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.

Pineau des Charentes (also known simply as pineau) is said to have originated in the 16^th Century when wine must (i.e. unfermented grape juice) was accidentally poured into a cask containing cognac eau de vie. The cognac prevented the must from fermenting and the barrel was set aside as an unfortunate mistake. However, it was found that extended maturation saw the flavors of the wine must and cognac blend to produce a fine drink. Pineau has been a specialty of the Charentes region ever since. The Charentes region seems to be sub-region within Cognac by the way.

The regulations governing production of Pineau des Charentes are quite strict. For a start the product must come from the Charentes region. The grapes used for the must should be Ugni Blanc, Folle Blanche, Colombard, Sémillon, Sauvignon or Montils. Pressing must be light to ensure the pressed juice is of high quality. The cognac used for blending must be a minimum of one year old, 60% or higher alcohol by volume, and from the same vineyard as the must. According to the Comité National du Pineau des Charentes the finished product must be matured in oak barrels for a minimum of 18 months. Other sources mention minimum maturation of 8 months for red pineau and 12 months for white, so there seems to be some ambiguity on this point. Old pineau can be aged for 10 years or longer. The alcoholic strength by volume must be in the range 16-22%. Most pineau is a blend of roughly one quarter cognac to three quarters wine must, with an alcoholic strength of around 17%.

The vast majority of pineau is either consumed within France or exported to Francophone markets. Less than 25% of pineau production is exported, and over 90% of exports go to Belgium and Canada. In practice France and Belgium together consume almost all pineau production. Canada follows a very distant third, but still consumes several times more than the next largest pineau drinking nation. I am guessing Quebec is the center of Canadian pineau consumption. The French are keeping this one very much to themselves. So enough of facts and figures! It is time to open that bottle and see what the French are hiding. . .

The taste is mild but interesting, and unusual compared to other aperitif wines. No herbal flavors, bitterness or spice leap out at you. There is also little of the matured complexity of aperitif wines like port or sherry. This stuff is simply sweet, full bodied, and extremely ‘fresh’. It tastes like a very fruity wine, but also reminds me strongly of mead (honey wine). It is hard to believe it contains no honey since the honey taste is so strong. There is also some apple aroma, though again no apples were harmed in its manufacture. It has an unusual ‘primeval’ character, reminding me of the opening titles in Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo”, which describe the Amazon is described as a place where God never finished his creation. Yep, it tastes ‘unfinished’, in a good way. Pineau seems slightly rough-and-ready, with a plethora of interesting aromas that threaten to erupt all over the place and are disinclined to sit still. This stuff should have potential as a cocktail ingredient. I wonder why it isn’t used more?

In terms of mixing I would tend to think (roughly in order of potential) along the lines of cognac (the obvious choice), calvados, rhum agricole, pisco, Cuban rum, and whiskey. Pineapple juice also springs to mind, and perhaps Cynar could be another idea. This is not experience talking. I am just making some guesses as to what might work. I should also note that I did not dream up the rhum agricole angle. I bought a bottle of pineau partly so I could make a rhum agricole drink, the Pompadour, from the Esquire Drinks Database. Lets start with the Pompadour then. . .

The Pompadour
1 ½ oz rhum agricole vieux (I used St. James Ambre)

1 ½ oz pineau

½ oz lemon juice

This shows off the characteristics of both the rhum and the pineau. It is weird and unlike anything you are likely to have drunk. It is also fantastic. There is a full on aroma symphony, with the fresh and aromatic characters of both ingredients getting a chance to shine. You should seek out Pineau des Charentes for this drink alone.

Next up are a couple more pineau cocktail recipes I found online. I will include some experimental recipes of my own in a subsequent post. This next recipe is from the website site of a producer of Pineau des Charentes.

Charentais

2 1/2 oz pineau

½ oz cognac

¼ oz créme de framboise

1 tsp lemon juice

This smooth and tasty refresher is just lightly spiked pineau. The source of this recipe was unclear on whether a liqueur or eau de vie framboise was called for (mentioning both in different places). I did not have an appropriate eau de vie so I went for a liqueur. The lemon juice was added by me as an afterthought to give it some zing since it tasted a bit flat.

The next was something not unlike the above, but with the addition of a dash of pineapple juice and the whole then being brought to life with champagne. Again the recipe was from the website of a pineau producer.

Reaulais

2 oz pineau

½ oz cognac

½ oz pineapple juice

1 dash grenadine

2 oz champagne or sparkling wine

Shake everything except the champagne over ice. Strain into a glass and top with champagne.

A very rich yet slightly lively drink. There are no real surprises but it is most pleasant.

The next recipe was from a French language website – hence a little ambiguity over what liqueur is meant.

Ambassade

1 ½ oz pineau

½ oz gin

½ oz “orange liqueur” (I used Grand Marnier)

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Another “take Pineau des Charentes and spike it with a little hooch” type of drink. It tastes good though. French style cocktails, by which I mean drinks that are heavy on aperitif wines and light on spirits, are tasty. Made with Grand Marnier the drink is rich and smooth. With Cointreau or some other triple sec it would probably be more fresh and fragrant.

I love the way the French can’t help adding London Dry Gin to things. It has to hurt them, right? Something like an “every time you spike your drink with gin, somewhere in the world a DGSE operative in scuba gear dies” kind of thing.

Sorry, I’m unrelenting about the Rainbow Warrior Affair aren’t I? The French are a fine race, and have punched well above their weight in terms of inventing delicious aperitifs. I’ve had better cocktails than this one, but I’ve also had much worse.

In my next post on Pineau des Charentes I will experiment with some recipes of my own.

Passion Fruit Pisco Sour

2 oz pisco

¾ oz passion fruit pulp (I used a whole passion fruit, which yielded roughly ¾ oz of pulp – not juice!)

½ oz lime juice

¼ oz simple syrup

1 egg white

Shake long and hard over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

I deliberately didn’t double stain, hoping the passion fruit seeds would end up as an attractive garnish on the bottom of the glass. This didn’t happen. About three seeds made it to where they were supposed to go. This was not quite the effect I was after. Maybe double strain and forget about trying to achieve this effect, or simply garnish with a teaspoon of passion fruit pulp in the bottom of the glass?

It seems best to leave out the Angostura garnish on the foam. I experimented with a drop of Angostura on one corner of the drink, but it seemed to distract too much from the delicate passion fruit aroma. Of course some may like it.

This drink made a beautiful pisco sour variation. The passion fruit and pisco make nice partners, and there is no doubting the passion fruit adds some extra complexity.

Since passion fruit comes from the Amazon, and since Pisco also comes from South America I am labeling my further experiments (involving pisco and agricole rum) ‘Amazonian cocktails’.

Amazonian Cocktail #1

2 oz pisco

¾-1 oz passion fruit pulp (my passion fruit was especially big so it gave me practically an ounce of pulp)

½ oz lime juice

¾ oz St. Germain

1 egg white

Shake hard over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

I had envisaged a drink that improved on the above by adding some subtle complexity in the form of St. Germain. I think the St. Germain ended up distracting too much from the passion fruit though. Maybe ½ oz of St. Germain would be better? This is a pleasant drink, but the passion fruit doesn’t jump out like I want it to. Perhaps it just needs tweaking?

Maybe my best drink came last. . .

Amazonian Cocktail #2 (or The Fitzcarraldo)

1 ½ oz pisco

¾ oz passion fruit pulp

¾ oz dry apricot brandy (i.e. a eau de vie, not a liqueur)

2 tsp Grand Marnier

1 tsp Grenadine

This is just a reworking of the Dulchin, substituting passion fruit for the lime juice. Though I say it myself, this is pretty damn good. The passion fruit makes a much softer and more approachable drink than the Dulchin, yet one that is no less interesting. The combination of pisco, passion fruit and apricot eau de vie provides tons of aromatic complexity. The pisco is easy to pick, but the apricot and passion fruit mesh into a single exotic flavor. While sweeter made with passion fruit than the original Dulchin, it is not too sweet. It could certainly be reworked (playing around with the Grand Marnier and Grenadine?), but this is close to being a pretty good drink. The color is beautiful too.

So why did I call this the Fitzcarraldo? I have always been fascinated by the city of Manaus, the remote Brazilian Amazon town that was the site of a big rubber boom in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. One of the famous stories of the Manaus boom years concerns the grand opera house that was built there. Legend has it that Enrico Caruso himself was scheduled to perform there but for various reasons never made it. No sooner was the opera house completed than the rubber economy collapsed, and Manaus reverted to a remote jungle backwater marking the furthest boundaries of civilization. Werner Herzog directed a movie, Fitzcarraldo (1982), about the dreamer behind the construction of the Manaus opera house. This last drink seems as good a drink as any to christen the Fitzcarraldo. The drink combines Brazilian passion fruit with Peruvian pisco (this makes sense because Manaus is closer to Peru than to most places in Brazil). Meanwhile, European apricot brandy and Grand Marnier bring some Old World refinement to the remote frontier.

The Avenue

1 oz passion fruit juice*

1 oz calvados

1 oz bourbon

1 dash orange flower water (about ¼ tsp of a fairly mild Middle Eastern one – but could have added a lot less)

1 dash grenadine (about 1/4 tsp but could have added more)

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass

‘Perfumey’ seems the best word to describe this delightful drink. There are amazing smells from the passion fruit and the orange flower water. I find the bourbon and calvados blend into an interesting base, with the bourbon giving some simple sweetness in the background and the calvados a spirituous fruitiness that provides a nice foundation for the passion fruit. The taste is still fairly challenging though. It smells like heaven, but the taste gives you a jolt – a pleasant one of course.

Freshly squeezed passion fruit juice, while full of amazing flavors and scents, is slightly astringent. Therefore you can afford to be generous with the grenadine. The grenadine will also give a little body to counteract the slightly thin and grainy quality of the passion fruit juice. Be careful not to add so much that you lose the passion fruit color though!

The Jinx

1 oz passion fruit juice (recipe specifically said sweetened so I added a dash of Monin passion fruit syrup to the juice)

1 oz gin

1 oz calvados

1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass

This drink resembles The Avenue above, with the substitution of gin for the bourbon and bitters for the orange flower water. The gin is a tasty swap. It is not necessarily better, but it is definitely good. I am not sure on the bitters though. I wonder if orange bitters would work better, or even peach. Angostura seems to distract a little from the delicate passion fruit. But maybe I just added too much.

Comparing different drinks made with common products is a very interesting exercise. My first impression of this drink was that some of the taste that I had mistaken for orange flower water in the previous drink was actually the passion fruit. Passion fruit really is that aromatic. No wonder the Chinese word for passion fruit literally means “hundred fragrance fruit” (???).

I think I may prefer this drink to the above. It may be less aromatic, but it seems a touch more robust.

The Melody

1 ½ oz gin

¾ oz passion fruit juice

¾ oz Lillet

1 tsp Cointreau

1 tsp calvados

Here the calvados becomes a mere accent and the Lillet softens the drink up and helps everything blend together. The passion fruit juice might need a touch of sweetening, but this is a smooth drink, smooth to a fault if anything. The passion fruit takes center stage, with the other flavors just providing little touches of color.

The above three drinks were all decent. The Melody was nice but perhaps a touch one dimensional. I rather liked the Jinx.

The last drink I tried was a bit of an oddball and I am including it more for the sake of completeness than as a recommendation.

Sardi’s Delight

1 ½ oz gin

¼ oz lemon juice

¼ oz passion fruit juice (in fact I just added about a ½ oz of pulp)

¼ oz grenadine

¼ oz pastis

1 dash Angostura Bitters

Shake over ice and double strain into a cocktail glass.

Like a lot of drinks with a decent dose of pastis this tasted of. . . pastis. There was something interesting in the passion fruit and pastis combination, but for the sake of balance the pastis needed to be toned way down. I think passion fruit and pastis would be better companions in a Tiki drink style concoction that contains a decent slug of passion fruit juice and a dash or two of pastis. Maybe something like a Monkey Gland, made with passion fruit instead of or as well as orange could also be interesting?

* I extracted juice from the fruit by cutting them open, then putting the pulp in a tea strainer resting over a container and pressing with a muddler. You will need to give the juice a few minutes to drip through the strainer, and it is difficult to get a good extraction (the pulp tends to slide away from the muddler rather than give up its juice), but each fruit should comfortably yield up to 1/2 oz of juice. With a better method of extracting the juice you could probably get a little more.

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.

This drink appears to have been named after the legendary Flying Tigers. The Flying Tigers were a squadron of U.S. volunteer pilots who assisted China in resisting Japanese aggression before and during WWII. They were based in Kunming (the capital of Yunnan province in southwest China), and commanded by Claire Chennault. Their successes became the stuff of legend, and included protecting the inhabitants of Kunming against Japanese bombing raids for the entire duration of their deployment there, adopting novel tactics that saw them massively outperform the RAF in the defense of Burma, and allegedly destroying nearly 300 Japanese planes for the loss of just 14 of their own pilots. The Flying Tigers formed a crucial part of China’s air defenses, and were a rare U.S. success story during the bleak period of Japanese advances that followed Pearl Harbor.

Flying Tigers “Blood Chit” worn on the back of pilots’ flying jackets: the Chinese reads “This foreigner has come to China to help in the war effort. Soldiers and civilians, one and all, should rescue, protect, and care for him”

The unit had a reputation for hard drinking, though not to the extent that discipline broke down, and some members of the unit were dismissed by Chennault for drinking. One member to be dismissed was Gregory Boyington, whose alcoholism eventually saw him sent to New Zealand for four months to ‘recuperate’. Incidentally, Boyington would go on to lead the Black Sheep, the colorful Solomons based air squadron partly made up of pilots stood down from their original units over disciplinary issues.

I have been to the Flying Tigers museum in Chongqing and even bought a Flying Tigers t-shirt. Maybe it is time to try the cocktail?

1 ¾ oz light rum (Havana Club)

½ oz gin (Plymouth)

¼ oz grenadine (homemade)

1 dash aromatic bitters

This is a sweetish but not uninteresting drink. It tastes heavily of rum, but with the grenadine giving lots of body and fruitiness. The gin and bitters add some light spicy and herbal notes to make things interesting. It may not be hugely exciting, but it shows what gin can do when used as a flavoring rather than the base spirit. It is also one of those handy drinks that does not require any hard to find ingredients – provided you either have good grenadine or can put up with average stuff.

Incidentally, how is this for coincidence? The Rough Riders were a unit of U.S. volunteers who allegedly invented the Cuba Libre, which allegedly combines rum and gin. The Flying Tigers were a unit of U.S. volunteers with an associated cocktail, invented by themselves for all we know, that again combines rum and gin. Spooky? Absolutely! It was probably after a discovery like this one that early man first got all philosophical and asked himself whether the universe had an intelligent designer.

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.

Recipes follow:

Clover Club

1 ½ – 2 oz gin

½ oz lemon or lime juice (juice of about half a lemon)

1 tsp – ½ oz grenadine (some recipes call for up to an ounce!)

1 egg white

Give a long shake over ice and double strain into a cocktail glass.

This one takes its name from a 19^th Century club of which it was the house cocktail. Made with good grenadine it is a simple but very respectable affair. The grenadine should add some pleasant fruit flavors as well as balancing the lemon. The egg white is essential. Be generous with the grenadine in this one since that is what gives the drink its character. The egg white also means you can add a reasonable amount without making things too cloying. Between the grenadine and the egg, the gin will slide down very easily indeed.

Pink Lady

1 ½ oz gin

½ oz calvados (or applejack)

½ oz lemon juice

1 tsp grenadine

1 egg white

Give a long shake over ice and double strain into a cocktail glass.

This drink adds uses apple brandy to lure the conservative Clover Club on a bit of an adventure. Nobody ends up getting hurt, and in fact the new combination works beautifully. The apple brandy now takes the lead, but good quality grenadine still helps add an additional layer of flavor.

El Presidente

1 ½ oz Cuban Rum (Havana Club 3 Anos works well, as does the Anejo Blanco)

¾ oz orange Curacao

¾ oz dry vermouth

1/2 – 1 tsp grenadine

Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

This is a great Cuban drink dating from the early 20th Century. There seem to be a few variations floating around. Some use triple sec. Some use sweet vermouth. I think the above version is the original. Whatever variation you use, a good quality grenadine should come into its own here. The drink is already fairly sweet and does not particularly need an extra dose of sugar. What the grenadine does is add a little fruitiness to lift the drink (not unlike the lemon twist garnish), and improve the mouth feel.

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?

Some brands are truly shocking. Price is not a bad guide, with the cheapest often being the worst. However, even pricier options like Fees Brothers are not necessarily good. I have a bottle of Fees Brothers at hand now, and besides not tasting very natural, to me it tastes distinctly of cherry. The list of ingredients is not informative, just listing various flavorings. Some commercial brands are reasonable though. I think Monin includes a little pomegranate juice (around 15% from memory), so I guess it is not a bad choice. Having said that, I believe the formula for Monin syrups varies among markets, with the U.S. versions sometimes being inferior to those sold in Europe. Before buying a bottle of grenadine I would recommend taking a look at the list of ingredients to see what it is made of. Does it contain pomegranate juice?

Some suggest using pomegranate molasses (sometimes labeled pomegranate syrup) in cocktails. I do not recommend this. This stuff really is a molasses like product, being thick, grainy, and extremely sour. While it has plenty of sugar, the emphasis is on the sourness. It is extremely concentrated and tends to be a dark-brown, almost black color. Looking at it you would never confuse it with grenadine. Pomegranate molasses can be interesting stuff to play with if you are unfamiliar with how processed pomegranates can taste, but it belongs in the kitchen, not the bar. It is great in marinades, sauces, etc. I have heard of people using this stuff as a grenadine substitute in drinks. This seems like a crazy manifestation of anti-commercial-grenadine prejudice to me. Sure the commercial grenadines are bad, but using a sour brown gunk as an alternative? There is just no similarity between grenadine syrup and pomegranate molasses. The former provides sweetness together with pomegranate taste, while the latter provides sourness together with pomegranate taste. They are designed to achieve completely different things.

A pomegranate juicer in action in the market in Kashgar

Given the difficulty of buying good grenadine and the lack of substitutes, it makes sense to make your own. Making my own grenadine has been a bit of an obsession since I took a trip around East Turkestan (the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of Northwest China) and found freshly squeezed pomegranate juice was ubiquitous as a roadside thirst quencher. Drinking the fresh juice gave me an idea of what grenadine could be if only it was made properly. The juice was sour, sweet, and tanniny, with quite a robust flavor. The intensity of the flavor is reflected in the fact it is often sold in quite small glasses, containing only 100 ml or so. As I wandered the streets drinking the stuff, true grenadine seemed tantalizingly close and yet very far away – the more so since the region suffers a shortage of cocktail bars. Fubar in Wulumuqi has a great line up of beers, but its martini glasses gather dust.

I have since tried three different methods of making grenadine, and have now found a method I am happy with. My experiments took me through the following three methods:

1 – Adding sugar to commercial pomegranate juice to make a juice flavored syrup: take ½ cup of bottled pomegranate juice, heat gently on the stove, add a scant 1 cup sugar (slightly less since juice already contains some sugar), stir to dissolve sugar, briefly cook, cool and use.

2 – Cooking pomegranate seeds in simple syrup: make a cold process 2:1 simple syrup by mixing 1 cup of sugar and ½ cup of water (using a pulse blender for the mixing makes this easy), cut a pomegranate into quarters and remove seeds (do this in a bowl of water and you will find the seeds sink while the white pith floats), place seeds in a saucepan with the syrup and gently simmer for 30 minutes until mixture forms a slightly thickened syrup*, add red food coloring to deepen color (recommended), strain, cool and use.

3 – Mashing pomegranate seeds to extract the juice, adding sugar and water, and cooking into a syrup: seed a pomegranate as described above, place seeds in a saucepan and lightly mash with a potato masher to extract most of the juice (you only need to burst the pods around the seeds, not crush the seeds themselves), add 1 cup sugar and ½ cup water, gently heat while stirring until sugar is completely dissolved, simmer on a low heat for 30 minutes into a thick syrup, add red food coloring if desired, strain, cool and use.

After trying the above three approaches I found an interesting recipe for a fourth method (read about it here at All the Marmalade). This method is similar to method 3 except that the mashed seeds are marinated overnight with the sugar to let the flavor develop. Another difference from method 3 is useing two pomegranates where I used just one. This should mean a more intense flavor and likely no need for added food coloring. Finally, the cooking is done at a low temperature and for a shorter time.

4 – The process for method 4, the marinating method, is basically as follows: seed two pomegranates and place seeds in a bowl with 1 cup of sugar; mash seeds and sugar together to release the juice and dissolve the sugar; rest overnight in the refrigerator; remove seeds by straining into a saucepan; add ½ cup water and gently heat for a few minutes to kill any bacteria. Personally, I think cooking for a little longer may still be a good idea.

This fourth method looks very promising, but due to a lack of pomegranates in the shops since finding that recipe I will have to leave it for my next batch. Of the three approaches I have tested I recommend method 3.

Method 1 simply just produces an extremely sweetened fruit juice. It is OK if you are in a hurry, and better than most commercial brands, but still not great. The limited cooking in method 1 also means the syrup is not especially thick. I think a little thickness is desirable. Method 2 is an improvement on method 1, mainly because it extracts some flavor from the seeds. The seeds have a hard-to-describe, slightly nutty or vegetal taste, and for me they really improve the syrup. You eat the seeds when you eat a pomegranate, so surely grenadine syrup should also capture their taste. The weakness of method 2 is that the juice tends to remain with the seeds rather than flowing into the syrup. Although the syrup still picks up plenty of flavor, it lacks acidity and natural color. Method 3 is the clear winner, producing a syrup with a natural purplish/red color (best boosted with red food coloring if you want attractive drinks), and a full pomegranate flavor, including both the acidic juice and the seeds. Method 4 will hopefully be even better than method 3.

Well made grenadine becomes not merely a sweetener but a flavor in its own right, making grenadine cocktails a field for serious exploration. The question then becomes what cocktails to try it in.

* Pay attention not to overcook the syrup or it will start to form candy. You want to cook it to the stage where it no longer dissolves instantly when you drop a little into a bowl of cold water. However, it should still dissolve easily when stirred. You do not want to cook it to the stage where it forms a soft mass that holds it shape even when stirred. If it gets to this stage you are on the road to making candy. Adding a little water will rescue things. If you demand grenadine that mixes a little easier then simply don’t cook for as long. Personally I don’t find requiring an extra couple of stirs when mixing a drink to be a big deal, but then I don’t mix hundreds of drinks every night.

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. Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of Catholicism could probably have come with with a Peruvian saint and wittily combined that the St. Germain. Unfortunately I’m not well versed in these things. Instead I thought of the Peruvian/Amazonian boa constrictor. The Art Deco style of cocktail glasses and the St. Germain bottle design led me from there to the image of a feather boa. Suddenly it seemed obvious that the world needed a pisco cocktail 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, 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 issue I guess is far too many ingredients, making it a bit fiddly to make.

Ernest Hemingway, endurance drinker, greets Fidel Castro, endurance orator

Auckland is suffering in the grip of a pressing lime shortage. Unrest has been quelled so far through the imposition of martial law (Batista will be smiling in his grave), but nobody knows how long the authorities can maintain even this crude semblance of order. OK, I may be exaggerating slightly. Everything is surprisingly normal considering that there have been no limes in the supermarkets since before Christmas. This means I can’t enjoy a Daiquiri despite the summery weather. The good thing though is that I’ve been meaning to write about the Daiquiri for a while, so with Daiquiris on my mind but none to be had I may as well get writing.

The Daiquiri ranks somewhere among my favorite cocktails. It competes for a top three spot with the likes of the Old Fashioned, the Sazerac and the Manhattan. Simply by virtue of being a rum drink while the others are whiskey the Daiquiri would have to get in the top three somehow or other. It definitely takes the top spot for tropical drinks. It also gets extra points for not requiring any special ingredients. A Daiquiri simply involves mixing some very ordinary ingredients with a little skill. Unlike say, a Sazarac (good luck finding real rye and Peychauld’s Bitters in most bars), any bar can make a decent Daiquiri if they care to.

Given my weakness for Daiquiris then I was always going to have something to say about the drink sooner or later. The Daiquiri is also an interesting drink to look at in a little detail simply because there is so much more room for interpretation than with most drinks. However, while there are some truly excellent variations on the classic Daiquiri, your typical Daiquiri variation is an overly sweetened, garishly colored, artificially flavored abomination. I’m going to take a look at the origins of the Daiquiri, its basic forms, and some traditional variations on that basic form.

Hemingway and Errol Flynn chat over a Daiquiri. The scene is the El Floridita bar, Havana, during the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Flynn would die later that year of a heart attack.

So what is a Daiquiri exactly?

The story goes that the Daiquiri was invented in Cuba in or around 1898, in the town of Daiquiri, by an American mine supervisor named Jennings Cox. This would seem to make the drink a product of the U.S. colonization of Cuba that followed Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American war in 1898. Daiquiri itself was an area of U.S. influence, with U.S. forces, including Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, making it their disembarkation point in Cuba.

There are a couple of versions of the tale. One version goes that Mr. Cox was a habitual gin drinker (some even say he was a Martini drinker) who discovered his stockpile of gin was running low just as a party of distinguished American visitors were due to arrive. Thinking quickly, he invented a rum cocktail to serve in place of gin, coming up with a mixture of rum, lime-juice and sugar. The other version of the story says that Cox developed the concoction for his employees in response to a malaria scare. Neither version of the story sounds plausible to me.

U.S. forces disembark at Daiquiri during the Spanish-American war

The Martini detail sometimes found in the first version of the story seems very dubious. First, the basic idea of the Daiquiri (rum, lime and sugar) predates the Martini by centuries, and so framing the invention of the Daiquiri as a quest for a Martini substitute is practically an insult to the Daiquiri. Second, the first literary reference to the Martini does not occur until 1910 – in the Jack London novel “Burning Daylight”. It seems difficult to believe that over a decade before the Martini made it into a work of popular fiction, the Caribbean was playing host to habitual Martini drinkers from America who needed to be placated with a ‘special invention’ when a Martini was unexpectedly unavailable. Third, the idea that Americans traveling the Caribbean at that time would have been unaccustomed to rum and a new drink was required to coax them into drinking the stuff seems odd. Rum was the drink of choice back in the early days of the United States, and remained the quintessential maritime drink at a time when all Caribbean travel was by sea. Could Americans traveling the Caribbean at that time really have not expected to drink rum? Fourth, the story displays a U.S.-centric conceit in the notion that it took an American to think of combining rum, lime and sugar. Navies had been serving up rum and lime for literally hundreds of years by the late 19^th Century, and were surely only imitating others before them. The combination of rum, citrus and sugar must have been so obvious and ubiquitous by the late 19^th century that only the most unadventurous rum drinkers could have overlooked it. What was the combination after all but a rum sour? Even the Brazilian Caipirinha is more or less a Daiquiri served on ice. The Daiquiri is the sort of thing that only an idiot would never have thought of. Realistically, the basic idea must surely have been thought of in numerous places by numerous people.

Not a Daiquiri in sight as the Rough Riders rest after capturing the San Juan heights. The Rough Riders may never have drunk the Daiquiri cocktail, but the association of the drink with the town of Daiquiri, from which they launched their Cuban adventure, may have helped the subsequent popularity of the drink with the U.S. armed forces.

Regardless of whether Jenings Cox invented the Daiquiri though, or even named it, he may have helped get Americans drinking it. In 1909 Cox is said to have served the drink to a visiting naval officer, who then introduced it to the Army and Navy Club in Washington D.C. The drink caught on among the U.S. defense forces, and Army and Navy Club renamed one of its bars the Daiquiri Lounge. Americans visiting Havana during Prohibition thus already had a little exposure to the Daiquiri, and spent their holidays in its enthusiastic appreciation – they certainly hadn’t flown all that way to admire the architecture. Later still, J.F.K. would make the Daiquiri the presidential drink of choice. This presidential stamp of approval drove the Daiquiri to new heights of popularity, popularity that sadly saw it morph into the machine dispensed slush sold in drive-through Daiquiri bars in Louisiana – a concoction you must remember never to ask for at a White House reception.

However it all happened then, the Cuban town of Daiquiri somehow attached its name to the basic rum sour, a straightforward rum, lime and sugar cocktail made as follows.

Basic Daiquiri Recipe:

A nice pour of rum, preferably white, say 2 oz

Juice of 1 lime, say 1 oz

Sugar to taste, say 1 tsp

Shake over ice and strain into a glass.

So the basic Daiquiri is 2 parts rum, 1 part lime, with sugar to taste. Sounds pretty easy, eh? If only. . . To get a good result you should consider the following suggestions:

It is sad that this even needs to be said, but obviously you need to use freshly squeezed lime juice. A lot of bars use bottled or powdered artificial ‘lime juice’, something like a lime flavored sweet-and-sour mix. There is no way of getting a good drink out of this crap so forget about even trying.

An early advertisement for Havana Club rum

Use a white rum. Given the Daiquiri’s Cuban heritage a Cuban white rum is most appropriate. Havana Club Blanco is my favorite. I’d use the Blanco above the slightly aged Tres Anos because the Blanco’s slightly rough around the edges character suits the straightforward and refreshing nature of a Daiquiri. The Tres Anos can be almost too smooth for its own good in a drink like this. Havana Club rum has an strong literary pedigree as a Daiquiri rum, featuring in the Graham Greene novel “Our Man in Havana”. The accidental secret agent Wormold drinks Havana Club Daiquiris at the Havana Club itself, where drinks are given away free to coax tourists into buying overpriced bottles of rum.

Big Constante tends bar while Hemingway drinks at the El Floridita

When squeezing the limes extract only the juice and nothing else. You do not want oils from the skin to get into the drink. This is where the Daiquiri differs from the Caipirinha. In a sense the Daiquiri is a purer drink, free of bitter citrus oils, while the Caipirinha is its rustic cousin in which everything is simply muddled together. Ernest Hemingway was the ultimate Daiquiri drinker, and his Daiquiris were free of citrus oil, so keep the oil out! Hemingway’s regular Daiquiri haunt was the El Floridita bar in Havana, where great pains were taken to keep the drinks free of citrus oil. Constante Ribalaigua Vert (known as Big Constante), who ran the El Floridita when Hemingway was a regular customer, was described by the contemporary cocktail writer David Embury as follows: “His limes were gently squeezed with his fingers lest even a drop of the bitter oil from the peel get into the drink; the drinks were mixed (but not overmixed). . . The stinging cold drink was strained through a fine sieve into the glass so that not one tiny piece of ice remained in it. No smallest detail was overlooked in achieving the flawless perfection of the drink”. If Big Constante took such pains to keep lime oil out of the Daiquiris he served Hemingway, I know how I want my Daiquiris made.

The El Floridita today

On a related point, do not put the spent lime shells in the shaker. A few bars that use freshly squeezed juice wear their commitment to fresh ingredients on their sleeves a bit by letting fresh fruit get into places it shouldn’t. Besides contributing undesirable oils, a spent lime shell in the shaker just represents unnecessary non-frozen material in there, drawing thermal energy from the ice, increasing ice melt, and diluting the drink. A Daiquiri should be an extremely cold and concentrated drink, and adding lime shells to the shaker is inconsistent with achieving this. So put only the juice in the shaker.

Either syrup or sugar work fine as the sweetener but I prefer sugar for a couple of reasons. First, a Daiquiri gets shaken for long enough that dissolving the sugar should not be a problem. Second, the balance between sweet and sour in a Daiquiri is crucial and sugar is slightly easier to measure than syrup. Third, there is a certain aesthetic in the few undissolved grains of sugar that you sometimes discover in the bottom of the glass as you take your final sip. They remind you of the beautiful simplicity of Daiquiri. Some bars play around with the type of sugar used. I wouldn’t go for anything too dark, but slightly unrefined sugars can be nice. Simple syrup is also perfectly OK if you prefer. It does not matter too much either way.

A Daiquiri should be as cold as possible. The texture can vary though, and there are three worthy possibilities. The first texture is fully liquid, and is produced by shaking, then double straining the drink (i.e. straining it out of the shaker and into the glass through a fine sieve). According to David Embury this was Big Constante’s favored preparation. The second texture is liquid with a surface film of ice, and is produced by shaking, then straining from the shaker and directly into the glass (i.e. relying on the shaker alone to strain the drink and not using a fine sieve), allowing a layer of very fine ice chips into the drink. A lot of bars make Daiquiris like this, and although Big Constantine might not have liked it I don’t see anything wrong with it personally. Ice chips are out of place in a Martini but to me they seem at home in a refreshing tropical drink like a Daiquiri. The third texture is frozen, and is produced by briefly blending the drink with shaved ice (or perhaps by shaking with shaved ice and pouring the whole thing into the glass). This last texture is a little controversial, and thus worth discussing in detail.

Hemingway enjoys one of his famous double-sized Daiquiri frappes

Frozen drinks sometimes attract scorn among discerning drinkers. This is hardly surprising given that these days most frozen drinks are luridly colored, ultra-sweet, artificially flavored disasters. Many quality bars either want to distance themselves from the whole ‘Strawberry Daiquiri’ image, or do not want to deal with the hassle of a blender, and so choose not to serve frozen drinks at all. Other reasonable bars are so in love with their blenders that they blend all kinds of things that should never be blended – like the Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh, where I had a blended Singapore Sling. To use an appropriately Cambodian metaphor, the whole area has become a bit of a minefield. However, there is no reason a frozen and blended drink has to be bad. Hemmingway’s Daiquiris were certainly frozen. Checking the above photo of Hemingway drinking a Daiquiri in the El Floridita will reveal his drink is frozen. The fact that the drink has begun to separate clearly indicates this. By this stage the astute might be wondering if the photo is genuine. Would the real Hemingway have let a drink sit long enough to separate? There is an explanation though. Comparing Hemingway’s glass with those of his companions reveals that he is on his famous ‘Papa Dobles’ – a extra large ‘diabetic’ daiquiri for which a recipe is given below. Obviously a larger drink would take longer to consume and thus have more opportunity to separate. The photo has not been tampered with. Graham Greene provides further support for the authenticity of the Daiquiri frappe, with Wormold drinking frozen Daiquiris at the Havana Club: “They had another free daiquiri each, frozen so stiffly that it had to be drunk in tiny drops to avoid a sinus-pain.”  The frozen Daiquiri was clearly being enjoyed during the Daiquiri’s glory days in pre-revolutionary Havana, even if Big Constante also served a shaken and strained version. You will struggle to find a good quality frozen Daiquiri these days, but if you are in a bar that uses fresh lime juice and has a blender you should give one a try.

Hemingway drinks what is clearly a frozen Daiquiri

So the fully liquid, liquid-with-ice-film, and frozen are all respectable textures for a Daiquiri. To achieve good results with any of these the key point is very cold ice. A liquid Daiquiri (strained or unstrained) requires enough very cold ice to completely fill the shaker, then needs to be shaken long and hard enough to make the outside of the shaker completely frost up. The long shake gets the drink as cold as possible, and also generates very fine ice chips if these are desired. A frozen Daiquiri requires enough cold crushed ice to cover the rum and lime, but not enough to deeply bury them. Brief blending should then yield a drink that is frozen, yet still pours easily. Too much ice will make the drink weak and too stiff to drink. The fact that every Daiquiri photographed with Hemingway has begun to separate suggests that they were not frozen very solid, so to be authentic go light on the ice rather than heavy. You can also make a frappe Daiquiri by simply shaking with crushed ice. I sometimes wonder whether the El Floridita might not have made their frozen Daiquiris this way rather than by blending. This gets a similar result to what you would get by using a blender. I guess it is not too big a deal either way.

Castro looks the worse for wear and lags by several drinks as Hemingway tackles yet another massive Daiquiri

Armed with the above knowledge you should be able to make an excellent Daiquiri. The next step is to examine a few variations.

David Embury Daiquiri

2 oz rum

½ oz lime juice

½ tsp sugar

This drink differs slightly from the first recipe in proportions. The first recipe is based on proportions of 4:2:1 (i.e. four parts of rum, two parts of lime juice, and one part of sugar). The David Embury recipe uses 8:2:1 proportions, making a drier and more rum-focused drink. This is the type of Daiquiri I like. Obviously there is room to improvise to suit your taste. The point is that the original 4:2:1 proportions can be adjusted. Different formulas might also work better with different rums.

Daiquiri Variation (Maraschino)

2 oz rum

½ oz lime juice

½ tsp sugar

Dash or two of Maraschino Liqueur

This is my favorite Daiquiri variation. You can get a perfectly made one of these in Constellation (an excellent little cocktail bar in Shanghai). I can’t remember now where I first saw this recipe. I think I found it somewhere labeled as a ‘Hemingway Daiquiri’ or similar, probably through confusion with the Papa Doble which also uses Maraschino. I suggested to Mr. Jin at Constellation that he added a dash of Maraschino to my usual Daiquiri. Ever since then I’ve preferred drinking them this way. In fact it is a pretty intuitive and straightforward variation on a Daiquiri – dozens of old-school cocktails were finished off with a dash of maraschino. The idea is to add complexity through a very subtle Maraschino flavor. The drink should still be about rum, but with a whisper of something else in the background. Although I never actually tried this, I bet a tiny dash of kirsch, or a dry apricot brandy (e.g. Barack Palinka), would make another interesting variation.

Floridita Daiquiri

2 oz rum

1 oz lime juice

¼ oz grapefruit juice

¼ oz maraschino liqueur

½ tsp sugar

This was the house Daiquiri at the El Floridita Bar in Havana. The grapefruit makes a really nice addition, working almost like an alternative to sugar in taking the edge of the lime. This version is excellent frozen.

Papa Doble (Hemingway Daiquiri)

4 oz rum

2 oz lime juice

½ oz grapefruit juice

½ oz maraschino liqueur

This was Hemingway’s usual drink at the El Floridita, and is basically a double sized Floridita Daiquiri without the sugar. Since Hemingway was diabetic he limited his sugar intake, and apparently simultaneously doubled his rum intake to compensate. Hemingway drank them frozen, and the freezing probably helps mellow the acidity a little. Some suggest making the maraschino a float on the final drink. It is worth noting that potent, acidic, minimally sweetened drinks were quite common in the first few decades of the 20^th Century, so a sugar free Daiquiri was not such an odd idea for the time. Obviously you could (perhaps should) either cut this one in half or share it between two.

Floridita Daiquiri (Vermouth Version)

1 ½ oz rum

½ oz lime juice

½ oz Italian vermouth

1/8 oz creme de cacao

1/8 oz grenadine

This is an intriguing variation whose origins I know nothing about. It is full of complex and hard to define flavors though and really needs to be tried. The vermouth alone provides nearly enough sweetness to balance the lime, so you don’t need to go heavy on the creme de cacao and grenadine. Pour them as light as you dare, to leave just a hint of chocolate in the aftertaste.

‘Floridita’ Daiquiri (Cointreau Version)

2 oz rum

½ oz lime juice

¼-½ oz Cointreau

This version really may be popular in Cuba these days since it was the drink I was given the one time a Cuban bartender made me a Daiquiri – admittedly this was in Shanghai so the guy may never have tended bar in his home country. Anyway, I asked if he could make an ‘original-style’ unblended Daiquiri (at the time I was still suffering from blender prejudice). He said “Ah! Floridita Daiquiri!”, and made the above. He made it on the sweet side. I would have preferred it a little drier but I had to go off and meet someone so left without having a second round. The Cuban barman was gone when I next visited so that drink was my one and only experience of a real Cuban Daiquiri. A simple and pleasant variation of the original.

Hotel Nacional Special Daiquiri

2 oz rum (recipe specifies golden so maybe go for the Havana Club Tres Anos)

1 ½ oz unsweetened pineapple juice (just get a pineapple and juice it – it’s not hard)

½ oz lime juice

1 tsp dry apricot brandy (i.e. Barack Palinka or similar)

Another interesting Daiquiri variation that was the house cocktail of a Havana Hotel. The hotel still exists but I have no idea if they still serve the drink. The recipe comes from the excellent Gumbo Pages. Pineapple juice becomes foamy when shaken, so this one should pour out with a frothy head, almost like a sour made with egg-white. The big splash of pineapple juice should make sugar unnecessary. The apricot brandy gives it a delicious fruity touch. It makes for a very light and refreshing drink. I don’t advise trying to make this with a sweet apricot brandy. It just won’t be the same.

I could go on and give more recipes but I am going to end it here. Those are all the classic and original Daiquiri recipes that I can think of. I have not given recipes for any frozen fruit Daiquiris, probably because they do not seem like classical Daiquiris to me. If you want to make one just muddle a little fruit in the mixing glass as your the step (aim for an ounce or so of fruit pulp), then proceed to make a Daiquiri normally from there. It’s as simple as that. With certain fruits you may end up with pits and other material, in which case you may be best to make a fruit pure and then strain that into the mixing glass. Adding a little fresh fruit to a basic Daiquiri recipe in this manner will make a pleasant drink that is lower in alcohol and more refreshing than the standard Daiquiri, similar to the Hotel Nacional Special above. The result should be a far superior fruit Daiquiri to anything made from pre-mixes or cheap fruit liqueurs.

This one may be my favorite pisco cocktail. Dave Wondrich wrote it up on the Esquire website drinks data base (now moved here). The Dulchin doesn’t have its own entry there; look for it under the Hop Toad, a lime and apricot brandy drink that is also pretty good.

The thing I really like about the Dulchin is its use of eau de vie, or dry fruit brandy. Eau de vie is fantastic stuff in cocktails. There aren’t nearly enough Eau de vie cocktails out there and the good ones deserve some attention. The Dulchin gets even better by combining eau de vie with pisco. This combination works so well, with the pisco being a sort of a eau de vie itself – lacking the woody notes of aged grape brandy. To top things off, the Dulchin uses a particularly neglected and under-appreciated eau de vie, a Hungarian dry apricot brandy called Barack Palinka. It is hard not to like this drink.

Barack Palinka can be hard to find. Obviously another apricot eau de vie would make a fine substitute. If you can’t find an apricot eau de vie then perhaps experiment with some other fruit eau de vie. Plum makes a reasonable substitute, different from yet still similar to the original apricot, and Yugoslavian plum brandy (slivovitch) is fairly easy to find. I can imagine raspberry also being good although I never tried it. I am not so sure about cherry or pear. It couldn’t hurt to give them a whirl though. Whatever you do don’t substitute a sweet apricot brandy (i.e. the reasonably ubiquitous apricot liqueur) for dry apricot brandy (i.e. apricot eau de vie). There is nothing wrong with sweet apricot brandy, but it’s not what this drink is about.

The recipe:

2 oz pisco

1 oz dry apricot brandy (I used Barack Palinka)

1 oz lime juice

1 tsp grenadine

2 tsp Grand Marnier

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Bracing, tons of complex fruity flavors, very dry, and not too sour. This drink is very different to most others so you really need to try it for yourself.

This drink is a good example of how pisco can do unique things. Here the pisco cuts the intensity of the apricot to a more agreeable level, while simultaneously contributing its own fruity and aromatic qualities. The pisco forms the backbone of the drink, creating the perfect stage for the apricot to shine on. If you substituted vodka for the pisco you would simply have diluted dry apricot brandy. If you substituted gin you might get an interesting result but the flavors would be likely to compete rather than cooperate. If you substituted a dark spirit like traditional wood-aged brandy you would mute the fresh flavors in the fruit brandy. In this drink Pisco is ideal.

Oh, and this drink was apparently named after some U.S. industrialist who was allergic to other more common spirits and so had to find inventive ways to drink pisco.

I haven’t posted anything for the last couple of Mixology Mondays. My excuse in April was being on holiday and having no access to Champagne. It seems it isn’t a popular drink in the remoter parts of Western China. I didn’t have a very good excuse in May since I was already back in New Zealand by that stage. All I can say is that I still hadn’t got around to setting up a bar in my apartment and the idea of tequila drinks didn’t inspire me enough to make me rush out and go shopping.

This month my bar is more or less functional and the theme is cream, a theme which seems very doable. Most of the drinks that spring to mind immediately are sweet affairs involving actual cream plus “Crème de XXX” type liqueurs. I’m thinking things like Brandy Alexanders, Grasshoppers, and so on. Don’t laugh about the Grasshopper. A Grasshopper can be quite nice, and it is one of the few drinks I can think of where I find a touch of vodka improves things – reducing the sweetness, smoothing out the texture, and adding a little punch. My bar is still a bit short on the “Crème de XXX” family though.

Instead of doing the obvious then I decided to make a cream-including drink that I’ve been meaning to make for a long time but have never been able to because of the lack of a vital ingredient. That ingredient is orange flower water (I could never find it in Shanghai), and the drink of course is the Ramos Gin Fizz. Think of a Ramos Gin Fizz as a refreshing palette cleanser after some of the sweeter offerings this Mixology Monday.

Orange flower water is easy to find in Auckland and should not be a problem in most big cities. Try trawling the specialist food stores. I only managed to find Middle Eastern stuff while out looking on Saturday. I hear the French stuff is better, but the Middle Eastern stuff will do for now.

The Ramos Gin Fizz is an invention of 19^th Century New Orleans. It isn’t the type of drink you can just expect to roll on up to a bar these days and order, and I guess that makes it just my type of thing. For a little history of the drink just check out the Gumbo Pages. There seem to be a bunch of different recipes floating around. I slightly modified recipes from the Gumbo Pages and The Art of Drink.

Both recipes had features I liked so I ended up combining the two. My recipe was:

2 oz gin (Tanqueray)

1/2 oz lemon juice

½ oz lime juice

1 teaspoon sugar

1 egg white

2 oz cream

1 dash orange flower water

soda

Technique is everything when you are building a fluffy, creamy fizz so pay attention to the next bit.

I put the egg white, orange flower water, cream and syrup in an empty shaker and shook for a half a minute or so to get the egg frothy. Now I have seen people suggest you throw a fork or miniature whisk into the shaker while doing this to help it froth up. That sounds like it would be noisy and scratch your shaker and stuff so I didn’t bother*. A better suggestion would probably be to do like Darcy at the Art of Drink and froth the mix with an immersion blender. If I had had a blender handy I’d have tried that. Although more traditional recipes doesn’t call for an initial frothing, getting the froth going before you start adding ice and generally diluting things makes sense to me. In my ‘experiments’ (OK, so I accidentally left the cream out of one drink) I found the egg frothed much better without cream. So frothing the egg, flower water and syrup, then adding cream, gin and juices, could be another possibility.

In any case, after getting some froth going I added the juices and gin, gave a quick stir to stop curdling, packed the shaker with ice, and began a long shake. I remember hearing somewhere that when making a Ramos Fizz you should shake for 20 seconds or so, tap the shaker on the counter, twist the shaker 90 degrees, shake, tap, and twist again, and so on until you have completed a full circle. Something like that anyway. I think this is supposed to help build a nice fluffy drink that pours easily out of the shaker. Who knows how well this really works? This whole routine could simply be a way to encourage people to shake the drink long enough to build a good head. I don’t see it can do much harm though, so I’m going to do it this way until I can be bothered making two drinks, one with and one without the ‘turn’, and seeing if there is any difference between them. After shaking I poured a little soda (1-2 oz) into a Collins glass (an undersized one is best since this drink has no ice), strained the drink in, and gave a gentle stir. Darcy at the Art of Drink suggests adding the drink to a soda filled glass rather than vice versa, and I think this make sense if you want a nice head. The final step is to drink the thing.

I found the drink unusual and very refreshing. It poured with a nice foamy texture and tasted almost too innocent to be a cocktail. Give this one to the neighborhood children and observe the fun! The texture is probably something I could improve on with practice, but I was still pleased with my first attempt. I don’t think there is too much to it provided you take a little care. The taste was perhaps a little too sour and with only the faintest hint of orange. Comparing the Gumbo Pages and The Art of Drink recipes, the Gumbo pages is much the sourer of the two, with less sugar and an extra ½ oz of citrus juice. I might try increasing the sugar and reducing the juice a little in future. When making this drink you will also need to play around with the quantity of orange flower water depending on its potency. With my brand (Al-Rabih from Lebanon) I figure a generous half teaspoon is called for. Finally, although the drink is called a ‘fizz’ I can’t see it turning out especially fizzy unless you dilute it with lot of soda water – surely a bad idea. I am thinking the fizz in the name indicates just enough gentle carbonation to cut the heaviness of the cream and egg white. The only way I can see of achieving more fizz than this would be if you used some kind of super carbonated soda water. Does such a thing even exist? It would be interesting to know though just how carbonated this drink it supposed to be. I have seen recipes that suggest shaking with soda water, but I would have thought you lose carbonation this way.

A friend in LA was chatting with me online as I was making the drink, waxing lyrical about Hendricks, and he distracted me enough that I finished my drink without photographing it. Never mind, his talk of Hendricks gave me the idea of making a rose flower water flavored variation of the Ramos Gin Fizz, so I decided I’d photograph that instead.

Incidentally my friend told me that he learned bartending at a school run by a guy who used to be Frank Sinatra’s bartender. The story goes that Frank Sinatra would drink Ramos Gin Fizzes on Sundays instead of his usual Jack Daniels. I guess that made the Ramos Gin Fizz an appropriate choice for my Sunday evening drink.

For the rose water flavored variation I repeated the above recipe but using Hendricks as the gin (as everyone must know Hendricks is flavored subtly with rose petals) and substituting rose water for the orange flower water. I guess this variation can be called a Rose Fizz – at least until someone comes up with a witty name involving roses, dairy products, fizzy gin and cucumbers.

The rose water was from a company called English Provender and seemed stronger than the orange flower water I had just used. I only added a scant 1/4 teaspoon.

The Rose Fizz worked out well. I figure this would make a nice substitution if you like the Ramos Gin Fizz but fancy a change. I decided substituting grenadine for all or some of the sugar syrup would give the drink an attractive rosy hue so I tried making it this way on Monday morning. Hey, I had no work to do and I figured I needed to rush and make the thing before Mixology Monday began in the US. Of course after going online to post this thing I realized I was a week early. Never mind. The grenadine version tasted and looked good. I used 1 ½ teaspoons of grenadine plus 1 ½ teaspoons of simple syrup. Everything else was the same as in the recipe above.

Right now I’m also considering an almondy gin fizz with orgeat as the sweetener and a big splash of orange flower water – to stand up to the almond taste. Hmm. . . I’m not going to make that straight away but will try it sometime.

* I’ve since learned removing the coil from a hawthorne strainer and putting that in the shaker during the dry shake gets great results.