The theme for this month’s Mixology Monday (hosted at Sloshed) is brandy. I’ve been taking a bit of a look at pisco recently (check posts here, here, here, here and especially here), so brace yourselves for some more pisco brandy.

Some weeks back I made a dead simple and intuitive pisco drink, a Pisco Sour sweetened with St. Germain elderflower liqueur.

1 ½ oz pisco

¾ oz lemon juice

¾ oz St. Germain

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

I am sure a lot of people must have thrown this one together before. The pisco and St. Germain work extremely nicely together. Both come through strongly but neither really dominates. Of course the more robust your pisco the stronger the pisco taste is going to be, so consider upping the St. Germain a little when using a stronger flavored pisco. Not much else to say since this one speaks for itself. If it isn’t sweet enough add a dash of simple syrup or increase the St. Germain.

For a variation you could try adding an egg-white.

Then I made it again but with an a teaspoon of Marie Brizard Tangerine. Also very nice and maybe better than the original.

Then, getting ahead of myself as usual, I started thinking about what I could call the thing. Obviously it needed a Peruvian name. If I was a better Catholic I’m sure I could have thought of some Peruvian saint, and after wittily combining that with the St. Germain it would all have been plain sailing. Unfortunately I’m not well versed in these things. Instead I thought of the Peruvian/Amazonian boa constrictor. What with cocktail glasses and the St. Germain bottle design both being somewhat Art Deco I was naturally led from there to the image of a feather boa. Suddenly it seemed obvious that the world needed a pisco cocktail, feminine yet old school, called the Feather Boa. The Feather Boa probably needed to be pink, but it certainly wasn’t going to taste pink. So the recipe got reworked again, and naturally things started getting out of hand – as they have a habit of doing as soon as a feather boa makes an entrance.

I tried

1 ½ oz pisco

¾ oz lemon juice

¾ oz St. Germain

½ tsp grenadine

1 tsp Tuaca

Why did I add Tuaca? Well I had tried a couple of Pisco cocktails from Cocktaildb.com that combined pisco with Galliano. Somebody obviously believes the pisco-vanilla combination works well. Personally I think the vanilla-heavy Galliano too easily overpowers pisco and the end result is just a bit weird. Tuaca on the other hand has a much milder vanilla flavor, and unlike Galliano it has a grape brandy base and some citrus notes. Intuitively Tuaca should be a much better match for Pisco than Galliano – which is a fine liqueur but a devil to mix with. Therefore I decided to give Tuaca a try in the Feather Boa. The idea was to introduce some vanilla to heighten the sense of sweetness without actually being cloying – the addition of vanilla makes a thing taste sweeter than it really is. Moreover, the use of Tuaca would still add a little citrus just as the Manderine had done. The result is pretty good though the citrus in the Tuaca is too faint to be detectable.

Then I made it again with 1 tsp maraschino instead of the Tuaca. Excellent! Better than the Tuaca. You get just the ghost of a taste of cherry in the mix which really improves things.

Despite having just made a really nice drink I then decided to do something completely different, and thus produced the version I finally settled on. Apologies for being long winded, but I really did go through a range of options.

Having recently done a bit of an exploration of the Daiquiri (check here), including the excellent maraschino and grapefruit version, I decided some grapefruit juice could add complexity and bitterness, and maybe even a touch of pink. I also decided that if I was playing around with introducing a ghostly little flavor in the back of the St. Germain then chocolate would probably work better than almost anything else, and would also go nicely with grapefruit. I probably also had the chocolate and vermouth spiked Floridita Daiquiri in the back of my mind. So I came up with the following, final version.

Feather Boa (another ‘final’ version below)

1 ½ oz pisco

¾ oz lemon juice (lime may be better but I had none available)

½ oz grapefruit juice

¾ oz St. Germain

½ tsp grenadine

½ tsp Tuaca

½ tsp Crème de Cacao

This is seriously nice, and just a little unusual. It probably still needs a little tweaking though. Suggestions anyone? On first taste it seemed well balanced but it seemed to get more and more sour as I went. Maybe the Tuaca could be upped to 1 tsp? I wouldn’t want to increase the Creme de Cacao because it is already quite noticeable.

I like that this drink contains a lot of different fruity flavors, is light without being sweet, and has a little bitterness to make things interesting. It’s a little like a cross between a new style and old style drink. The heavy dose of fruit juice reminds me of contemporary cocktails, while the relatively restrained sweetening reminds me more of older drinks. Anyway, while it may need a little revision I think it has potential.

No photograph of the final (pink) version of the drink. Sorry, it was so tasty it sort of evaporated. I’ll try it again tomorrow.

I did try it again the next day and did the following

Final Revision(?)

2 oz pisco

1/2 oz lime juice (lime seems nicer than lemon in this)
1/2 oz grapefruit juice

3/4 oz St. Germain

1 tsp Tuaca

1/2 tsp Creme de Cacao

1/2 tsp Grenadine

This seems a slight improvement on the above. I’ve given it to a few people and no complaints so far.

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. God knows. If anyone has the answer to that one I would be curious to know.

I think Galliano is quite a hard liqueur to mix with since it has such an assertive vanilla taste. Vanilla goes with most things of course, but pisco is fairly delicate and quite easily dominated by Galliano. In any case, two of the drinks were a bit weird, but the third one was rather good and worth noting. For the sake of completeness I’ll write up all three here, saving the best till last.

First. . .

Raffaello

½ oz pisco

½ oz bianco vermouth

½ oz Galliano

¼ oz triple sec

1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake over ice then strain onto some rocks in an old fashioned glass. I was feeling lazy and just built it over ice.

This is not an uninteresting drink but I doubt I will bother to make it again. I have a hazy memory of having made this a year or two ago and reaching the same verdict. The two liqueurs plus the bianco vermouth make this very sweet, but the herbs and spices in the vermouth, bitters and Galliano help stop it being sickly sweet. You end up with a bitter-sweet and quite aromatic drink. I couldn’t taste the pisco much given all the vermouth and liqueur, but it was still there as a background presence. I can’t imagine when you would want to drink something like this. I guess it could be an aperitif for somebody with a sweet tooth.

This is also one of only a few cocktails to use bianco vermouth. Bianco vermouth has a funny flavor I can’t quite identify. It tastes almost chocolaty, but I’m guessing chocolate isn’t actually an ingredient. Anyone got any ideas on where that chocolaty taste comes from?

Second. . .

Angelino

1 oz pisco (I used Bauza)

1 oz blended scotch (I used Ballentines)

¾ oz Galliano

Shake with ice, strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with a cherry.

I found this drinkable, but sweet and unexciting – the unfortunate contribution of the Galliano. Just maybe this could be interesting if you made it with a more robust pisco and scotch. As it stands it is just a slightly interesting Galliano-promotional-booklet-style cocktail. You taste the Galliano and whiskey more than the pisco, though the pisco is still there in the background and adds a layer of flavor that wouldn’t be there if another spirit was substituted. This drink is by no means offensive, but I can’t see why anyone would drink it unless they had some kind of Galliano fetish. Just maybe there is something in the whole scotch-pisco combination, but I think the Galliano needs to be reduced significantly to make this an interesting drink. I am also thinking Tuaca might worker better here. Given that Tuaca has a gentler vanilla flavor, a little citrus, and a brandy base it should partner better with pisco.

Third. . .

New Yorker (exotic)

1 oz pisco

¾ oz Galliano

1 oz grapefruit juice

½ oz lime juice

1 tsp simple syrup

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Finally a decent drink!

This one should be popular with modern drinkers given it is a sweet and sour type drink, with a big splash of liqueur and a couple of different fruit juices. The basic composition isn’t so different to some of the vodka-based, flavored ‘martinis’ that are all the rage these days. It isn’t a sugar bomb though, with lime for sourness and grapefruit for an interesting bitterness. I’d been finding the whole pisco and Galliano combination a little weird up until now, but it actually works nicely in this one. The grapefruit and lime keep the Galliano in check, so the vanilla taste is present without taking over. While the pisco isn’t exactly the main flavor in this (I guess the flavor profile is more citrus-vanilla-bitter), there is no doubt that it is a pisco drink. I probably can’t see myself drinking this too often, but I would make it for someone else if they wanted a pisco drink which was lower in alcohol, a little fruity, and not too sweet. If you have pisco and Galliano lying around you may as well throw one together just for the heck of it. After all, how often do you get an excuse to use Galliano?

If I was to vary this one I’d probably replace the Galliano with Tuaca, and possibly even a dash of orange curacao too since Tuaca is very restrained in the citrus department. I think going down that route might achieve a similar effect with a bit more subtlety. However, I’m not complaining about the recipe as is. It is good enough that it doesn’t need changing around.

A couple of nights ago I dropped into the recently opened Henry’s Brewpub in Shanghai. The beer there is US style. It is nothing like the English beer brewed at Galbraiths in Auckland, but it isn’t too bad. The prices are also reasonable, only 30 RMB a glass, compared to at least twice that for the Bavarian wheat beers at the Shanghai Paulaner.

My timing was excellent, for two reasons. First, I arrived to meet a friend at exactly 7 pm, and found that they were offering free beer for the next hour. Naturally I took advantage of this unexpected opportunity. Second, there was the most stunning looking Sri Lankan girl working behind the bar, on her first night in the place, and as it turned out probably her last.

The beer was very good. US style micro-brews aren’t exactly my thing, but there is no denying that the beer at Henrys is good. I had a pale ale, a honey brown ale, and then more of the pale ale. Me and my friend had a couple of plates of ribs, and he chatted about his messy personal life. I spent most of the conversation talking about the virtues of monogamy, something he needed a dose of. I was the very voice of temperance and self-control, a lone voice raging in defense of true love and straight dealing. While not deliberate there was something vaguely fortuitous about all this. Since the bar was virtually empty (Henry’s has only just opened and even free beer doesn’t seem to be pulling the crowds in just yet) the Sri Lankan barmaid was listening to most of our conversation. We must have sounded something like a good cop bad cop routine, but I was not just any good cop, I was the cop who was going to single handedly right every wrong in the world.

Eventually the barmaid joined in the conversation. We stopped talking about my friend’s situation and moved on to other things. It turned out that the barmaid was from Sweden. She had been born in Sri Lanka but adopted by a Swedish family. Naturally I asked her where I could find aquavit or Swedish punsch in Shanghai. To my surprise she said I would definitely find aquavit in Ikea. She didn’t know anything about Swedish punsch, which I guess isn’t common even in Sweden. I had been to the little deli in Ikea looking for interesting things before and never seen any aquavit, but she sounded very certain. I thought about asking her about Sri Lankan arrack, but figured I would sound a bit weird if I asked too many questions about hard to find drinks, and in any case she had only been back to Sri Lanka once since leaving as a child so what would she know about arrack? It turned out that the barmaid was having second thoughts about working in Henrys and probably wouldn’t be there again, so all in all I was lucky to make her acquaintance and find a source of aquavit.

The next day I headed down to Ikea. She was quite right, they had aquavit. I picked up a 500ml bottle of OP Anderson Fine Old Aquavit, plus a box containing a dozen miniatures of different brands.

The barmaid had mentioned that Aquavit was a Christmas drink in Sweden. In fact the reason she was so certain Ikea had the stuff was because her father had been there recently to buy some for Christmas. I decided to get to work and make a Christmas cocktail with the stuff.

Aquavit is more or less a herbal flavored vodka, though unlike vodka Aquavit is sometimes aged. I’m not sure if the brand I bought is aged or not. I suspect not. It has a slightly golden hue, but I think that comes from caramel rather than cask storage. OP Anderson tastes of caraway and anise, but other brands include other ingredients – for example one of the miniatures I bought is flavored with dill. The dill makes sense since the Swedes sometimes drink aquavit with smoked salmon and other fish.

After drinking a glass of the stuff straight I decided the caraway flavors would work well with Galliano and orange juice. Therefore I decided to simply make a Harvey Wallbanger, but substituting Aquavit for the vodka. It isn’t the most creative idea in the world but I thought it would work. Since the Harvey Wallbanger was named after a surfer who used to sling his surfboard up against the wall before walking into a beachside bar at the end of a day’s surfing, this drink is called Frozen Surf – imagine a despondent surfer, wearing colorful Hawaiian shorts, standing on a desolate Swedish beach around Christmas.

Frozen Surf

1.5 oz Aquavit

3 oz orange juice

1/4 oz Galliano

Build in a rocks glass, floating the Galliano on top.

You can adjust the quantity of Galliano to taste. Personally I like to keep the ratio of Galliano down so the Aquavit has a chance to shine.

This drink is crisper and more interesting than the Harvey Wallbanger. The caraway adds an extra dimension, the herbal notes in the aquavit blend with the Galliano, and the orange juice makes it all rather refreshing. Mixing the drink strong (only two parts orange to one part Aquiavit) and going easy on the Galliano stops the drink from being too sweet.

Merry Christmas!