This is just a little record for myself and anyone else who is interested, covering my Pimento Dram making experiments. For those who don’t know, Pimento Dram is an allspice flavored liqueur with a rum base from Jamaica. I have had two attempts at making Pimento Dram, the first not very successful and the second quite successful. (more…)

I had high hopes for this one and was not disappointed. I like drinks with lots of herbal flavors and this one obviously fits the bill.

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.

Continuing with kummel, this drink is featured on the side of the Fees Peach Bitters. Kummel with peach bitters. . . How is that for obscure? But that’s not all. Just when things are threatening to get a bit high brow, in goes a big dose of crème de menthe. I have nothing against crème de menthe, but it isn’t the most subtle or complex taste, and it tends to make rather one dimensional drinks. Still, I’ve said similar things about kummel being a very assertive flavor. So lets see how kummel goes pitted against crème de menthe. . .

There are a few different recipes around for this one. (more…)

In my quest for more Kummel drinks I came across this one. I picked it out because the recipe looked interesting and unpredictable. What was a caraway, vermouth, whiskey and bitters flavored sour going to taste like?

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I decided to whip up a quick something using blackberry brandy and settled on the Allegheny. It was the first recipe to come up on CocktailDB when I searched for blackberry brandy and lemon juice. Bourbon and dry vermouth looked like they would do nicely to fill out the drink, and a dash of bitters promised to spice things up a little.

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I tried out a range of apricot brandy drinks while selecting my entry for the recent Raiders of the Lost Cocktail. The following gives a summary of what I tried, ranked not very scientifically from best to worst. (more…)

So the theme for this Mixology Monday, hosted at Jimmy’s Cocktail Hour is ‘variations’. For once I haven’t had to think about what to throw together. This month’s theme perfectly fits something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now, namely a very straightforward and versatile variation of a Gin and Tonic. (more…)

I did a search on CocktailDB for pisco cocktails. Besides the well known pisco drinks, namely the pisco sour and the pisco punch, CocktailDB had just three other drinks to offer. CocktailDB is normally a good way to find a list of drinks using obscure ingredients, but when it comes to pisco it does not have much to offer.

The peculiar thing was that all three of these pisco drinks from CocktailDB also included Galliano. Very strange indeed. I am guessing that these three drinks all come from the same source, maybe a promotional cocktail booklet published for some South American market by Galliano, or perhaps they were winning entries in some competition or other. (more…)

I’m going to try a few different pisco cocktails over the next few entries here, just to maintain a little bit of a pisco theme. Some probably won’t be so great. However, there is one excellent one coming up shortly, and hopefully there will be a couple of other good ones besides that.

This one is something I found while looking for something else. It is called a ‘Pisco Bell-Ringer’ and comes from David Wondrich at Esquire.

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The theme for this month’s Mixology Monday is Repeal Day, and Pre-prohibition drinks are thus in order. Pisco is flavor of the month at my place since I managed to pick up three different brands of the stuff. That makes the Pisco Punch the obvious choice for this month’s drink.

I mentioned Pisco Punch the last time I wrote here. The problem with Pisco Punch, and it is quite a problem, is that the original recipe seems to have been lost. Certain things about the drink are known with certainty though. (more…)