Cynar has has one of the coolest label designs out there

La Cosa Nostra

2 oz Cynar

1 oz Kola Tonic* (Roses)

½ oz grappa (Carpene Malvolti)

¼ oz lemon juice

¼ oz coffee liqueur (Tia Maria)

A dash of Angostura Bitters (optional)

Build in an old fashioned glass over a couple of large ice cubes.

There are rich aromas from the grappa, an interesting interplay between the grappa and coffee (these two are always a nice match), and of course the mysterious bitterness of the Cynar. The Kola Tonic works as a pleasant sort of glue, taking the edges of the various elements and holding them all together.

The name is a bit weak. But hey, what’s in a name? I’d drink this again. It is an interesting sweetish aperitif that makes a change from the regular stuff.

Robert Simpson at Off the Presses just posted another Cynar drink. My post had been sitting around waiting to go up on the site for a few weeks, so I figured I would throw it up and declare today International Cynar Day. It may be a few years before this one becomes a statutory holiday, but get the ball rolling now by checking Robert’s drink out. It looks pretty cool. I am just going have to salivate since we don’t have Carpano Antica here in New Zealand.

UPDATE:  Sloshed just contributed this Cynar based Negroni variation.  Cynar seems to suddenly be flavor of the month.

* Kola tonic is basically cola syrup. Besides Roses (popular in South Africa), you might also find Claytons (popular in Barbados). I can’t comment on Claytons, but Roses seems a little more bitter than regular coke, and the syrup is not that concentrated (i.e. it does not require too much dilution, and pours and mixes very easily). You could probably try reducing regular Coke in a saucepan to get an approximation of kola tonic. I never tried this myself, so don’t blame me if you end up with a gruesome and unappetizing mess.

In some ways this would be good drink for introducing people to Campari. OK, the dose of Campari is kind of heavy for that purpose. Still, the classic Campari drinks (i.e. the Negroni and the Americano) are complicated by the inclusion of vermouth – another problem ingredient for many people. This drink is free of vermouth, Grand Marnier increases the sweetness, and fruit juice lightens things a little. In fact the drink is purely about rich and bitter sweet citrus. The taste is intense but free of surprises. While quite bitter, this drink reflects the current fashion for drinks that are light on spirits and heavy on juices and liqueurs.

Romanza

1 3/4 oz Campari

1 1/4 oz Grand Marnier

1 oz grapefruit juice

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange twist.

Anyway it is very pleasant – rich sweet orange with an intense bitterness that keeps things interesting. Also, unlike a lot of what I have been posting recently, this recipe requires no hard to find ingredients. Yes, my friends in Shanghai will not need to cry upon reading this. Instead they can march to the booze cabinet and throw one together.

Consider this cocktail a goodwill gesture in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics. Besides tasting good, it proves this blog is not part of a decedent western plot to contain China’s peaceful rise through a series of alluring but impossible to replicate cocktail recipes, each one scoring a deep gash in the morale of the Chinese people. Nope, no such nefarious scheme is being attempted. I guess that is just as well too, since such a scheme would certainly be doomed to ignominious failure, with its perpetrators being ground to a kind of messy paste and smeared across the less interesting pages of history.

Pineau Experiment No. 6 was perhaps the best of the bunch. . .

The next step was to try mixing some drinks of my own using Pineau des Charentes.

Pineau turned out to slightly awkward stuff to mix with, probably on account of it having such a mild taste. My natural inclination was try substituting pineau in recipes that traditionally call for other aperitif wines (i.e. following well worn patterns like Manhattans and Martinis). This approach did not work well.

While I did not come up with anything truly exceptional, several experiments yielded one or two promising results.

Not following any particular plan, I tried the following.

Experiment #1

2 oz bourbon (Bulleit)

1 oz pineau

½ oz suze

1 tsp lemon added afterwards.

This was not a success. First, there was way too much bourbon. Second, I do not think bourbon and pineau are a good match. A spicier bourbon might be an improvement, but rye would be better still, and definitely in a smaller quantity. Calvados might also be interesting. Again a teaspoon of lemon juice proved an easy way of brightening it up a little. The Suze added a little interest but also did not really fit.

Experiment #2

1 ½ oz pineau

1 ½ oz pisco

½ oz lemon juice

¼ oz Cynar

I figured I would try something using pisco, loosely based on the rhum agricole Pompadour, with the addition of ¼ oz of Cynar to give a bitter and complex finish. While I enjoyed this it did not compare with the Pompadour. The Cynar could be toned down and still do its thing. A teaspoon may be adequate.

Experiment #3

2 oz Pineau des Charentes

1 oz pisco (or calvados)

1 oz fresh pineapple juice

2 dashes peach bitters

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

On first taste this seemed almost too smooth and refreshing – like one of those vodka cocktails. I was not sure it worked. Despite an interesting list of ingredients it tasted boring. I made it again using Calvados instead of pisco, hoping for a better result. The Calvados version did not really work either.

Experiment #4

1 oz pineau

1 oz Cruzan Estate Light Rum

1 drop (not dash) Angostura

½ tsp Kummel

This was good, making a very smooth rum drink that reminded me a little of the El Presidente on account of its soft profile fringed with herbal flavors. It needs to be reworked, but is a decent start. This one deserves repeating.

Experiment #5

1 oz pineau

1 oz rye (Pikesville)

1 drop angostura

2 drops peychauds

This drink pretty much built on my experiences from Experiment #1. It is tasty enough but perhaps a bit mild and uninteresting. A bigger, spicier rye might have helped it.

Experiment #6

2 oz pineau

1 oz dry apricot brandy (i.e. a eau de vie, not a liqueur)

½ oz lemon juice

1 tsp creme de framboise

Tasty. . . The honey taste in the pineau plays nicely with the apricots. The lemon juice and eau de vie keep things dry. The creme de framboise adds some sugar to round things out, plus an extra layer of fruit flavor that contributes to an overall impression of fruity complexity.

Experiment #7

2 oz pisco

1 oz Pineau des Charentes

Dash of Orange Bitters

This was pleasant but unexciting.

I was probably expecting better results from messing around with Pineau. The first drink I tried with the stuff, the Pompadour, set the bar quite high. None of my own efforts came close.

Still, I think experiments #4 and #6 have potential. Experiment #6 was quite good, and Experiment #4 hints at a whole world of possibilities using pineau with rum and small doses of liqueurs or bitters. In general, Pineau seems to work well in drinks that are light on the spirits. Small touches of liqueurs also work nicely.

I would like to do more experimenting using Pineau and rums. There seems to be lots of potential there. It might also be interesting to mix Pineau with aromatized aperitif wines, something I did not try.

So that is it. While my experiments were not completely successful I think I showed there are promising possibilities for using Pineau in cocktails. Pineau des Charentes might not be as versatile as vermouth but it is still underrated as a cocktail ingredient. Used in the right way Pineau can make good drinks.

1 oz brandy (Prince Arignac Armagnac V.S.)

1 oz kummel (Wolfschmidt)

½ oz Fernet Branca

5 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

This would make a nice alternative to a liqueur after a meal. Or you could drink it any time you want a complex, contemplative, and rather medicinal drink. The Fernet Branca comes over heaviest, but the kummel makes its presence felt and the brandy provides the perfect mild but rich base for it all, with the bitters giving some extra complexity. Kummel mixes interestingly with strong herbal flavors, and it is a nice match for brandy too. Drinking this is like tasting a new herbal liqueur with a caraway base. I’d definitely drink this again. Mind you I tend to like this sort of thing.

I got hold of a bottle of Fernet Branca the other day. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while but it can be a little hard to track down. At Tara 57 in Shanghai, when Marcus was still working there, I used to drink a simple Fernet Branca cocktail (gin, Fernet Branca and Italian Vermouth) pretty much every time I went in. The bitter taste of Fernet Branca is very much my kind of thing.

Besides the simple Fernet Branca cocktail Marcus also used to make something called The Pharmacy. I think this drink was made from cognac, crème de menthe and Fernet Branca, though I’m not sure about the proportions. I’ll have to ask Marcus sometime. Anyway, the drink was rich, minty and bittersweet. It was the type of drink that could make a good introduction to Fernet Branca.

Searching through the Fernet Branca recipes on Cocktail DB I found two that stood out, mainly because they combined Fernet Branca with Dubonnet and gin. Dubonnet is another drink I have a lot of time for. I’d already been thinking that Dubonnet could be just the thing to smooth the edges off Fernet Branca, and of course both Dubonnet and Fernet mix well with gin.

The first of the two recipes was called Don’t Give up the Ship. This name must have meant something to somebody. . . The second drink was called the Napoleon. The interesting thing is that each recipe uses identical ingredients (gin, Fernet, Dubonnet and orange curacao) but in different proportions.

I made a Don’t Give up the Ship first. The recipe comprised 1 ½ oz gin (I used Tanqueray), ½ oz Dubonnet, ¼ oz Fernet Branaca, ¼ oz orange curacao (I had no straight curacao on hand so I used Cointreau, though I’m thinking Grand Marnier may be a better substitute). This turned out to be an exceptionally good drink. The flavors really blended to produce something completely new and surprisingly smooth. Obviously there was lots of complexity, but the Dubonnet and Cointreau somehow smoothed things down to an amazing degree.

Next I made the Napoleon. The Cocktail DB gives two versions. I made the version with 1 ½ oz of gin and a dash each of Fernet Branca, Dubonnet, and Curacao (again I used Cointreau). I went slightly heavy handed and used a level teaspoon of each of the modifiers rather than a dash (which I guess strictly speaking would be more like ¼ teaspoon). The other version on Cocktail DB is much sweeter and less Fernet Branca oriented, with a full ounce of curacao, ¼ oz of Dubonnet and a dash of Fernet Branca. I guess I should try that version too some time. I finished the drink with a squeeze of lemon peel.

Though not my first choice, the Napoleon also turned out to be a good drink. Obviously it basically tasted of gin, and so I guess dry martini lovers would enjoy it. The combination of Fernet Branca and Dubonnet struck me as more interesting than vermouth though. With Fernet Branca a little certainly goes a long way. Meanwhile, the touch of curacao gave the drink an old school cocktail taste of raw spirit tamed with a little sugar.

This month’s Mixology Monday, kindly hosted at Jimmy’s Cocktail Hour, is all about whiskey. Note, simply whiskey, not necessarily whiskey cocktails. I should have lots to say about this month’s topic but somehow I don’t.

Of course there are many things I could cover. I could choose a favorite whiskey cocktail and write about that. I could write about my family’s ritual of drinking tea with whiskey in the morning on Christmas Day. I could write about a favorite whiskey, maybe Lagavulin or Laphroaig.

Of those two I probably prefer Laphroaig – particularly the cask strength Laphroaig. The thing about Laphroaig is that while drinking it you can never quite decide what to make of it. Laphroaig lacks the easy appeal of Lagavulin. Clearly a fine whiskey, but not quite a crowd pleaser. Each taste brings something that attracts you, but in the background lurks something hard to fathom, possibly even rough and unpleasant. You quickly decide that Laphroaig is very nice but not quite perfect. Yet that imperfection is where the attraction of Laphroaig lies. Laphroaig is a little like a woman who has a beautiful face with an obvious flaw, and somehow it is the flaw that makes her looks. Without the flaw she would not be half so good looking because there would simply be nothing to wonder about and hence no interest. Laphroaig challenges you to think. It has personality and is endlessly interesting. Its a whiskey you could happily grow old with.

Of course given that most people reading this are cocktail bloggers they have probably tried Laphroaig and Lagavullin already, and for people who haven’t tried them a verbal description is hardly sufficient. Maybe I should write something about a whiskey not popular in the west, maybe the Suntory Yamazaki 12 Year Old Single Malt from Japan.

It was drinking the Suntory Yamazaki in Constellation, a little Japanese bar in Shanghai, that got me seriously interested in cocktails. The barman, Mr. Jin, suggested I try a Suntory Yamazaki with water and ice. This way of drinking whiskey is known as ‘mizuwari’ in Japan. I was brought up to think that good whiskey was best unpolluted by anything. I was not keen on Mr. Jin’s proposal. He was persistent though, and further proposed making two glasses using identical ingredients. One would be mixed to taste good, and the other would be mixed to taste average. He would let me taste both, then give me the good one and drink the average one himself. Intrigued, I let him do his thing.

He filled both glasses with freshly chipped ice. In traditional Japanese bars the barman works with an ice pick to produce individualized ice for each drink. They will carefully carve a single snowball sized rock for a scotch on the rocks, chip off a flurry of small shards for highball type drinks, and so on. All this is done with ice so cold it is dry to the touch. It is a world away from the soggy machine ice you find in most bars. When I take people to Constellation they are amazed at how long the ice cubes take to melt. After filling the glasses with ice Mr. Jin began stirring one glass with spoon, thoroughly chilling the glass. He poured the melt out of that glass and added more ice before adding whiskey to both glasses, thoroughly stirring the first glass and giving the second a perfunctory stir, adding a little more ice to both glasses and finally topping them up with water.

The taste difference between the two drinks was enormous, and the thoroughly chilled one was very good. That drink totally changed my ideas about Japanese whiskey, and about drinking whiskey with water. These days I think that whiskey needs a few drops of water to bring out the full flavor. The Japanese whiskeys that are designed to be drunk mizuwari style taste good cold and with an even bigger dose of water.

Hmm. . . having written a couple of paragraphs I am still not convinced there is anything I can say that a glass of whiskey couldn’t say much better. But continuing with the Japanese theme, the novelist Haruki Murakami wrote an interesting little travel book about a trip around the distilleries of Islay and Ireland. The book is called “If Our Language was Whiskey”. At least I assume that’s what it’s called. The name in Chinese is “如果我们的语言是威士忌” .

If our language was whiskey. . . What a amazing world that would be. Imagine smiling people inhabiting a bottle green landscape. Some are gathered in fields where they appreciatively pass glasses back and forth. Others sit alone beside crystal springs and quietly savor. Proposing marriage is as simple as selecting just the right single malt and passing it across to the object of your affections. Everyone is content.

I suppose that just for Mixology Monday our language really is whiskey, so I will finish up with an appropriately named whiskey cocktail. Oddly enough for a whiskey cocktail this one was inspired by a potable bitters from Poland I picked up the other day. The brand is Balsam and the label says it is flavored with wolfberries, honey, and other unspecified herbs. This is a sweet bitters, something like Jagermeister but milder. Perhaps it most closely resembles Averna from Italy.

Balsam makes a nice sour but I thought I would try and make a whiskey drink from it. I did an experiment with some scotch but it didn’t work very well. The honey notes meant the drink ended up tasting like a Rusty Nail but without the easy mixability and balance provided by Drambuie. I decided to try adding some vermouth and mixing it with Jameson Irish whiskey. I figured the Jameson would mix better with the Balsam than scotch and produce something less sweet than if using bourbon.

If Our Language Was Whiskey

1 oz Jameson

1 oz French vermouth

1 oz Balsam (substitute Averna, or maybe a reduced quantity of Jagermeister)

1 dash Angostura bitters

1/2-1 tsp Benedictine

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Squeeze the oils from a lemon twist onto the drink and rub the twist around the rim of the glass.

The mildly astringent Jameson balances out the Balsam. Plenty of herbal flavors. I added a little Benedictine as an afterthought. It complements the herbals in the Balsam but also adds complexity and helps everything mesh together.

I may play around with the recipe some more in future. Right now I am wondering whether an idea as weird as using Laphroaig as a modifier could work. Maybe I will remove the Benedictine and add a splash of Laphroaig, or mix the drink with Laphroaig instead of Jamesons. Mixing Laphroaig with Jamesons would be cool if it worked since Haruki Murakami visited both Islay and Ireland on his trip.

Update: I tried making the drink as above but with two teaspoons of Laphroaig. It was pretty good, probably more interesting than the original version. You notice the Laphroaig more on the initial taste than on the after taste. This could be worth continuing to play around with. Perhaps it could use a different bitters though, or the Balsam could be reduced. The Balsam isn’t bad, but there is something almost too smooth and mundane about it.

The topic of this month’s Mixology Monday is bitters. On a recent trip to Cambodia I happened to pick up a bottle of Suze. I had heard of Suze before but never tried it. From what I could make out of the label it seemed to be flavored with Gentian, an ingredient I’d only vaguely heard of before. The shop where I bought it was Phnom Penh’s largest French supermarket so I was fortunate enough to be able to ask a passing French woman what Gentian tasted like. ‘Aniseed’ she said. That didn’t sound entirely right to me since I had a feeling Gentian was something different. However, given that aniseed is such a divisive flavor I figured her description meant Suze had some kind of interesting taste and so I grabbed a bottle.

The French woman clearly was not much of a Suze drinker, or perhaps was as confused about aniseed as I was about gentian. When I finally got the bottle back to Shanghai (along with my other Cambodian finds – St. James rum and Marie Brizard Apry) I tasted no aniseed. I found the Suze rather like Campari, but less intense and without the orange taste. Apparently gentian is some kind of bitter flower. Suze is lighter bodied than Campari, less bitter, a little floral, and apparently has a wine base. I like it.

Suze tastes great with a splash of soda or tonic, but I wanted to find some Suze cocktails. I did a little research but came up with nothing. There were a few cocktail suggestions on the Suze website, but none of them grabbed me. The standard cocktail websites don’t mention it much.

So in honor of the approaching Mixology Monday I did a little experimentation myself. Because of Suze’s similarity to Campari I took the Negroni (a favorite of mine) as my starting point.

I tried mixing 1 part Suze, 1 part gin and 1 part French Vermouth. This was drinkable but I felt it didn’t mesh together well. Perhaps it would work with the proportions changed around – the gin dominates a bit. I thought Suze would go nicely with some fruit, and that some sweetness and acidity might help put the gin in the background, so I tried adding some orange juice. A version with equal parts of Suze, gin, vermouth and orange juice wasn’t too bad, but lacked character.

Another day and another attempt and I came up with something I was happy with. This time I used calvados instead of gin, to produce a fruitier gentler drink that plays off Suze’s relatively mild bitterness. Calvados always reminds me of Autumn and so bringing out the calvados bottle seemed fitting for the season as well. I think this would make a nice aperitif before an autumn meal involving cooked apples – maybe pork with apple, or chicken Normandy?

So the recipe. . .

Autumn Frogman

1 oz Suze

1 oz calvados

1 oz French vermouth

Stir ingredients over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Squeeze a twist of lemon peel over the drink to extract the oils, rub the peel around the rim of the glass, and drop into the drink. A dash of orange bitters might also be nice instead of the lemon twist, though I haven’t tried this yet.

This drink isn’t as bold as the Negroni, but I think Negroni drinkers will appreciate it. Personally I’m very pleased with it. For an aperitif this drink is slightly mellow (something that could probably be changed by upping the ratio of Suze), but the mellowness seems part of the charm. While I would never want to abandon the wonderful Negroni I can see myself substituting the Autumn Frogman occasionally when I feel like something slightly more low key and heart-warming. If you simply happen to want to bring out the Suze this drink is just the thing.

Why is it called an Autumn Frogman? This drink has three French ingredients so the name was always going to refer to France, and who could refer to the French without having a joke at their expense?

I am from New Zealand and in our minds (or is it just in mine?) the French will forever be associated with the bombing of a Greenpeace protest boat, the Rainbow Warrior, in Auckland Harbor. Yes, I know it happened in 1985, but we’re talking about the French here! The Rainbow Warrior was sunk in winter, but I expect the French agents spent the Autumn wet-suited up and training for the mission. The Calvados also matches the Autumn theme. So I present to the world, the Autumn Frogman!

Being an unforgiving person, on a previous occasion I came up with a Rainbow Warrior cocktail, but that will have to wait for another day.