Cocktails

I've recently been having fun putting cocktails together, experimenting with different ingredients, discovering combinations that work together surprisingly well. I had never been much of a cocktail person - finding them too strong and expensive - but when I worked at hangingditch I became fascinated with the different spirits, liqueurs, and bitters that people would come in specifically asking for. Now I'm already becoming one of those people, searching out obscure ingredients that will provide a subtle but vital fix to the recipe.

history

Cocktails date from early on in the nineteenth century, when they were a mix of spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. They gradually became more complicated, with liqueurs added to the mix. Their height in the US was during Prohibition, often to cover up the dubious quality of spirits. Gin was a popular base spirit - as in eighteenth-century England, an easy spirit to make, easy to make badly, and easy to get drunk on. After the Second World War, gin was replaced by vodka, a neutral spirit to which many flavours could be added. After a lull in the 1960s and 70s in the US (though in the UK they became popular with the rise of middle-class dinner parties), cocktails returned to fashion in the 1980s, particularly in New York. This was also the point when Bourbon, which hadn't really recovered from Prohibition, was embraced back into American drinking culture through cocktails like the Manhattan and Old-Fashioned.

bitters

Historically created for their health-giving properties, bitters are alcoholic liquids with bittering agents added, such as quinine, angelica, orange, or rhubarb. Those bitter flavours can also be aromatised by the further addition of clove, vanilla, coriander, or ginger.

Many of the great bitter drinks originate from central Europe, in particular northern Italy where they are called amaro. A famous amaro apertif is Campari, which is used to give colour to cocktails; its bitterness tempered with a sweet edge, it's made from bitter orange, quinine, and rhubarb. A lower strength, less complex, more herbal alternative is Aperol.  

Amaro can also be drunk as a digestif. Italy's top-selling amaro is Averna, which is sweet and made from herbs, bark, and botanicals. The Czech Republic also produces another famous sweet, herbal digestif, Becherovka. Other digestifs are overtly and intensely bitter, designed to be drunk in small quantities. A famous example is Fernet Branca, made from rhubarb, saffron, aloe, myrrh, iris, bitter orange, and cinnamon. More notorious is Jägermeister, made from 56 different herbs.

For use in cocktails, there are many specifically flavoured bitters which have been reduced to their essence. The most famous are Angostura's aromatic bitters, a secret recipe made from herbs and spices. Originally a medicinal drink for the army of the great Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar, these are an essential element of any cocktail bar. A classic cocktail featuring them is a Pink Gin, which dates from the days of the British Empire in India. A favourite of Ian Fleming, it's made with 2½ ounces of gin and 4-5 dashes of Angostura, with a lemon twist.

Another historic producer is Peychaud, from New Orleans, whose bitters are more aromatic and sweeter, and the key ingredient in a Sazerac cocktail. Other great producers include Bob's Bitters and Bittermens, and many new companies are emerging as cocktails once again become popular. My good friend Matt Hemeyer makes spiced bitters at addition, a fine example of the imagination and experimentation behind every great cocktail.

vermouth

Dating from late-eighteenth-century Turin, vermouth is a vital ingredient in classic cocktails such as a Martini, a Manhattan, or a Negroni. Vermouth is wine with herbs, bark, and roots added to it and can be either sweet or dry. Famous brands are Punt e Mes, from Italy's Carpano family who also produce Antica Formula, a richer, fuller high-quality vermouth, Cinzano, and Martini & Rosso.

liqueurs

A liqueur is a spirit flavoured, infused, or distilled with herbs, fruits, or flowers and often with a sweet syrup added. The complex, intense aromas make them ideal for adding to a cocktail. Crème de Cassis is a liqueur made by soaking blackcurrants in alcohol; added to white wine it makes Kir and to Champagne a Kir Royale. Other similar liqueurs, which will make a profound difference to a cocktail with just a small amount, include Crème de Cacao and Crème de Menthe. Another famous liqueur is Grand Marnier, which is Cognac flavoured with the distilled essence of bitter oranges, while Cointreau is another orange-flavoured liqueur from sweet and bitter orange peels (non-branded alternatives are called Triple Sec). Amaretto, meanwhile, is flavoured with almonds. The list is endless.

cocktails

Here are some cocktails I've made recently which I've enjoyed, arranged by the core ingredient.

Brandy

Although Cognac would be the preferred base, a good brandy will suffice. Likewise with fruit brandies - good Calvados, an apple brandy from Normandy, is expensive and Laird's Applejack does the job.

Corpse Reviver

As the name suggests, this is a hangover 'cure' - at the very least, it will wake you up. There are a number of different recipes each called the Corpse Reviver; this one is brandy based. An equal combination of three ingredients - 1oz each of brandy, applejack, and sweet vermouth.

Champagne

It may seem sacrilege to corrupt a drink as fine as Champagne with other ingredients, but it nevertheless makes a superb base for complex cocktails.

Jumping Jellybean

Add 1oz each of tequila blanco, Grand Marnier, and fresh lemon juice to a chilled flute, and then top it up with Champagne. The result is a refreshing, citrusy, salty drink.

Gin

For some base drinks - for example, white rum - the quality of the spirit doesn't matter too much, but with a spirit like gin it's essential. The mix of botanicals will impart vital flavours to the drink. The classic gin cocktail is the Martini, a combination of gin and dry vermouth.

Alfonso Special

Mix and shake 1½oz of Grand Marnier, ¾oz each of gin and dry vermouth, and ¼oz sweet vermouth, with a couple of dashes of Angostura to create a bitter, spicy cocktail.

Rum

White rum, which has fairly neutral flavours of tropical fruits, is a great base for cocktails as it adds some but not too many flavours to the mix. It's what else goes into the mix that counts.

La Floridita

Mix and shake 1½oz white rum, ¾oz sweet vermouth, ¼oz crème de cacao, and 1oz of fresh lime juice, with a dash of grenadine. That touch of crème de cacao gives a strong chocolately finish to the spicy, herbal, cherry-like vermouth.

Tequila

Although darker versions of tequila can be used, it's tequila blanco that's most common - most famously in the Margarita. Always use good-quality tequila that's been made from 100% agave.

Tequila Mockingbird

Mix and shake 2oz of tequila blanco, ½oz of white crème de menthe, and 1oz of fresh lime juice. Float a sliced lime wheel on top. A beautifully coloured, salty, minty drink.

Vodka

A neutral-tasting spirit, vodka nevertheless comes in different guises, made from a range of base materials including grain, potatoes, or grapes. Increasingly fashionable now are flavoured vokdas such as vodka citron.

Agent Orange

Everything about this cocktail is orange, flavouring the neutral flavour of the vodka: 1½oz vodka, ¾oz Grand Marnier, ¼oz Cointreau, and ½oz fresh orange juice. 
 

Whiskey

Many whiskey-based cocktails use Bourbon (such as the Old-Fashioned) or rye whiskey (Manhattan, though some prefer Bourbon). Others use Canadian whisky, perhaps because so much whisky came from Canada during Prohibition, when cocktails were all the rage as part of the Roaring Twenties.

Commodore

1½oz of Bourbon, ¾oz of crème de cacao, and ½oz of fresh lemon juice. The flavours here are strong and powerful - great if you have a cold.

serving cocktails

There are different glasses for different types of cocktails. A Martini glass has a long thin stem with an inverted conal glass; a Margarita glass is similar but more like a goblet. An Old-Fashioned glass is a stocky tumbler, which is used for serving drinks over ice. The other classic cocktail glass is a Highball, tall and straight and to be filled with ice. Even if a cocktail isn't served with ice, it's usually mixed and shaken with ice in a cocktail shaker.

Cocktails are fun. They do require quite a stash of alcohol at home to make, which is fine if you're a collector like me. They work as aperitifs or as a pick-me-up after a hard day's work; they're also a great way of exploring spirits and discovering the world of obscure European drinks that survive because of the inventiveness of bartenders around the world.

Rum

Ah, Ron. Another spirit that once upon a time I wouldn't have gone near but which I'm now extremely intrigued by, especially the dried fruit and sweet spice flavours of oaked dark rum.

Perceptions of rum are dominated by Bacardi, one of the biggest international spirits brands in the world (globally, it sells nearly 20m cases a year, second only to Smirnoff). I remember the ads from the '90s: a trendy, cool drink which meant guaranteed success with Latina women; such an ad inevitably led to ordering one in a bar, and, equally inevitably, vowing never to drink the stuff again. For an older crowd, though, rum means Navy Rum: bottles with drunken sailors on the front and only ever ordered by an old ruddy-cheeked, frantically stubbled man. Both these styles are image conscious, Bacardi the party spirit for good times (and, of course, to be drunk with coke), Navy or dark rum the drink of history and tradition. Neither image does much for rum, though.

this looked really cool in the 1990s

 

an ad for Lamb's Navy rum about the "True British Character" - featuring a Creative Branding Guru...

what's it made from?

It was probably Marco Polo who brought back sugar cane from Asia and it made its way to the Caribbean through the Spanish (by way of Christopher Columbus). By the seventeenth century, sugar cane was an even more valuable commodity than gold, so much so that it led to the development of the slave trade. Extracting sugar from the plant creates a residue of sticky sweet molasses, which planters distilled into spirit so as not to waste any material. By the eighteenth century, this spirit had become extremely fashionable in Britain - yet another spirit with a heavily colonial history.

Most rum is made from molasses, though it can also be made from sugar cane juice (particularly in the French islands Martinique and Guadaloupe, when it's called rhum agricole).

different styles

white rum - clear and colourless; if they receive any oak ageing, the colour is filtered out (which is how Bacardi has traditionally been made); flavours aren't particularly intense, though this depends on the desired style.
golden rum - the colour comes from time in oak (as well as some caramel for consistency), and the ageing results in a greater complexity.
dark rum - the different methods of distillation for rum lead to spirits of lighter and heavier intensity - a dark rum will be made from the most intensely flavoured spirits, while the dark colour comes from lots of time in oak. This prolonged maturation also allows the unripe, green cane flavours of the base spirit to develop into rich tropical fruits. The heat of the Caribbean plays an important part in maturation; a "tropical year" is eight months long, so a twelve-year-old rum is almost the equivalent of a twenty-year-old spirit from a cooler climate. This is the kind of stuff sailors used to drink in great quantities, and there's another style of dark rum - Navy Rum, which is even more aromatic and has caramel added to it to give it a burnt-treacle flavour.

where it's made

Most countries in the Caribbean produce rum, and often the base materials are shipped from one country to another - as long as the drink is made in a country capable of growing sugar cane it can be called rum. The major countries include Guyana, which uses Demerara sugar and produces a broad range of styles of rum due to the unusual wood pot stills used for distillation, Jamaica, where the variety of styles comes from the length of ferment, and Cuba, where the style of white rum originates.

Diploma tasting

Bacardi - my notes say vegetable and grassy, with green bananas and bubblegum. I'm not sure it even tasted of that much, but we have to write something for the tasting exam. We also need clues to help us spot which spirit is which when we do the exam, especially when they're this bland, so for a white rum we should be looking for tropical fruits such as underripe banana. These clues didn't help me for the mock blind tasting at the end of the day, as I thought this was a vodka (we were warned that it's easy to confuse white rum with tequila; I wish I'd made a mistake that obvious).

La Mauny Rhum Agricole - a much, much more interesting white rum. The clue is again green banana and grass (flavours you don't find in vodka), but there's also cinnamon, white pepper, melon, and smoke.

Appleton Estate 12YO - no confusing this with vodka, as it was mahogany coloured. The tropical fruits were much less ripe, with cedar and sherry aromas from the oak, and treacle, toffee, and fruitcake from the molasses. 

El Dorado 15YO  - another mahogany coloured rum, with lots of complex aromas. I've already talked about this, and Pusser's Navy Rum, in my initial blog about the Diploma spirits classes. These two rums were fantastic.

Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum - I coped pretty well with tasting nearly forty spirits one after the other, by taking small sips that I thoroughly spat out. This, though, was 63% and the alcohol was immediately apparent before even pouring it from the bottle. On tasting, the aggressive alcohol did fade to reveal tropical fruit aromas, but the level of alcohol meant that there's no way this could ever be considered a complex drink. Quite amazing, though, to produce a drink of this quality with such high alcohol.

cachaça

We weren't given any cachaça to taste, but we were told that it may appear in the exam. Thanks for that. Cachaça is the second most drunk spirit in the world, after Shochu (an Asian spirit) - so there's more of it produced than vodka. Most of the production and consumption, though, is in Brazil, meaning that its importance is local (to a country of 200m people) - that's definitely changing and the international importance of cachaça is growing. It's made from sugar cane juice rather than molasses; this means it's technically no different from rum (particularly rhum agricole), but the Brazilian authorities have been campaigning to get international recognition of cachaça as a distinct product and last year, the US finally agreed to recognise cachaça as a separate category. Cachaça's the base ingredient in a caipirinha, which is how recognition of the spirit has been growing in the UK and elsewhere. I do have memories of drinking cachaça in Lisbon, but those memories are dim...

Diploma Week 2 - Days 2 and 3

Over the course of these two days, we tasted around 35 spirits under the guidance of Michael Walpole, who had spent 30 years working for Diageo before joining the WSET. These tastings were intense, educational, yet quite frustrating. Intense for the amount of high-alcohol drinks we tasted, educational for the sheer range of drinks we sampled, and frustrating for the contradictory WSET approach to studying and tasting drinks.

very good or outstanding?

On Thursday morning, we began by tasting three vodkas, a forbidding and unpleasant proposition. Surprisingly, I quite liked all three and could appreciate the warming sophistication of the drinks despite their neutral, high alcohol flavours. One in particular everyone in the group seemed to like was the Zubrowka Bison Grass Vodka, a Polish vodka flavoured with grass from fields that European bison graze on. It had a light colour to it, and a subtle texture. Many of us thought it was outstanding, as there was very little to fault about it, but Michael said it was merely very good because there are superior vodkas sold in Poland. If there are even better vodkas than this, we thought, then fair enough.

Later on during our brandy session, we tasted Rémy-Martin's XO. This is a very expensive brandy (£120+) from a famous Cognac name, but it's one I've tasted before in a Cognac line-up and found disappointing, especially for the price. Michael waxed lyrical about the drink, declaring it outstanding, and I couldn't help question him. 'I've tasted better XOs than this, so how can I describe it as outstanding?' I asked. 'Because it's outstanding.' 'But you said the vodka this morning was only very good because there were even better vodkas out there, so if I know there are better Cognacs out there how can I call it outstanding?' 'Because it's outstanding.' 'So why wasn't the vodka this morning outstanding?' 'Because there are better vodkas out there.'

It was a conversation which summed up what I've found frustrating about tasting during the Diploma so far. The WSET have created an objective tasting schemata, which their tutors interpret in an inconsistent and personal fashion. I think, for the large part, you've got to stick with our own judgement, using your knowledge and experience.

whisky tasting

what we tasted

In short, just about everything apart from Cachaça. Spirits I've never tasted before, spirits I've never wanted to taste before, and spirits I now want to taste again. I won't go into detail about all the spirits, as there were just so many we tasted and I plan to blog about each different spirit up till the exam next month. Although the breadth of the tasting was extensive, I felt we could have tasted more premium spirits as opportunities to taste such drinks are rare. There's also a section in the book on cocktails, but it's not something we need to study; this is a shame, as having tasted all these different spirits I'm interested to discover how they work with other ingredients.

brief highlights

Zubrowka Bison Grass Vodka (£20)

Vodka's just something I never drink; the first sniff of the Smirnoff we tasted brought back many bad memories. This Polish vodka really opened my mind to vodka, though. There was a complex elegance to it, with a long, lingering finish. The range of engaging flavours overlapped, creating a rounded texture - marzipan, lemon and lime, grass and hay, chamomile and mint, with spices from the rye. Apparently, this goes very well with fresh apple juice and a suggested cocktail was with lemon, ground almonds or amaretto, and apple juice.

Pusser's Blue Label Navy Rum (£30)

Now here's another drink - dark rum - that not that long ago I wouldn't have gone near, but a brief taste at hangingditch of one last year gave me an idea of the depth and complexity of the drink. This was confirmed by this astonishing spirit, which British sailors used to drink a pint a day of. The flavours were rich, deep, and intense with lots of dried fruits (figs, prunes, and dates), and Christmas cake. The treacle and toffee sweetness came from the raw material, molasses. Its colour comes from ageing in old Bourbon oak barrels, making the spirit toasty and smoky, with cinnamon and cloves spices. Yet in the midst of all this dark complexity were light tropical fruit flavours of banana and melon.

El Dorado Special Reserve 15YO Demerara Rum (£40)

And Pusser's wasn't even the best dark rum we tried. This Guyanan rum has won plenty of awards and has lots of similiar complex flavours, but with an added depth and finish, with a creamy vanilla texture also coming from the oak, as well as chocolate and coffee. I'll be exploring the world of dark rum with some pleasure.

Johnnie Walker Black Label (£25)

Spirits are all about fashion. Blended whiskies like Johnnie Walker are highly sought after in other parts of the world such as Asia; in Britain, they're seen as yesterday's drink - it's the Single Malts that are sought after. I've drunk plenty of Scotch, but never even considered trying Johnnie Walker - now I will. This was simply superb: a complex combination of all the other Scotch whiskies we tried and a prime example of the art of blending.

am I now an expert?

You'd hope so, having tasted so many spirits. However, there's still a lot of work to be done before the exam next month: learning to distinguish between each spirit, recognising the raw material, and remembering the vocabulary. We had a mock blind tasting at the end of the final day; I correctly identified the grappa and tequila, but thought the Bacardi was a vodka. The hardest thing is distiniguishing one mediocre drink from the other - not the kind of revision I really want to be doing...

I didn't drink a drop