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 figured kummel, being such an assertive taste, would work well as a mere dash or two in a martini type drink. I searched around for a suitable recipe and found this one in the Savoy.

1 oz dry gin (Tanqueray)

1 oz dry vermouth

2 dashes kummel (I initially used ½ a teaspoon then upped it to 1 teaspoon)

Not in the recipe but I squeezed an orange twist over it.

Surprisingly the kummel was no more than a faint background note at ½ a teaspoon. I found a full teaspoon more to my taste. This one tastes pretty much like what you’d expect, like a pleasant martini variation.

Given that kummel originates from Holland it might be interesting to try making something like this using genever rather than standard dry gin.

Update: I later tried this using Bokma Genever, 2 tsp kummel, and a squeeze of lemon peel. It was very tasty, and perhaps better integrated than the original (hard to say though since I did not compare side to side). The milder character of the genever blends nicely with everything else.

I never got around to experimenting with the Kummel I bought a few months back. I think I got a couple of decent drinks out of my recent exploration of apricot brandy so I figure I will try and do the same with Kummel over the next few days. To kick things off here is a slightly unusual Kummel drink from the Savoy. This one drags Kummel away from Northern Europe to holiday in sunny Jamaica, where it meets fun ingredients like Pimento Dram liqueur and Jamaican rum.

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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…)

I considered writing the Charlie Chaplin up for Raiders of the Lost Cocktail. I decided not to in the end though. Partly I wanted to write up a drink that combined Lillet with apricot brandy, and partly I was not sure if the Charlie Chaplin qualifies as being ‘lost’. I have occasionally seen the Charlie Chaplin on bar menus. Still, the name of the drink is rather old worldly, as is the use of sloe gin, so I won’t argue with anyone who wants to label it a lost drink.

The one bar where I have drunk a Charlie Chaplin was a little Japanese place in Shanghai. This time the bar in question was not Constellation, but rather the little bar inside the Garcon Chinois restaurant on Hengshan Rd. That bar is much smaller than Constellation, and does not have nearly the same range of spirits, but the cocktails used to be very carefully and expertly made by a Japanese woman who knew exactly what she was doing. (more…)

This is my first time participating in Raiders of the Lost Cocktail, hosted this month at Cocktail Chronicles. Resurrecting undeservedly forgotten things appeals to me, so Raiders of the Lost Cocktail seems like a great idea. Unfortunately I do not have much of a library of old cocktail books to scour for recipes. My only older book would be the Savoy Cocktail Book. Does Ted Haigh’s Cocktail Database website count as a source for the purposes of this event?

Anyway, the theme for this month’s Raiders of the Lost Cocktail is apricot Brandy. I have taken my research extremely seriously and my bottle of Marie Brizzard Apry has the scars to prove it. It feels like I must have tried a dozen or so apricot brandy cocktails, mostly from www.cocktaildb.com. In the end the drink I settled on for my entry turned out to also be in the Savoy. This means that I get to pretend I dug my entry out of the Savoy instead of finding it online. Yay! (more…)

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, (more…)