It looked better full. . .

Pineau des Charentes is an interesting aperitif from France that I have only recently tried. It seems to be relatively unknown outside of France. Pineau des Charentes is generally drunk straight rather than being used used in cocktails. However, since I am interested in aperitif wines as cocktail ingredients I picked a bottle up to try it out. (more…)

My initial round of experimentation with passion fruit showed how aromatic it is. Therefore I decided to partner it with pisco, an aromatic spirit. The obvious starting point was the pisco sour.

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I picked up a big bag of passion fruit and did some experimenting with passion fruit juice cocktails. I started with some ‘classical’ recipes from the early 20th Century. I have not personally checked the origins of these drinks, but I am guessing the first three are from the 1920s pr 1930s.

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Disney designed the Flying Tigers decal.

I found this one on CocktailDB while looking around for drinks using grenadine. In my post on The Fogcutter I mentioned how small quantities of gin can make an interesting contribution to rum cocktails. Since this drink is another example of that idea I thought it would be worth a try. (more…)

Having made some quality grenadine, the next step is to find some drinks to try it in. Three drinks immediately come to mind, the Clover Club, the Pink Lady, and the El Presidente. The Clover Club and Pink Lady are simply grenadine sweetened and flavored gin sours, while the El Presidente is a complex rum, orange Curacao and vermouth affair that gets a gentle lift from a teaspoon of grenadine. (more…)

Grenadine syrup is an awkward ingredient. There are interesting drinks that call for quite large doses of the stuff, yet mixing up one of these in the average bar is likely to result in the grenadine being the nastiest single ingredient in the mix. Who wants to adulterate quality spirits with a vaguely fruity, artificial version of what was once a natural pomegranate syrup? (more…)