The Noble Experiment

Tag: Recipe

April 12, 2012

Death in the Afternoon

I’ve been on a quest for some time now to displace the mimosa as the morning/afternoon champagne cocktail of choice. There was the momentarily famous Breakfast Cocktail, but people often said that it was too much work and too obscure. So I caved.

I’m currently rotating through a staggering number of sparkling cocktails that I think have potential, but my current favorite afternoon sparkler is most certainly the Death in the Afternoon. This drink is said to have been created by the famous imbiber (and author, apparently) Ernest Hemingway. His love for the sauce has been well documented and we can thank him for some other classic cocktails such as the Hemingway Daiquiri. But the Death in the Afternoon really brings out the day drinking alcoholic side of Hemingway that we all know and love. It’s a simple drink and any bartender worth their salt can whip this together.

As always, quality is the key. If you don’t want to drop $60+ on a bottle of Absinthe, I’d recommend Herbsaint from the Sazerac Co in New Orleans. Their $30 bottle of anise liqueur is an absinthe replacement, omitting on the Wormwood (which helped them produce it throughout the American absinthe ban).

I typically use Spanish cava as my sparkler of choice, but any good American sparkling wine or French Champagne will work just fine. I like the slightly yeasty notes you get from Methode Champegnoise sparkling wines, so don’t skimp. Without further ado…

Death in the Afternoon
1 oz Absinthe or Herbsaint
4 oz Sparkline Wine

Mix in a champagne flute and enjoy. If you like to chill your absinthe ahead of time, that’s fine. I like the slightly warm anise notes that come from room temp absinthe and cold sparkling wine. But I’m a bit odd.

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June 24, 2010

It’s the Twitter #Beertailcontest

I’ve been delinquent in getting this post up.  I’ve had it in mind for the better part of a few weeks, but I just haven’t gotten it posted.  I have the usual excuses – too busy at work, forgot, dog ate my homework, etc.  But the reality is that I’ve just been delinquent.  Excuses aside, here is what we’re working with.

There was ongoing chatter on twitter amongst some bartenders and cocktailians about making a beer cocktail.  I jumped into the fray and thought I may be able come up with something interesting.  Turns out, its far more difficult than I imagined.  And I didn’t make it easy on myself, I wanted a full flavored beer that had lots of malt, sweetness and hops.

So I started with Avery Maharajam Imperial India Pale Ale.

This is a delicious beer in its own right.  Avery brewery is somewhere in Colorado.  This Imperial IPA is super hoppy with a nice malt sweetness.  It’s well balanced and delicious.  To be honest, it was difficult putting it in a cocktail.  I wanted to keep drinking it in a chilled pint glass.

But my neurosis aside, here’s what I decided to do.

First, I took 1.5 ounces of my Avery Imperial IPA.  Second, I took my 2nd favorite thing in the world, Dolin dry vermouth.

Yes, Dolin is one of my favorite things in the world.  Then I broke out the Fee Brothers Old Fashioned Bitters.  I thought the Fee Brothers would work better than the standard Angostura because of the abundance of cinnamon that I taste in the Fee Brothers.  I thought the earthy, cinnamon-y aspects of Fee Brothers would play nicely with the hoppy and malty Avery IPA. Finally, I squeezed in a lime and called it a day!

So that’s it.  Seriously.  It’s that easy.  And I thought it was an easy drinking beer cocktail.  And just to recap:

1.5 oz Avery Imperial IPA

1 oz Dolin Dry Vermouth

1 Dash Fee Brothers Old Fashioned Bitters

Squeeze of a lime

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June 18, 2010

A Variety of Honey Syrups

I’ve been playing around a lot this week with honey.  Honey is such a brilliant and versatile sweetener.  There are so many variations of honey and they all have such subtle sweetness and intrigue. I have a love affair with honey.  But that’s my issue, not yours, so let’s get moving.  Here are two honey syrups that will add spice, depth and deliciousness to your cocktails.

Syrup #1 is made from an orange blossom honey syrup.  Orange blossom honey is freaking wonderful.  It is made from the blossoms of citrus trees and is typically a light and slightly fruity honey. This version from Honey Gardens is divine.

When you open up raw honey, it kind of looks like lip balm, but don’t let that deter you.  Take one half of a cup of honey and one half of a cup of water, put it on the stove and bring it to a simmer to combine. I don’t find that a honey syrup benefits a lot from an extended simmer on the stove.  I just like to incorporate the ingredients and then get it off the heat.  It’s that simple.  After its incorporated, switch it to a different container and put it in the refrigerator.  It probably doesn’t need to be refrigerated but I like it that way.  You can do what you like with it.   After your syrup is ready, check out the recipe below for the best damn margarita you’ll ever taste.

Syrup #2 is made with pure wildflower honey (Sorry for the poor picture, I’ve never been much of a photographer).

Wildflower honey is a fragrant honey that is typically a bit thicker and richer (in my opinion) than your regular grocery store honey.  It has a dark amber color and a real concentrated sweetness and flavor. It comes, not surprisingly, from wildflowers which means it can vary from producer to producer and from season to season.  For this syrup I was looking for spice, so before I took  one cup of wildflower honey and tossed in 1/4 cup of cracked black peppercorns.  After they were incorporated, I put the mixture on the stove, added 1 cup of water and brought it up to a simmer.  After it was all combined I removed it from the heat and let it sit for a few days so that the honey could soak in the spice.

At the end of the day, I had two great syrups, one raw orange blossom honey syrup and one peppered wildflower honey syrup.  And they looked like this:

You can see the difference in color which is due primarily to the difference between orange blossom and wildflower honey.  The wildflower is in the front in the picture above.  These syrups have tons of uses but here are my two favorites:

The Peppered Bourbon – I’ve used variations of this drink on many occasions, but I like the way the peppered honey mingles with the oak and citrus.  It’s lightly spiced, with a nice peppery finish.

1.5 oz Bulleit Bourbon

0.75 oz. Peppered Honey Syrup

0.50 Lemon Juice

Orange Blossom Margarita This makes a seriously delicious margarita. I know what you’re thinking, it’s just a margarita, but you need to trust me here.  The orange blossom honey syrup replaces the need for any triple sec and lends the cocktail a very subtle sweetness and an understated orange accent.

1.5 oz Tequila Blanco

1.25 oz Lime Juice

1 oz Orange Blossom Honey Syrup

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June 14, 2010

How to Make Bitters

Anyone who has ever had a Manhattan without Angostura Bitters knows the value of that little bottle.  Those magical drops can add depth, flavor and balance to your cocktails. Most people are probably familiar with Peychaud, Angostura, and Regans Orange, the  most popular brands of bitters and the most vital to a few of the classic cocktails.

But these days, there are all sorts of bitters out there.  The good folks at Fee Brothers have a whole boatload of flavors including grapefruit rhubarb, peach and more.  And nowadays you can find numerous other brands over at Cocktail Kingdom.

While most of these bitters have their place at the bar (you’ll run into a few that aren’t worth your time or attention), the best way to make a unique cocktail is to make bitters on your own.  It’s easy and fun and it will add depth and flavor combinations that are unique to your drinks.

The most difficult item to procure when making your own bitters is the bittering agent.  To make this a bit easier on you, here are a few options you can use.  My bittering agents of choice are wormwood and bitter orange peel, although you have a lot of options, including:

Gentian

Quassia

Wormwood

Milk Thistle Seed

Birch Leaf

Bitter Orange Peel

Bitter Lemon Peel

Fennel Seed

The best place to find these ingredients is often at a homebrew store.  The ingredients are common for beer brewing, so you can often find these items in stock and ready for you.  If you live in or around the Annapolis/Baltimore/Washington DC area, check out Annapolis Homebrew.

Here is a basic recipe for orange bitters to get you started.

6 oz high proof vodka or grain alcohol
6 tsp orange peel, chopped
1.5 oz ginger peel, chopped
1/2 cinnamon stick
5 whole cloves
1.5 tsp bitter orange peel

Take the vodka or grain alcohol and add the bitter orange peel.  Seal it and let it sit for two days.  After two days, strain out the bitter orange peel and discard.

Add the remaining ingredients to the liquid (which should have a nice bitter kick to it), seal it up and leave it in a dark corner for 10 – 14 days.  Strain everything out and you have yourself some flavorful, complex orange bitters!

After the 14 day rest period, you can continue to add flavors to your bitters.  If you want more orange, add more orange.  If you like that spice and cinnamon flavor, leave the cinnamon stick and cloves in the liquid longer.  This is a flexible process and that is the great part about making your own bitters.

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June 4, 2010

Summer Cocktails!

Once the nice weather hits, everyone is looking for something they can enjoy while sitting on their deck/patio/stoop.  Something that helps you beat the heat, that’s light and refreshing, and in my case, something that has a reasonable amount of alcohol so you can sip all day.

This is why drinks like the Pimms Cup (a simple combination of Pimms No. 1, lemonade, and 7up) and the mojito (via http://intoxicologist.wordpress.com who, by the way, makes spectacular cocktails and has a great site) have become summer staples.  They fit all of the above criteria.  Following the lead of these summertime cocktails, when the warm weather arrives I leave the bourbon on the shelf and reach for the white rums, vodkas, and blanco tequilas.  That’s just how I roll.

So, you ask, what should I drink? Good question.  Let’s dig right in.  Summer cocktail iterations are endless, so I’ll just get you started with two cocktail recipes that you’re certain to enjoy.

Painkiller – A classic summertime/island time cocktail, this drink just screams summer.

2 oz white rum (try Dogfish Head or Rogue rums for a nice alternative to the big guys)
1 oz pineapple juice
1 oz cream of coconut
0.75 oz orange juice (fresh squeezed, please)
I like to shake this drink and then serve it over ice.  Getting the coconut cream to co-mingle with the other ingredients is important.

French 75 (ish) – A spin on the classic French 75, a brilliant summertime sparkling cocktail

1 oz gin
0.5 oz St. Germain
0.25 oz lemon juice
0.25 oz simple syrup
3 oz sparkling wine
Shake the gin, St. Germain, lemon and simple syrup in a shaker. Strain into a champagne flute and top with sparkling wine.  Garnish with a nice, long lemon twist.  In case you haven’t tried St. Germain, it’s a vibrant brandy based elderflower liqueur from France.

Here is another great reference on summer cocktails from liquor.com, a ridiculously wonderful site chock full of everything cocktail related you could ever need.

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May 31, 2010

Ginger Simple Syrup

Quick post today to help get everyone on the path to house-made mixers and syrups.

Hopefully you’re all making your own grenadine and adding ginger syrup to your repertoire will give you another great option.  Ginger is a great ingredient for cocktails.  The spiciness pairs well with so many things, making it very versatile.  It can be mixed with dark rums in the winter, with strawberries in the spring and with lemon and mint in the summer.  It’s great with rum, always works with vodka, and can complement a gin cocktail incredibly well.

And making ginger syrup is simple.  Here’s what you need to do:

Take one large piece of ginger (about 3 oz worth), peel it and chop it into pieces.  On your stove, combine 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of water.  Toss in the ginger and bring the whole mixture to a simmer.  Let the mixture simmer lightly for  ten minutes or so.  Strain out the ginger and voila! You’ll have a lovely, ginger infused simple syrup.

Use it in place of regular simple syrup or in combination with other sweeteners as you see fit.

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May 28, 2010

Cocktail Recipe: Strawberry, Basil and Gin

I was muddling around with a few things from the garden yesterday and ended up with a nice summer cocktail.  Given that it’s strawberry season out here in Annapolis and on the Eastern Shore, that seemed like the most appropriate starting point.  I pulled some basil from the garden, a little lime and all sorts of liquor and got to work.

The first version was a combo of falernum and rum along with my garden muddle.  That was lovely, albeit a bit on the sweet side.  And nothing too complex or interesting.

So I went next with gin.  And in my house, where there is gin there is usually bitters.  The gin/bitters/strawberry/herb combo was a hit.  Check out the recipe below.

Strawberry Gin Muddler

2 Strawberries

3 Basil Leaves, torn

1/4 of a lime, cut in half

1 bar spoon white sugar

1.5 oz London dry gin

1 Dash Angostura Bitters

Throw the strawberries, basil, sugar and lime in a pint glass and muddle until the juice and oils are extracted from the lime and the basil is incorporated.  Add the gin and a dash of Angostura, put over ice, and shake vigorously for 10 seconds.  Take the top off of the shaker and pour the whole thing, pulp and ice included, into an old fashioned glass.  No need for much garnish, as the strawberry and basil muddle makes for a nice looking cocktail.

Enjoy!

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May 24, 2010

Recipe: Cachaca Old Fashioned

After much tinkering over the past few weeks in preparation for an upcoming class, I stumbled upon a cocktail that has turned into a new favorite.

I was mixing up a few separate cocktails to present at an upcoming cocktail class. I mixed up an old-fashioned and a classic caipirnha. They’re both lovely cocktails, delicious in their own right. After sipping and thinking and sipping and thinking, I decided to mash them up together, which is a common practice in my household.

So I took two Luxardo Maraschino cherries,

replaced the orange with lime and added a touch more sugar than normal. Right off the bat we had a nice start.

Acid, sugar, color…it was looking good. To play off the flavors of the lime, I decided to use cachaca instead of bourbon.  I like the depth and lightness of cachaca over standard light rum, and bourbon is more of a fall liquor for me.  Finally, to give it the depth of a true Old Fashioned and to offset some of the sugars, I reached for the bitters. I started with classic Angostura, but in the end settled on Fee Brothers Old Fashioned Bitters.

The result was a classic mash-up.  A cachaca old-fashioned.  Or a cherry caipirinha with bitters.  Whatever you want to call it, it was a lovely concoction.  One that is perfect for the spring with a wintery richness from the cherries and a summery pepper-ness from the cachaca.  Check out the recipe below:

Cachaca Old Fashioned

2 Luxardo Maraschino Cherries

1/2 of a Lime, quartered

2 teaspoons sugar

2 oz cachaca

1 dash Fee Brothers Old Fashioned Bitters

Take the cherries, lime pieces and sugar and muddle them up in a large glass.  After they’re muddled, allow them to sit for two or three minutes to help dissolve some of the sugar.  Add the cachaca and the bitters, stir, and serve over ice. You really don’t need a garnish here, as you’ll have muddled cherries and lime pieces in the glass.  Enjoy!

4 comments
May 17, 2010

A Couple of Classics

My earlier post on grenadine has been getting some attention lately, so I thought I’d go ahead and post a few recipes for classic cocktails that use grenadine.  That way you’ll have something to do with all of that grenadine you’ve been making!

Here are a few of my favorites when I have a batch of grenadine on hand.  Most of these drinks use ingredients you probably already have in your liquor cabinet as well, which is certainly a bonus.

A Jack Rose (minus the garnish, which was promptly eaten).

So without further ado…

Clover Club

1.5 oz Gin
0.50 oz Grenadine
0.75 oz Lemon Juice
2 tsp Simple Syrup
1/2 Small Egg White

Put all of your ingredients in a shaker and shake the crap out of it.  You need to emulsify the egg white, so you’re probably going to need to shake this thing for about 45 seconds.  I know it’s cold, but you’re an adult and you can handle it.  Strain this drink into a martini glass and you’ll have a nice cocktail with a creamy foam layer on the top.

Ward Eight

2 oz. Rye Whiskey
1 oz Simple Syrup
0.75 oz Lemon Juice
0.25 oz Grenadine

This is basically a whiskey sour with a splash of grenadine, but it’s pretty delicious.  Toss these ingredients in your shaker and shake it up.  Strain into a rocks glass with ice and garnish with a maraschino cherry.

Jack Rose

1.5 oz Applejack
0.75 oz Lemon Juice
0.75 oz Grenadine

Put your ingredients in a shaker and mix them up well.  Strain into a martini glass and garnish with an apple slice (and if you’re in the mood, a maraschino cherry as well).  A lot of recipes call for simple syrup here, but I choose to increase the amount of grenadine and omit the simple syrup.  If you prefer, you can always add simple syrup and decrease the grenadine.

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May 5, 2010

Making Rhubarb Syrup and Cocktails

Tis’ the season for house-made spring mixers!  And this time of year always makes me think of rhubarb and asparagus.  Asparagus seems like a tough fit with most cocktails, so rhubarb was my spring item of choice for this mixer.  Look at all this beautiful rhubarb!

I decided to go with a nice tangy rhubarb syrup to complement a yet-to-be-determined cocktail.  So I took fresh rhubarb, sugar, water, and lime juice and threw it all on the stove.  I brought it to a boil and let it simmer for about 10 minutes.  To help concentrate the flavors, I decided to blend the mixture and strain it through a cheesecloth.  The final product was a vibrant red color and had a nice consistency.  It was viscous enough, but not overly so.  And the sweet/tart balance was just right.

Now on to the cocktails: After testing out a few different liquors I landed on white rum.  It’s a good fit for the spring time and I found that it had the appropriate amount of herbaceousness (sp?!) for this cocktail.  Gin felt too complex and it overwhelmed the syrup.  Vodka was too blank.  White rum had the peppery zip I was looking for but it was balanced enough to let the rhubarb shine.  For this particular cocktail I decided to use Dogfish Head White Rum (you may know that I’m a Dogfish fan) and it was just right.

To continue moving the cocktail in the right direction, I decided that rum, lime and rhubarb syrup would be my base.  I ended up with two very different, but both appealing, spring cocktails.  The first was simpler and it played off of the tartness/sourness of the rhubarb, bringing in a little acid to liven things up and a touch of sweetness to balance them out.  See recipe #1 below.  The second cocktail brought in some additional liqueurs and a bit more sweetness.  But it was balanced out by Angostura and I was satisfied with the end product.

Go get yourself some rhubarb and get to work!

Rhubarb Cocktail #1:

1.25 oz white rum

0.75 oz lime juice

0.50 oz simple syrup

0.75 oz rhubarb syrup

1 Dash Angostura Bitters

Rhubarb Cocktail #2:

1 oz rhubarb syrup

0.75 oz lime juice

1.25 oz white rum

0.50 oz Domaine de Canton

0.25 oz St Germain

1 Dash Angostura Bitters

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