Where Have I Been?

January 26, 2022April 5, 2024 / jasonobryan / 6 Comments

Hello friends,

I’m grateful and flattered that people continue to look at this blog, considering I’ve updated it once in the last four years. Thank you for coming.

So where the hell have I been?

For the last two years, I’ve been writing at Robb Report. Content there is more abbreviated than the type of Saturn V-level nerdery that I usually host on this site, but it’s the same concept — for each cocktail, I tease it apart, and weigh in on both common variations and individual ingredient notes. Not just the what, but the why.

Anyway, thank you, again, for your continued visits and comments. Below is a linked & alphabetized list of every cocktail I’ve written about on Robb Report to date. Hopefully this will be sufficient until I can figure out how to have time/energy to write both there and here.

—Jason

Cocktail Videos: I’ve only shot about a dozen of these so far, but they’re all available on YouTube.

Cocktail Articles (updated 4.4.24):

Absinthe Suissesse	El Guapo	Paloma
Admiral Schley Highball	El Lupolo	Paper Plane
Adonis	Espresso Martini	Peanut Butter Old Fashioned
Airmail	Fancy Free	Peanut Malt Flip
Alaska	Fog Cutter	Penicillin
Amaretto Sour	Fort Point	Penicillin (N/A)
American Trilogy	French 75	Pimm’s Cup
Americano	French Martini	Pina Colada
Appletini	Garibaldi	Pink Lady
Army & Navy	Georgia Julep	Pisco Punch
Arsenic and Old Lace	Gibson	Pisco Sour
Aviation	Gimlet	Poet’s Dream
Bandolier	Gin Basil Smash	Pornstar Martini
Bee’s Knees	Gold Rush	Queen’s Park Swizzle
Bellini	Greenpoint	Quick Fix
Benton’s Old Fashioned	Growing Old… etc	Ramos Gin Fizz
Bicicletta	Hanky Panky	Red Hook
Bijou	Harvey Wallbanger	Remember the Maine
Bitter Giuseppe	Hemingway Daiquiri	Revolver
Bitter Start (N/A)	Hot Toddy	Rob Roy
Bitter Tears	Hurricane	Rome With a View
Black Manhattan	Infante	Rose Collins
Blood and Sand	Irish Coffee	Rosita
Blood Moon (Punch)	Jack Rose	Rum & Coke
Bloody Mary	Japanese Cocktail	Rusty Nail
Boozy Hot Chocolate	Jasmine	Saturn
Boulevardier	Jet Pilot	Sazerac
Bourbon Renewal	Jungle Bird	Sidecar
Bramble	Kamikaze	Siesta
Brandy Alexander	Kentucky Buck	Singapore Sling
Breakfast Martini	Kir Royale	Southside
Brooklyn	Last Word	Spanish Coffee
Brooklynite	Lion’s Tail	Spiced Cranberry Sour
Cable Car	Little Italy	Stinger
Caipirinha	Long Island Iced Tea	Strawberry Daiquiri (Frozen)
Cameron’s Kick	Mai Tai	Summer Crush (Shrubs)
Captain’s Blood	Manhattan	Ti’ Punch
Carajillo	Manhattan (“Perfect”)	Tipperary
Cardboard Plane	Margarita	Tom Collins
Casino	Martini	Toronto
Chamomile Old Fashioned	Martini (Freezer)	Trifecta
Champagne Cocktail	Mexican Firing Squad	Trinidad Sour
Chartreuse Swizzle	Michigander	Tuxedo No. 2
Chocolate Martini	Midnight Stinger	Vesper
Clover Club	Mimosa (Sparkling Wine)	Vieux Carre
Colleen Bawn	Mint Julep	Ward 8
Corn n Oil	Mojito	Watermelon Margarita
Corpse Reviver No. 1	Monte Carlo	Watermelon Pina Colada
Corpse Reviver No. 2	Morning Glory Fizz	Whiskey Smash
Cosmopolitan	Moscow Mule	Whiskey Sour
Daiquiri	Mulled Apple Cider	Whisky Highball
Dark ‘n Stormy	N/A Pina Colada	White Lady
Death in the Afternoon	Naked and Famous	White Negroni
Don’t Give Up the Ship	Negroni	White Russian
Earl Grey MarTEAni	New York Sour	White Toreador
East India Cocktail	Oaxaca Old Fashioned	Widow’s Kiss
Eastside Rickey	Old Cuban	Wild Eyed Rose
Eggnog	Old Fashioned	Zombie
El Diablo	Painkiller

What’s the best recipe for a Mint Julep?

April 28, 2020May 4, 2020 / jasonobryan / 6 Comments

Note: an earlier and much more concise version of this article appears at Robb Report.

The Mint Julep doesn’t give a damn about the rules. That much is clear to just about everybody. As a cocktail, it violates almost almost every drinking norm we have, so easily spanning apparent contradictions so as to make the impossible possible.

Take a moment to consider its achievements:

It evokes a sense of 200 years of Southern history that is almost impossibly sanitized, and no one seems to mind. It is essentially a large cup of whiskey, and yet has been embraced by every strata of society as perfectly acceptable to have several on a Saturday afternoon. It is simultaneously exuberant and genteel, a sign of a great party and yet deeply serious, and has found favor in everyone from Teddy Roosevelt to Margaret Mitchell. The same jaded bartender who rolls his eyes at your request for a copper Moscow Mule mug will not only accept but insist on a traditional pewter cup for your Mint Julep.

The Kentucky Derby without the Juleps would be shorter than a commercial break, and just as skippable (I can’t be alone here). But add in Mint Juleps? Suddenly it’s a multi-day event, and the thought of dressing up like a carnival barker from the 1930s seems necessary. Important even. It’s about tradition.

History:

“Somebody somewhere was kidding,” writes David Wondrich, in his magesterial Imbibe!. “A ‘julep,’ you see, was medicine, pure and simple, and always had been.” From the Persian “gulab” — literally “rose water” — the word exclusively referred to sweetened medicinal liquid for some 300 years. It travels from medicine cabinet to liquor cabinet by way of an English novel called Tom Jones in 1749, wherein a character describes a bottle of wine, jokingly, as a “medicinal julap.” It is similar, Wondrich points out drolly, as referring to a bong hit as “glaucoma medicine.”

The burgeoning ice trade, started in New England in 1806, was by the 1810s shipping ice down south year round, and that’s all the drink needed to really take off. Juleps — the cocktail kind, with mint — quickly took root in Virginia, and soon were nationally embraced, the “first true American drink.” Like so many cocktails in the 1800s, early ones would’ve been with Cognac, or the less expensive rum. It wasn’t until the last few decades of the century, those of whiskey’s ascendant quality and Cognac’s struggling production, that whiskey slid into the starring role, where it quite rightly remains.

Mint Julep’s specific attachment to the South is less clear. It was popular all across the country in its day, and it’s “day” was almost 100 years. It drifted out of style in the early 1900s, and anyway, Prohibition came along in 1919 and so thoroughly obliterated drinking culture that it would take us 80 years to even start to get it back.

In any case, it’s easy to imagine that the Mint Julep never really lost a foothold in the South. As medicine, it is a particularly effective palliative against the kinds of paper-wrinkling humidity and weapons-grade mosquitoes that attend Southern summers. It was named the official drink of the Kentucky Derby in 1938 (just 5 years after Prohibition was repealed), and has since become so enmeshed with the event that one intrinsically suggests the other, like turkey and Thanksgiving, or Taco Bell and gastric distress.

What’s the Best Recipe for a Mint Julep?

Old Forester is the official bourbon for the Kentucky Derby much in the way Dannon is the official yogurt of the NFL, which is to say, corporate bullshit that should be summarily ignored. Old Forester isn’t bad — very few bourbons are bad, here — but for this drink I personally prefer one on the sweeter, as opposed to spicier, end of the spectrum. Too much rye spice in the bourbon seems to fight with the mint, particularly on the finish.

Full conclusions below, but first, the best Mint Julep:

Mint Julep
2.5oz Four Roses Small Batch Bourbon
0.5oz – 0.75oz simple syrup (to taste)
10-12 mint leaves
In a metal cup, gently muddle the mint into the simple syrup. Add bourbon, and fill ⅔ with crushed ice. Stir to chill, until a frost forms on the outside. Then pack the rest of the cup with ice. Take 2 or 3 mint crowns, lightly bruise them with your fingers, and stick them against the inside close to the straw. Enjoy.

INGREDIENT NOTES:

Sugar: SIMPLE SYRUP with WHITE SUGAR

For ease and precision, make a simple syrup. Equal parts sugar and water, and stir. Hot water will dissolve the sugar faster, but it’s not necessary. It’ll keep for a month in the fridge and couldn’t be easier. It’s literally the simplest syrup.

Use plain white sugar. Demerara syrup and muscovado sugars are less refined, with darker, richer, more molasses-like flavors, but you get as much as you could ever want of that kind of thing from the bourbon itself. Mint is a piccolo — it’s bright and light and delicate, and the darker sugars blunt its effect.

Mint: SPEARMINT

About 10-12 leaves of mint, reserving 1 (or ideally 2+ crowns) for garnish. Pretty much every reputable recipe on the internet will admonish you to gently muddle the mint, warning that over muddling will release bitter chlorophyll into the drink. This is sound advice, but honestly, the warnings get a little hysterical.

I tried 3, side by side. The first, I barely tapped. The second, gently pressed, and the third, I pounded that shit like I was forging a sword. I crushed it into a wet pile of dark green shreds. And yeah, a light press on the mint will release brighter flavors, but the over-muddled one was still good — too loud and unsubtle, maybe, “a little toothpasty” my notes say — but not bad, and certainly not bitter.

Aim for about as much pressure than it would take to crush a ripe raspberry. The goal is clarity, not volume. If you want the mint louder, add more of it. Though be advised — as I mentioned in the mojito trials, double mint does not double your delightment. You can easily overdo it with the mint. 10-12 leaves is solid.

Ice: CRUSHED ICE

Crushed ice is pretty important here. Mint Juleps taste best when they’re ice cold and well-diluted.

There are a few ways to do this: professionals use a dedicated Ice Mallet and a canvas sack called a Lewis Bag to hammer ice to order, which is surprisingly effective and you can find for around $30 online. A clean dish towel and a rolling pin provide similar, if less elegant, services. Pulsing in a blender or food processor works as well.

If you’d prefer to avoid violence entirely, you can (1) likely buy it at a local ice company, or (2) every Sonic Drive-In restaurant in the country sells 10lb bags of pebble ice for something like $2. I’m assuming most towns in America have access either to an ice company or to a Sonic or, unlikely, both.

Vessel: METAL CUP

A traditional julep cup is Pewter or Silver, and about 12-16oz. They’re fun and inspirational in their own right (catching a glimpse of one in a cupboard is often sufficient prodding to turn any day into a Julep day), but all that really matters is that it’s made of metal, which conducts the way you need it to.

The smaller base of a cocktail shaker works just fine, as long as it’s not too big. If you must use glass, put it in the freezer for 10min before making the drink. As far as Juleps are concerned, cold is an ingredient.

Bourbon: FOUR ROSES SMALL BATCH BOURBON

Four Roses Small Batch cozies up perfectly to the mint, perfectly mentholating the sweet richness of the bourbon. Too much agreeability can actually make Mint Juleps flat and a little dull, and Four Roses Small Batch had just enough depth and complexity to keep interest but with no tension, no spikes, no fights. 45% alcohol seems to be the sweet spot. Smooth without being boring. Works as well as I can imagine.

Individual Bourbon Details (with ABV%)
*note on method: every bourbon was blind tasted at least twice, usually 4 or 5 times, across 9 rounds. The sole exception to this is Templeton Rye, which was only tasted once because I knew it didn’t belong and I threw it in just to make sure.

MY FAVORITE:

Four Roses Small Batch (45%). Like it was made for it. There might be something better out there but it’s honestly hard to picture, as this feels like the ideal balance between having its own character and agreeing with the overall cocktail.

TOP TIER, WOULD HAPPILY ACCEPT ANY TIME EVER

Buffalo Trace (45%): An excellent all-rounder, really complements the cocktail, but there’s a small bitterness on the finish. Still — this almost won, until I tried it next to Four Roses Small Batch, which took the day each of the 3 times they competed.

Four Roses Single Barrel (50%): not just 5 points hotter than the Small Batch but also a different mashbill, a whole different product. Proof offers a surprising richness here — brown sugar, butterscotch, midpalate like a minted Werthers. Gets a little prickly on the finish but it’s delicious, if perhaps a touch intense for an already intense daytime drink.

Woodford Reserve (45.2%): Very mild. Perhaps too mild. This also perfectly conforms to the figure of the cocktail, but almost too well; so mild it borders on flat. I wanted more flavor. I could see someone thinking this was best, though. “Smooth and soft like baby butt.”

GOOD, BUT WOULD PREFER ONE OF THE ABOVE

Maker’s Mark (45%): Well rounded. Soft. Arcs like a scared cat — front too soft, midpalate oak rises fast and dries it all out, and finishes soft. Less compelling than I want it to be. “Something very dry up front, a flavor that travels concurrently with the cocktail.” Perhaps the wheat, because that happened with Larceny, too. Not unpleasant but not ideal.

Bulleit Bourbon (45%): This would be I think most similar to Old Forester — nice tertiary flavors, and some cool fruit, but spice rises up assertive in the midpalate. Huge fans of Bulleit might appreciate that here — to me, the peppery spice isn’t bad but it doesn’t do the drink any favors. Works against purposes with the mint.

Basil Hayden (40%): Similar problem to Bulleit (above), too much rye fighting with the drink. Flavor is cool but the effect is not.

GOOD BUT TOO HOT

Maker’s Mark Cask Strength (56.7%): Good. Boozy. A little too boozy. After a few minutes the dilution fixes this, bringing out some really cool stone-fruit notes, but it takes a bit. “Finish, while long, is not 100% pleasant.”Overall tasty, but this isn’t what I’d reach for. The Mint Julep, as a drink, doesn’t want for booziness. Keep it 50% or under.

DON’T RECOMMEND FOR THIS APPLICATION

Larceny (46%): Weird front palate and weird finish. This is wheated, like Maker’s Mark, so I expected it to soft and mild, but it’s not: there’s, again, a weird graininess that seems to run concurrently to the flavors of the cocktail and never integrate, which on the finish mutates from weird to straight-up bad.

Maker’s Mark 46 (47%) and Jim Beam Double Oak (43%): Both of these products are finished with more wood — Maker’s 46 with toasted French oak staves and Jim Beam in a whole other barrel — and a rule I found for Mint Juleps is that too much oak actively works against the mint, much in the same way darker sugars did.

Templeton Rye (40%): Tried MGP rye on a lark. Not as bad as I thought it would be, but definitely weird. Sweet vanilla, like cake batter. Tastes like Mint Julep fan fiction or something. No, this is a bourbon drink.

Now make one, and tell me how it is. Cheers.

Trivia

The evolution of the word “julep” is a showcase of just how many different ways the same five-letter word can be spelled in 1000 years — in reading I’ve seen, variously: gulāb, gulap, iulip, julip, julap, julab, and the utterly nonsensical but still somehow offensive “jewlip.”

What’s the best recipe for a Clover Club?

February 21, 2017September 23, 2021 / jasonobryan / 9 Comments

1934 — Just one heady year after Prohibition was repealed, Esquire Magazine, in a civic-minded attempt to reestablish the norms of a long dormant drinking culture, published a list of 10 Worst Drinks of the Previous Decade. There, among what they called out as the “pansies,” were the Brandy Alexander, the Bronx, a shaken 50/50 mix of rum and sweet vermouth called the “Fluffy Ruffles,” and, for some reason, the Clover Club.

Well, it wasn’t exactly called a pansy “for some reason.” It’s for this reason:

Such is the injustice that has followed the drink its whole life. The Clover Club is too pretty to be taken seriously. It’s the Brad Pitt of cocktails.

History:

In January of 1880, an informal dinner of 15 newspaper men was arranged. The social benefits of this association became quickly apparent, and they formed the Thursday Club, which met every 4th Thursday for almost two years. For various reasons, the group re-branded, and on January 19, 1882 at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, they met with a new formal name: The Clover Club.

To call it formal, however, was to miss the point. Its membership was made up of 35 men from all over industry, government, and law, as well as various other prominent wits. Oscar Wilde was there. There was no specific aim — “a Club for Social Enjoyments, the Cultivation of Literary Tastes, and the Encouragement of Hospitable Intercourse.” The one major rule was to enjoy yourself: if anyone was found to be too ponderous, sullen, or dull, they’d be mercilessly heckled. “The Clover Club,” according to the old Waldorf-Astoria bar book, was “composed of literary, legal, financial and business lights of the Quaker City, [who] often dined and wined, and wined again.”

As no self-respecting drinking club could be without its own drink, a Clover Club cocktail was needed. We don’t know when or by whom it was invented, but by 1901 it’s referenced, and 1908 finds it published, in William Boothby’s The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them. By then it is already popular at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where William Butler Yeats, upon first discovering the drink, reportedly took down three in a row.

The Clover Club organization more or less disbanded around WWI, and by 1934, Esquire calls the now-orphaned cocktail one of the worst drinks of the previous decade. They’re wrong on both counts — it’s an exceptional drink, and it’s not from the previous decade — but no matter. It had somehow lost its association with the gentlemen’s club of noted wits, and becomes one of the “pansies.” Still in 1949, Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts incompetently dismisses it as “something for the ladies.”

And so it is today. Just look at the damn thing:

The pink. The white head. The cocktail glass. The garnish. It’s seems specifically designed to provoke insecure men. Which is a shame, because here’s the thing: the Clover Club is savagely fucking tasty.

What is the Best Recipe for a Clover Club?

Over the course of a month, I made every Clover Club recipe I could find. I tried grenadine vs. raspberries, dry vermouth vs. no dry vermouth, tweaking ratios, and did several blind trials with 16 different gins, which reduced to 8, then to 4, then to a winner. So here, the best Clover Club recipe, and then, below, I’ll explain my choices:

The Clover Club
2oz Hendrick’s Gin
0.75oz fresh lemon juice
0.75oz simple syrup (1:1)
1 egg white (about 1oz)
4-5 raspberries

Add egg white to tin. Add the rest of the ingredients, as well as the raspberries. Seal, hold tight, and dry shake, without ice, for 5-6 seconds. Add ice, reseal tins and shake hard for 15 seconds. Strain into cocktail glass. Express a lemon peel over the top, then discard peel (for the aroma). Garnish with a raspberry, or 2, or 3, on a pick.

Ingredient Notes:

Raspberries vs. Grenadine: FRESH RASPBERRIES

There’s a bit of wavering about whether it’s raspberries or grenadine in this, and it’s comforting to discover bartenders have been wavering since the very beginning. Booth’s 1908 recipe calls for grenadine but adds that raspberry syrup “will answer the purpose” while a 1909 recipe calls for raspberry syrup, but says grenadine will work if raspberries aren’t in season. So it seems pretty simple: raspberry season is June — October, and pomegranate season is September — February, so pre-globalization, just use whichever you can get.

That being said, it’s 2017, and we can have everything all the time, so use raspberries. Grenadine makes a fine drink, but it’s not magic. Raspberries, in this, are magic.

As for fresh vs. syrup, use fresh. Syrup mutes the flavor, and fresh raspberries sing out of this drink. The PDT cocktail book advises raspberry jam, and again, it’s a fine drink, but fresh is always better.

cc-jam

Vermouth vs. No Vermouth: NO VERMOUTH

Very smart and talented people claim that a spot of dry vermouth improves the drink, and indeed, dry vermouth shows up in some of the earliest recipes. What dry vermouth achieves is to lend complexity — midtones — to a sour that otherwise rests on its brightness and vibrancy.

This is personal taste territory, and I tread lightly to disagree with such august opposition. Legendary cocktail historian David Wondrich says vermouth turns “a serviceable drink into an ambrosial one.” Julie Reiner, equally legendary operator who opened a bar in Brooklyn almost 10 years ago and named it after this exact drink, chooses vermouth. Along with that are a couple quieter choices as well — Plymouth, softer than it’s London Dry big brothers, and raspberry syrup instead of fresh. Her choices all lend toward subtlety and nuance instead of the vibrant, electric sour I’ve landed on. I admit I think mine is much better, but obviously she’s not incorrect. It’s just a difference in taste, and I like it better without vermouth.

Note: If you are using vermouth, I personally found it best with Tanqueray. To me, Tanqueray best incorporates the complexity of the vermouth into the greater drink. I feel like vermouth spoke too loud for the other gins, even Beefeater.

GINS: HENDRICK’S

Imagine my surprise. Plymouth is traditional, in that some very early recipes call for it (though they didn’t have the selection we now enjoy). I was sure it would be Tanqueray 10, but nope — the structure and floral nature of Hendricks just melds perfectly. Side-by-side it against your favorite and tell me I’m wrong.

Here are the gins I tested, more or less in order of how I preferred them:

Individual Gin Notes:

MY FAVORITE:

Hendrick’s: really delivers that brightness I enjoy. Raspberry depth all the way through, buttressed by floral components of gin. Strong but mild, complex and delicious. Perfect.

TOP TIER, WOULD HAPPILY ACCEPT ANY TIME EVER:

Beefeater 24: very close second, even won some early blind rounds against Hendrick’s, just that Hendrick’s won more often. Really outstanding, bright, full flavored. “No hair out of place.” As it warms it can betray a little spirit hottness, but this is a very close 2nd.

Sipsmith: interesting that this would be so close at only 41.6%, but it provides the perfect infrastructure for the drink. Another close 2nd. Allows the raspberry to sing while complementing them with what translates as a textured grapefruity semi-bitterness. Really great.

STILL GREAT, BUT WOULD SLIGHTLY PREFER ONE OF THE ABOVE:

Beefeater: Very good, creamy and a little hot. “Like ice cream,” I wrote. Simple but tasty.

Tanqueray: Also extremely good. Starbright and vibrant at first. Gin shows through a little too much as it warms, but this is still an excellent drink.

Tanqueray 10: Same benefits and detriments as Tanqueray original. I thought the grapefruit would come through more, but I get more grapefruit-y notes on Sipsmith than I do on this.

FINE, BUT IT GETS BETTER:

Miller’s Westbourne Strength: one of my favorites for so many other uses, and almost made the above category. The cucumber here comes through as a green note that is very interesting, but ultimately distracting away from the clarity of flavor, which I see as the one of the Clover Club’s main strengths. Good though.

Plymouth: a little boring. Tastes fine, not bad, just a bit flat.

Death’s Door: just weighs in a little out of balance on this particular drink, but certainly not bad. “Creamy, tasty, good. A little hot on the finish but good on the whole.”

DON’T RECOMMEND FOR THIS APPLICATION

Aviation: this gin really stakes a different claim for itself — strong sarsaparilla notes, and some lavender — and that claim distracts from the overall drink. “Not bad — like a spinoff. Makes a Root Beer-flavored Clover Club.”

Sipsmith VJOP: in both trials, it wouldn’t foam up right. Flat, hot and uninteresting. I made it again because maybe the non-foaming part was my fault, and didn’t foam second time either. A catastrophe.

Plymouth Navy Strength: I thought extra proof points would do this favors, but still more suppresses flavor than enhances it. And there’s a strange, barnyardy earthiness just out of grasp that I find unpleasant.

Old Harbor San Miguel Gin: again, a bold new-style gin that is tasty, but too much cilantro for this application. “Green. Herbal. That’s cilantro. Not unpleasant, actually, but no reason to use this gin for this drink unless it’s all you have around.”

Ford’s Gin: this coaxed an earthy midpalate out of the cocktail and led to a somewhat unpleasant finish. I have no idea where that’s coming from on the gin, but we both placed it in the bottom half of its heat.

TRIVIA:

What is a “Clover Club?”

The name “Clover Club” was adopted from a then-famous phrase, “While we live we live in clover, when we die we die all over.” To be “in clover” was to be flush with luxury, comfort, and happiness, and the phrase shows up in the early 1700s, when clover was seen as a particularly savory and fattening meal for cattle.

What does that phrase come from?

The entire “while we live we live in clover…” phrase itself was coined by singer and playwright Samuel Sanford. Sanford was also an actor, as well as a hideous bigot — he achieved fame in 1850s for writing a fiercely pro-slavery stage version of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which he titled “Happy Uncle Tom, or Life Among the Happy.” He himself played Uncle Tom, in blackface, and an 1895 article in the Baltimore Morning Herald adoringly reported that “Sanford’s life is practically the history of negro minstrelsy in America.” What a dick.

Batched ingredients don’t separate. Ever.

September 29, 2016September 29, 2016 / jasonobryan / 11 Comments

This will be a short post, because while I found this fact to be a revelation, I suspect most people already know this intuitively, and to them, I sound pretty goddamn stupid.

It’s against policy to sound stupid in the public sphere, but I risk broadcasting my density here for the benefit of those who, like me, have always insisted on shaking the batches before every use.

Batching:

In a busy bar, you’ll often batch liqueurs, syrups, or even base spirits together to make service more efficient, turning a 5 pour drink into a 2 or 3 pour drink. Thus, for something like the Mane of Needles, say:
2oz Rye — becomes — 2oz Rye
0.75oz Carpano Antica 1.75oz batch
0.5oz Campari dash orange bitters
0.25oz Benedictine
0.25oz Fernet
dash orange bitters

Easier, no? I’ve been a fan of batching for a long time, but I’ve always warned my bartenders: agitate the batches if it’s the first time you’re touching them that day. It only made sense to me that the constituent ingredients would settle out over time, the way juice does.

My intention was to figure how quickly they separated, not whether they did at all, so I set up a couple experiments. I made 5 cocktails with ingredients of dramatically different sugar levels, ABV, and colors (all that data is at the bottom. if you’re curious) sealed them in glass bottles, and tucked them away.

[bi] initial

The general idea was to check every few hours to see how quickly the colors separated. My hypothesis was that it would happen within 6-8 hours.

First few hours: nothing. First few days: nothing. After two weeks, they still looked like this:

Convinced I was missing some minute but crucial gradient, I held it up to bright light and looked harder:

Zero color variation.

“Ok,” I thought, “maybe whatever accounts for color completely mixes in but something must settle out, right?” So I took a siphon, and siphoned off each bottle into three glasses: top 1/3rd, middle 1/3rd, bottom 1/3rd. And tasted them all side by side. And nothing. They’re exactly the same.

Do the ingredients really not separate over time?

Obvious Answer:

Of course they don’t separate over time.

If alcohol and water settled out, a bottle of vodka would be stronger on top than it is on the bottom. If sugar settled out of alcohol and water, a bottle of Campari would be sweeter on the bottom than on top.

When you first add things together, they’re not completely mixed, and you see sugary wisps in the liquid. But shake or stir it a couple times, and once those wisps go away — once it’s all fully mixed together — your job is done. The liquid doesn’t know it used to be 3 different things. All it knows is that is has a certain amount of water, sugar, and alcohol, and because of Brownian Motion, the levels thereof will be constant, throughout the liquid, until the end of time.

Again, this may be obvious to you. It may seem like I’m urgently tapping you on the shoulder to tell you that giraffes are tall. And in hindsight, yeah, of course. But it took me 2 weeks of experiments and a long text conversation with a friend who has a Ph.D. in chemistry (thanks, Addison) to work it out. So, you know. There’s that.

Bonus Fact:

Solids, of course, settle in the bottom of the bottle. In bottled citrus juice, the pulp starts to settle within the hour. But what about bitters?

Angostura bitters does indeed have tiny solid particulate matter that settles out over time. Look closely to the bottom of the bottle:

Clearer still is a brief close-up video to see them dancing about:

I couldn’t possibly tell you how much of an effect those little particles have on flavor. I have no idea. But it’s probably a good idea to not batch your bitters, and to add them à la minute to each drink.

Added Bonus Fact:

This principle has an appealing corollary, which is that if you, say, found an ideal gin and sweet vermouth for a Negroni, you could just pre-batch a bottle of negroni and keep it at home for easy cocktails after long shifts. Food for thought.

Experiment Data:

This wasn’t interesting enough to put in the body, but in case your curious, these are the cocktails I chose because the ingredients had widely disparate sugar & alcohol levels, and were of different colors. Sugar levels are taken from educated guesses by smarter people than myself, most notably Dave Arnold in Liquid Intelligence and this random, helpful little website.

What’s the Best Sparkling Water for Cocktails?

April 30, 2016April 30, 2016 / jasonobryan / 10 Comments

We’re here to talk about sparkling water in cocktails. But first:

My Obsessive Nature, a.k.a. A Briefish, Seemingly Unrelated Disclaimer on Why Its Hard to Buy Things

I like research.

Before I buy something, for example, I tend to comb through reviews. This can be important, like finding the right hotel for a vacation. This can also be shatteringly unimportant, like when I suddenly realize I’ve wasted 90 minutes on a Tuesday morning comparing customer reviews and build specifications between a bunch of $12 can openers. I can’t help it. It’s who I am.

I say that to say this: what follows is an article about what carbonated water is best for your cocktails. My conclusions have changed my thinking about soda water (a little). But even at its most dramatic, we’re talking about a flavor difference of 20% maximum, and usually closer to 5%. Which is my way of acknowledging that what follows is esoteric and largely insignificant, and if you ignore my conclusions regarding sodium content vis-a-vie effervescent cocktails, I assure you that your life won’t be any worse for it.

Anyway.

Carbonated Water & Its Many Forms

Carbonated water is what happens when carbon dioxide and water are hanging out together under pressure. Sometimes it’s natural: mineral-laden water, bubbling up through limestone in underground springs, finds some trapped underground CO₂ and self-carbonates. People used to find these special places, and drink/soak there as a medicine. When they’re constantly traveling to Bath to “take the waters” in Jane Austen novels? This is what they’re doing.

Some of the carbonated water you can buy is natural, and while others are imitations of the natural minerals, or the natural carbonation, or both. All in all, you can break down bubble water into 4 different categories.

Four Categories

• Carbonated Water or Seltzer Water or Sparkling Water: pure water, artificially carbonated.
• Soda Water or Club Soda: water, carbon dioxide, and small amounts of added sodium salt and/or potassium salt.
• Mineral Water: naturally carbonated water from a protected underground spring, containing more than 250 parts per million (ppm) dissolved minerals/salts, like sodium, magnesium, calcium, potassium, etc.
• Spring Water: water from a protected underground spring, containing less than 250ppm dissolved minerals/salts.

This alone is fairly simple, but it’s only the very beginning, because each individual brand of sparkling water needs to be evaluated on three traits. And these three traits aren’t in any way predictable from the four categories, because waters within the same category swing wildly from one extreme to the other.

Three Traits:

(1) How carbonated is it?

This is vital, and the only unconditional trait you need in your carbonated water. You want big, ripping carbonation. In something like a Tom Collins, carbonated water is only about 1/3 of the liquid in the final drink, and has to carry twice its own weight in effervescence. The more carbonation, the brighter and more alive your drink will be.

(2) How does it taste?

Carbonating water is like hitting it with a spotlight — bad tasting water tastes even worse carbonated.

(3) How does the mineral composition affect the experience of flavor?

As affirmed by Dave Arnold and explained well by Kevin Liu here, a very small amount of salt can make flavors “pop,” even if it’s not enough to actually perceive any salt at all (known as subthreshhold saltiness).

To compound that, we know a small amount of salt is incredibly effective at reducing bitterness, so in the case of bitter sparkling drinks like Americanos or Campari & Soda, it might give the the other flavors a boost.

The Experiments:

I picked up a couple bottles of every brand of sparkling water I could find. Which is, by the way, a good way to look insane in the check-out aisle.

I got a couple rain-cheap grocery store brands, a few world-famous mineral waters, two ludicrously expensive artisanal mixing waters straight from an advertisement in Imbibe, some super basic carbonated distilled water, and capped off by a gift: the elusive and broadly-revered Topo Chico, courtesy of the excellent Carlos Ochoa.

12 waters in all, and a decently representative sample:

San Pellegrino and Crystal Geyser were immediately disqualified for insufficient carbonation, and Crystal Geyser doubly because it sucks (In my notes is one line, a cryptic, but damning, “this is shit and the people who make it are shit and I hate them.”).

Then, we did tests. Lots of tests.

All in all, I blind tasted all of them, 6 at a time, shuffled randomly:

— 2 rounds all the way through, just water alone
— 6 rounds as Americanos
— 3 rounds as Lillet + Sodas
— 2 rounds as Tequila + Sodas
— 1 round as Gin + Sodas
— 1 round as Vodka + Sodas
— 1 round of Tom Collins’

The round of vodka sodas was particularly difficult.

The round of vodka sodas took an especially severe toll on our tasting panel.

So why did I do this so many times? Because the results were incredibly subtle, and maddeningly inconsistent. I’ve never experienced anything like this. One round of Americanos, Fever Tree is the best. A few more rounds it hovers around 2nd or 3rd place, and then once it drops to last. Mineragua was 3rd place for the first Lillet + Soda test, but then the next time it drops to last. La Croix is an underperformer at Americanos but it makes the 2nd best Lillet + Soda. My homemade soda + a crack of salt made the best tequila soda, but when bittersness came in, it was only 4th best at an Americano. Why is Refreshe Seltzer better than Refreshe Soda? WHY?

I mean really. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?

Conclusions:

I did it so many times that, yes, I managed to find patterns and draw conclusions:

(1) The biggest factor is the amount of carbonation. If you taste the water, hold it in your mouth before you swallow. CO2 in liquids forms carbonic acid, and it should burn. If you can pleasantly hold it in your mouth for 5 seconds, it’s not carbonated enough. San Pellegrino is nice for lunch, but it’s nowhere near bubbly enough for your cocktails.

(2) We’re really only talking about simple Americanos or spirit/wine + bubbles. In the round of Tom Collins’, which introduces sweetness and tartness, I literally couldn’t tell the difference between the 3 or 4 best versions. Just bring enough carbonation, and it’s fine.

(3) The more bitter your cocktail, the saltier your water. Q Soda and Mineragua in particular are salty as hell, but in bitter drinks they make the flavors pop because of that salt + bitterness thing we mentioned earlier. And the top performers, as far as I could tell, just had sea salt. Sodium citrate, an industrial salt in the Refreshe Soda, was not as beneficial.

(4) Enjoying a water alone and its performance in cocktails are two very different things. Both Q and Mineragua, for example, are too salty for me alone, but added to bitter sweetness in an Americano, that ceases to be a problem. Likewise, Fever Tree is the king of sipping waters in my house, but it doesn’t come close to dominating the competition the way I thought it would.

(5) We’re not talking about a big flavor difference here. This ain’t different vermouths, or even different gins. We’re talking about water. For most of these we’re dealing with shades of carbonation and shades of salt. The subjective difference between 1st and 4th in the conclusions could very well have been due to what I ate last.

(6) Water costs money. More on this in a second.

What’s the Best Sparkling Water for Cocktails?:

Q Club Soda.

Big carbonation, nice and salty, and well flavored, Q was the best all around competitor, with Fever Tree, Refreshe Seltzer, Topo Chico, Mineragua, and my homemade water (carbonation technique nicked from Liquid Intelligence) coming in as respectable runner ups.

But.

If I didn’t have my own, would I be buying Q Club for home? No, I would not. I would be buying Refreshe Seltzer and adding a pinch of salt (or Topo Chico, if I could find it). Because of the final column, cost, that I left off earlier.

If I were in some kind of competition, I’d bring Q Club. But it’s not significant enough of a difference for me to buy boutique imported water at nearly $0.20 a fucking ounce. Q was best, and Refreshe Seltzer is somewhere around 3rd. But Q is 7.5x the cost of Refreshe, and only like 5% better. And I’m not living that life.

In other words, did I just make you read 1500 words on carbonated water just to tell you it doesn’t matter all that much? Yeah, I did. Sorry. I tried to warn you.

SUPPLIMENTAL CAVEAT: There’s still so much I don’t know about these waters. Sodium, in miligrams, is available on the back. But what about potassium? Or calcium, or magnesium, or fluoride, or nitrates? All that stuff can show up in mineral water, and it tastes like something, and I don’t have the tools to identify them. And honestly, what tools I could’ve bought (pH strips, etc) I opted against buying when I realized how difficult it is to draw conclusions from such scattered, subtle results in the first place.

TRIVIA #1!: Why is salted water even a thing at all? This is already much too long, but the history of artificial carbonation is pretty awesome, so I’ll just leave this superb article here if you want to know more.

TRIVIA #2!: If you’re wondering if the English town of Bath was named Bath because people bathed in the natural hot springs, the answer is yes.

What’s the best Gin and Vermouth for a Negroni?

August 4, 2015August 8, 2015 / jasonobryan / 67 Comments

There is a rule in my house: if I ever make a Negroni for myself, and Victoria is home (or about to come home), I have to make one for her too. Every time. This rule was put in place more than two years ago, and never once has it been broken, never turned down, never exceptioned.

There is only one other such mandate between us, in the case of bacon.

That’s the Negroni. It’s the bacon of cocktails. And yes, I take that comparison as seriously as it deserves, because like bacon, (1) it is always great, and (2) I’m never not in the mood for it.

The Negroni:

So first things first — what is a Negroni?

I’m not going to spend too much time on the history, but briefly: from the moment Campari was invented in 1860, it’s had a heedless love for sweet vermouth.

Somewhere along the line, some genius (perhaps Gaspare Campari himself) united them with a little soda water and created the Americano, still the greatest pre-meal cocktail ever made. And the story goes that in 1919, Count Camillo Negroni walked into the Caffe Casoni in Florence and ordered an Americano with gin instead of soda water. He took one sip, lightning struck in the same spot three times, Jesus appeared on a biscotti, and the Negroni cocktail was born (unless it wasn’t. See Trivia, at bottom).

Look anywhere for the recipe for a Negroni and you’ll find the same thing, more or less everywhere, from more or less everyone:

The Negroni
1oz gin
1oz Campari
1oz Sweet Vermouth
Stir, and serve either on ice or up. Garnish with an orange slice or peel.

Almost no one specifies types of gin or vermouth, and in a way, it’s not vital — one of the charms of the Negroni is it’s near invincibility. Use any gin or sweet vermouth you like, and it’s going to taste great. Substitute Campari for any of it’s competitors, and it’s going to taste great. Understir it, overstir it, add orange bitters, screw up the measurements, carbonate it, age it in barrels, do whatever you want to it, and it’ll still be great. It’s great for men or women, first dates or business meetings, after dinner, before dinner, before breakfast, on the train, in outer space, anywhere, always, forever. It’s bitter, it’s sweet, it’s perfect. It is one of the handful of mixed drinks that enjoys universal respect in this industry.

But that’s my problem. I get it, no one looks for the best Negroni because saying “best Negroni” is a little like saying “best orgasm” — yeah, there are shades of difference there, some better than others, but even a terrible one is still better than almost everything else in the world. But. If you could have the best one every time, wouldn’t you?

And so, our question: what’s best? What gin, what vermouth, what combination?

Rules:

These are my guiding principles:

(1) Campari. Bartenders are a tinkery bunch, which is mostly a good thing, but here, we’re sticking with Campari. Yes, a Cynar/Aperol/Cappelletti/etc Negroni is a fine drink, but a true Negroni has to be made with Campari.

(2) Sweet Vermouth. Not dry vermouth, not bianco vermouth, not barolo chinato (which is like double-dutch heaven), but sweet vermouth. The red kind. Because that’s what’s in it.

(3) Gin. It’s made with gin. For the love of god. Not mezcal, not aquavit, not genever, not barrel-aged gin. Gin.

(4) Equal Parts. A Negroni is equal parts Gin, Sweet Vermouth, and Campari. Yes, it comes with a bit of sweetness. Deal with it. The sweetness is part of the charm. There’s no adding more gin. That’s blasphemy, and it also doesn’t taste as good.

Procedures:

Identical glasses, identical large (2″ x 2″) ice, stirred the same amount of times, tasted double blind by both Victoria and I according to the sticker on the bottom of the glass method. As double blind as possible, anyway. Punt e Mes is recognizably darker than the others, but it tastes so different it’s not like we wouldn’t have known anyway.

Competitors:

I chose gins and vermouths that are fairly standard. Yes, obviously I’m only tasting 5 each, and yes, I might be missing out on some other brand that makes the Negroni of my dreams. I’m sure you’ll message me about it.

GIN: Beefeater, Tanqueray, Plymouth Navy Strength, Hendrick’s, and Aviation.

VERMOUTH: Carpano Antica, Punt e Mes, Dolin Rouge, Cocchi Vermouth di Torino, and Martini and Rossi

[nt] intro montage

Process:

First, we did 5 rounds of 5, keeping the gin constant and doing 5 different vermouths. Victoria and I silently rated them, then shared when we were done. Then, we did 5 more rounds, keeping the vermouth constant and doing 5 different gins. By the end, every one of the 25 possible combinations was tasted twice in two different heats. Points were given based on our respective ratings (we didn’t always agree, of course), and the data looked like this:

There are a couple different ways to look at this:

The way I like best is to count the amount of times each ingredient earned a 1st place ranking. You’ll notice every ingredient had its own heat, so at one point or another, they all got at least 2 first place prizes, one from each of us. If I tally up Victoria’s and my votes, the data looks like this:

Number of times each gin won it’s heat:

Tanqueray — 6
Plymouth Navy Strength — 5
Hendricks — 4
Beefeater — 3
Aviation — 2

Number of times each vermouth won it’s heat:

Cocchi Vermouth di Torino — 7
Carpano Antica — 4
Punt e Mes — 4
Dolin — 3
Martini and Rossi — 2

Another way to sort the data is individual Negroni scores. As we tasted every combination twice and both of us ranked them 1-5 each time, each Negroni has 4 ratings, so if it were #1 every single time, it would score a 4:

By points (lower is better):

Beefeater & Carpano — 6
Tanqueray & Cocchi — 7
Hendricks & Punt e Mes — 7
Aviation & Carpano — 7
Plymouth Navy Strength & Cocchi — 7
Tanqueray & Dolin — 9

This isn’t perfect because they’re rankings as opposed to evaluations, which means even if all 5 were bad (looking at you, Martini and Rossi) they still get ranked 1-5. However, this is how we did the Final Round, because it has the added benefit being fairly diverse, which is good because they’ve already competed against themselves in every possible way.

The final combined results, with my ranking and Victoria’s ranking for reference

Not even close. We both, independently, liked Tanqueray and Cocchi best by a significant margin. They were all great, but Tanqueray and Cocchi tasted tasted the most like the ideal Negroni. No hair out of place. As close to perfect as I can imagine.

In fact, of the 6 times Tanqueray and Cocchi was rated, there is only once where it wasn’t #1, a weird spike in the data on our very first test and one I’m tempted to explain away by error, but we’ll never know. Nonetheless:

The Best Negroni*
1oz Tanqueray
1oz Cocchi Vermouth di Torino
1oz Campari.
Stir on ice. Garnish with an orange peel. Drink. Melt.

*That is, best of the 5 gins and 5 vermouths we tried, of course. And according to our specific palates. Out of only 1:1:1 Negronis. With strict rules. This is a very limited experiment featuring two people and 10 products. But, Tanqueray and Cocchi is now my champion, and what I’ll make against any new combination I’m told about.

Ingredient Conclusions:

GINS

[nt] gin lineup

Tanqueray: The bars I’ve worked at have always carried Beefeater instead of Tanqueray so I’ve never been too familiar with its nuances. But I’m finding the more of these experiments I do, the more I find Tanqueray still standing at the end. I’m beginning to realize what an incredible gin this really is.

Beefeater: Great product, great for Negronis. Most cocktail bartenders I polled before starting this said Beefeater and Carpano are the best, and indeed, it’s great. Carpano was too sweet, too much vanilla for most gins, but Beefeater handles it admirably.

Plymouth Navy Strength: I really thought the strength would counter the sweetness of the cocktail, but it just made most of them kinda flat, like a dampener.

Hendrick’s: Performed better than I would’ve thought. I figured it didn’t have the backbone for this and only included it as a reference point, but it did well. Its floral nature is absorbed by the cocktail and doesn’t stick out. I’ll drink Hendrick’s & Punt e Mes Negronis all day.

Aviation: I love Aviation gin. It won my Martini experiments, after all, but the sarsparilla note comes through as wintergreen, and has no place in a Negroni.

VERMOUTHS:

[nt] vermouth lineup

Cocchi Vermouth di Torino: Performed incredibly well. Mixes with Campari like a dream.

Carpano Antica: Great vermouth, but most of the Negronis, especially against peers, were too sweet with too much vanilla. It’s like a Vanilla Negroni as opposed to just a Negroni.

Punt e Mes: I like Punt e Mes Negronis a lot, but Victoria doesn’t much. It really shouldn’t have been in this experiement because t’s like a spin-off of a Negroni. It’s too different. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a cherry/chocolate Negroni with Punt e Mes, but if I just want a normal one, Punt e Mes is not the answer.

Dolin Rouge: Too weak. All the Negronis with Dolin tasted flat & dull.

Martini and Rossi: Terrible. The worst performer of the whole experience. It tastes like an herb shop. The only time this was best was when it ran unopposed.

====================================

Trivia: All of that history up there is true, unless of course Count Camillo Negroni never actually existed, but we’re pretty sure he did. It’s a minor rats nest and I don’t feel like getting into it. If you’re curious, there’s an admirably complete discussion of the topic here.

Chartreuse

June 18, 2015June 18, 2015 / jasonobryan / 5 Comments

“Some say the first bottle of ____ was brought to the court of Charlemagne by a captured Druid mystic, who proclaimed it the greatest potion in all the blah blah blah blah lies.”
— Every Liqueur Marketing Team Ever

Preface:

I generally council people to just ignore the stories behind brands, because (1) they don’t matter and (2) they’re usually untrue. Made-up historical relevance is the herpes of the liquor industry, an embarrassing but manageable stain that we learn to tolerate because there is no cure. Examples are too numerous to list and range from minor exaggeration to outright lies, but as a rule, when the story begins 200+ years ago, I don’t even want to hear it.

This is true for all liquor, across the board, everywhere. Except Chartreuse.

Facts:

Name: Chartreuse — Yellow, Green, V.E.P., Elexir Vegetal, etc.
Category: Liqueur — Herbal
ABV: 55% for the Green; 40% for the Yellow; 69% for the Elixir
Origin: France, at least since 1737, allegedly dating to 1605 (or earlier).
Characteristics: Intense and pungent; beguiling; very herbal; sweet, strong, and full; vegetal flavors, anise, saffron, honey, mint, and about 130 others.

The Order:

A quick word about the Carthusian monks:

In 1084, St. Bruno founded a spin-off of the Catholic church he called the Carthusian Order, after the Chartreuse mountains in France where he chose to live. The motto of the Carthusians is “Stat crux dum volvitur orbis” Latin for “The cross is steady while the world is turning,” and indeed, for the last 931 turns of the world, the Carthusian monks still live almost exactly as they always have.

It is one of the most ascetic orders of Christianity in existence, and is all about finding God through contemplation, solitude, silence, and prayer. They literally don’t talk all day. They barely see each other. Technology obviously is non-existent. It’s all stone and wood. Their whole charterhouse is built so one monk can bring a meal and spin it through a hatch so the feeder and the feedee don’t have to interact. It’s broadly misunderstood that they’ve taken some kind of vow of silence, but this is not strictly speaking true. It’s more that their lives are built around the rhythm of stillness, solitude and silence, and because speech breaks that, it is reserved for certain ritual occasions. And they also make Chartreuse, as they have since 1737.

[chartreuse] intro

History:

Here’s what we’re told:

In 1605, some Carthusian monks just outside Paris were met by Francois Hannibal d’ Estrées, Marshal of King Henri IV artillery, who gave them a recipe for the Elixir of Long Life. The recipe was hopelessly complex and the initial recipients couldn’t figure it out, so after 100 or so years the recipe was sent to the mother order, Grande Chartreuse, in the French alps near Grenoble. The monks there studied the recipe intently and ultimately cracked it, and in 1737, the Carthusian monks produced the very first Chartreuse, a vivid green from 132 different herbs, roots, and spices harvested not only at specific times of year but specific times of day. Part of the magic is that the color is natural: it somehow doesn’t turn brown like every other chlorophyll infusion in the world.

It was 71% alcohol and, like most liqueurs back then, used as medicine. But people liked to drink it as well, so in 1764, a milder version was developed at 55% alcohol, what we now know as Green Chartreuse (praising Green Chartreuse for its mildness is like praising a forest fire for its subtlety, but I suppose it’s all relative). In 1838, they made an actually mild version at 40%, Yellow Chartreuse, which uses about 80 plants, and is colored mostly by saffron.

There have been interruptions over the last 278 years. As one might imagine. The monks were forced from the country after the French Revolution in 1793, and again in 1903 when the government nationalized the distillery. In 1810 Napoleon demanded all secret recipes turned over to the state, but his scientists couldn’t make sense of it. It was made in exile for a time. In the 1930s, the distillery was destroyed by a landslide. All these obstacles, all this mystery, and still, these men who in 2015 still wear white robes in stone rooms and don’t speak and pray all day, they still produce one of the most beguiling, tastiest, inimitable liqueurs in the world.

This fucking guy.

Here’s what is indisputably true:

It’s made by Carthusian monks, in France, according to a secret recipe. It’s been made since the mid 1700s. It is one of the few bottles behind the bar that matures as it ages. And many of us regard it as the greatest liqueur ever made.

Here’s what I sincerely believe is true, despite our lack of proof:

All of it. I believe all of it. That there are 132 ingredients. That ingredients are harvested at specific hours to get the right chlorophyll levels. That the color is natural at all.

Everyone repeats these endlessly, but we have no proof. All the same, I choose to believe. It tastes true.

Here’s what let’s just say is true because who cares:

That 1605 business. Why not? Everything else about it seems true, so why not this? Whether the recipe was from 1605 or 1737 couldn’t possibly matter less, so whatever. I’ll tell that story.

[chartreuse] detail

Production:

For a while I was ready to call shenanigans on the whole thing, because how could these monks who probably still use a damn abacus make enough of this stuff for the million or so bottles bought every year? But they do. As with the recipe itself, you can figure things out when you have nothing but time on your hands.

Photo credit: The likewise inimitable Adam Stemmler

It goes like this: there are only two monks who know the recipe, Dom Benoît and Brother Jean-Jacques, and they aren’t allowed to do things like ride in a car together. Every year, a total of some 18 tons of the various 130+ berries, roots, herbs, barks, and leaves are delivered in secret numbered sacks to the herb room, where only those two monks dry, grind, and combine them into new sacks, which are then themselves numbered and sent to the distillery.

Even the distillery is off-limits to most, but there they have help — two “laymen” who help physically run the stills. Each sack is macerated for it’s certain amount of hours in neutral spirit, and then distilled for about 8 hours. It is then macerated again for color and flavor, sweetened with sugar and honey, then sent to age in large neutral oak casks for couple years until it’s ready.

There’s Green and Yellow, of course. In Europe they sell the original “Elixir,” at 69% ABV. There’s also the Green and Yellow versions of the V.E.P. (Vieillissement Exceptionnellement Prolongé), a more expensive, extra-aged version that is devastatingly tasty.

Uses:

For many of us, Green Chartreuse is inseparable from the Last Word cocktail. Invented at the Detroit Athletic Club in 1916, it twiddled in cocktail purgatory until being resurrected by the legendary Murray Stenson, at the Zig Zag cafe, somewhere around 2005. It shouldn’t work but it does, and there is, quite simply, nothing else like it. It’s gone around the world and everyone knows it now. Ask for one next time you’re at a cocktail bar. And get the original. No, you don’t want to try their house variation with tarragon-infused Aquavit or whatever instead of gin. You want a Last Word.

The Last Word
0.75oz gin
0.75oz Green Chartreuse
0.75oz Luxardo Maraschino liqueur
0.75oz lime juice
Add all ingredients to tin and shake well. Strain into chilled cocktail class, and garnish with a real maraschino cherry. If you have no cherries, or only have the shit cherries the color of a clown’s nose, just leave it naked.

Beyond that, there a classic called a Bijou, which is equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Green Chartreuse, and which I admit I’ve never liked. Yellow Chartreuse makes one of my favorite Manhattan variations, the painfully delicious Greenpoint. There’s the fantastic tiki-d out Chartreuse Swizzle by Marco Dionysos up at Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco. I’ve also had great fun with the Silent Order, a Green Chartreuse-based drink I enjoy pulling out of my mental weird shit folder when such a thing is called for.

More Chartreuse cocktails here.

TRIVIA!: Interior decorators among you will know Chartreuse already as a the name of a color. There are in fact two colors, chartreuse green and chartreuse yellow, and they are named after the liqueurs. Or, as Quentin Tarantino says, fumbling in front of the camera in Deathproof, “the only liquor so good they named a color after it.”

Further reading:

This is a nice little article by Sean Kenyon that goes slightly more into history (and some first hand impressions).
The uncommonly informative official website.
Some fascinating information on the Carthusian monks, from their own website.
For those who are seriously interested in the life of these monks, there is a nearly 3 hour documentary called Into Great Silence. Be warned: there is nothing about the liqueur in the film. There are no words. It’s just a camera on the wall, no explanation, just a witness to the strangely admirable silent rhythms of these men who give up their entire lives in search of peace. Trailer on youtube.

Campari: The Red Mistress

February 15, 2015February 15, 2015 / jasonobryan / 8 Comments

There’s nothing quite as cool as old school Italian class. I don’t know where I’m getting this image, Fellini or something probably, but I see a mid-century man in a perfect suit. Wayfairers, scarves, and Alpha Romeros zipping along the coast. He’s definitely smoking a cigarette. And he’s drinking Campari, probably with soda. Has to be. There’s no other way.

Name: Campari
Category: Potable bitters — the “amari” (plural) or “amaro” (singular) in Italian.
ABV: 24% ABV, in the U.S. anyway.
Origin: Milan, Italy, since 1860.
Nose: Herbal, like chinese medicine. Orange and rhubarb. Wood chips. Lightly floral.
Taste: Floral into orange sweetness, with a slow building bitterness that crescendos after you swallow and lingers for a minute+, leaving you either (1) begging for more, or (2) wondering why anyone would ever do that to themselves twice.

The History:

In 1860, a 32 year old bartender and salesman named Gaspare Campari finalized the recipe for a bitter liqueur he’d been working on. He had other liquers — fruit and cream cordials, mostly — but this bitter red business was propelled by an unusual tastiness. As its fame increased, he soon earned the money to move from the suburbs to the center of Milan and opened a cafe in the newly built Galleria Vittorio Emanuele across the street from the Duomo, making his booze in the basement and serving it in the afternoon to the Milanese intelligentsia.

Caffe Campari was the place to be. If there were movies back then, movie stars would’ve hung out there, and when Gaspare died his obituary ran on the front page of the Milanese daily. His son Davide took over, built a production plant in 1904, and stopped making almost all other products in 1926, focusing heavily on the eponymous apertif.

It is Davide Campari’s name wrapped around the neck of every bottle, not his fathers’. Davide is the one who took Campari from a popular local phenomenon and put it on the road to what it is today, which is multinational leviathan selling 3 million cases a year across 190 countries. Which, if you’re wondering, is a whole hell of a lot.

The Product:

Of all the aggressively bitter Italian liqueurs, and there are many, Campari is by far the most pervasive. Speakeasy or sportsbar, towny dive or rooftop club, it’s one of the few bottles you can find in pretty much any bar. Which is nice, because it is also amazing.

It is an aperitivo — the aperitivo, really, as it is widely credited with inventing the category — and is sharply bitter, more rust than dirt, one of those things that you’ll hate the first time you have it but grows on you over time. This aperitivo business suggests that you drink it before meals: the acute bitterness, they say, rouses your body’s digestive enzymes from their twixt-meal slumber and prepares you for eating. Italians are big on that kind of thing (there are also digestivos, which is even more bitter liquor, for after the meal).

As for the product itself, we don’t know what’s in it. Oranges for sure, with rhubarb, ginseng (maybe), plenty of herbs and roots as well as the unmistakable bitter gentian and Red #40, but beyond that, Campari seems to take a dickish pleasure in their own secrecy. “Many have guessed simply at the number of ingredients,” they say on their website, toothy smile implied, “some say there are 20 or 60, but others list the ingredients at 80.” There are only three living humans who know the recipe, and no one even knows who those three humans are. So ok: you don’t tell people. Got it.

Regardless, Campari is one of those bottles that is somehow more than its ingredients. Their secrecy doesn’t frustrate me, because a list of herbs would only tell half the story. It’s like Angostura bitters. Yes, there are similar products, in some cases very similar, but all Campari’s peers lack whatever ethereal magic it possesses that makes it sublime and absolutely indispensable. It is at once bitter and sweet, aggressive and subtle, and has that most charming of ingredient characteristics, which is to elevate whatever drink it is mixed in — specifically and especially its three brilliant, canonical cocktails:

(1) Campari & Soda, which is so popular in Italy that an adorable little 3oz version has been pre-bottled and sold since 1932, and which holds the noble purpose of being the one real drink you can get in almost any bar in the world that the bartender literally cannot fuck up.

(2) Americano, a Campari & Soda with sweet vermouth. The greatest pre-meal cocktail ever made, and which more or less defines the category of aperitivo. Still near impossible to fuck up, though some particularly incompetent bartenders have risen to the challenge. Some have also returned with an espresso and hot water, which is less a fuck up than a hilarious misunderstanding.

(3) Negroni, equal measures Campari, Sweet Vermouth, and Gin. It deserves its own post, and will get one shortly. Bitter, sweet, strong and seductive, the Negroni is good before dinner, after dinner, before bed, in a mountain lodge, at the bottom of the sea, or really anywhere, at anytime at all. I’m not being hyperbolic about Campari as indispensable: a world without Campari is a world without Negronis, and in that case we should all just kill ourselves immediately.

Trivia #1: Campari has historically not been a vegetarian product. The brilliant red color was, from 1860-2006, the crimson dye carmine, which is created by collecting a bunch of cactus-feeding cochineal insects in a bowl and grinding them up with a pestle. For reasons either compassionate or capitalistic, they changed in 2006 to artificial color.

Trivia #2: Campari was initially called Bitter all’Uso d’Olanda, which translates to “Bitter – the Use of Holland,” or Holland-style bitter. There is, of course, nothing whatsoever Dutch about it, just that Gaspare wanted to tie in something exotic and the Dutch have long been at the center of the spice trade (just like the Branca people did with their imaginary Dr. Fernet). But as “Bitter – the Use of Holland” is an extremely stupid name, they changed it.

Are Whiskey Stones Worth It?

January 22, 2015 / jasonobryan / 13 Comments

There’s something about Holiday Gift Guides, in magazines and such, that I find tremendously frustrating. Not because the suggestions are worthless, but because every single one seems to be just barely on the far side of useful. There are two kinds: the chintzy necessities you already have, except this time imprinted with kitsch (i.e. R2-D2 Measuring Cup Set, $19.99) or the solutions to problems that really don’t exist (i.e. a small electronic pouch to pre-warm your pijamas, $39.99).

Sitting, ostensibly, in the latter camp, nearly standard on such lists for the last few years, are Whiskey Stones. Whiskey Stones are 1″ cubes of soapstone that you keep in the freezer and drop (gently) into your glass of whiskey, they claim, to chill your whiskey without diluting it. One package gets you nine little rocks, and it costs $20.

I get asked about Whiskey Stones a lot, about whether someone’s boyfriend or son would like them, about what the best kinds are (there are a few), about how I feel about ice, and several other versions of the same basic question: are Whiskey Stones worth it?

This is not one question, but three:

(1) How much cooling power do they have?
(2) Is chilling without dilution something you even want?
(3) What is it like to use them?

The first question can be answered with science. The second two fall to personal taste, and are therefore more vexing. But we’re going to tackle it anyway, because this is a blog.

(1): How Much Cooling Power do they Have?

I’m going to save you the suspense: almost none.

You would think that 2oz of whiskey stones and 2oz of ice, both straight from the freezer, would have a similar effect, no? Just that one dilutes while the other doesn’t? While that indeed does seem intuitive, you’d be wrong. You’d be wrong because ice is magic.

Without getting too much into it, the fact that ice is cold isn’t why it’s so good at chilling liquids. It doesn’t take much energy (a.k.a. chilling power) to take ice from 31°F to 32°F, or water from 32°F to 33°F But it takes a ton of energy to turn 32°F ice into 32°F water. Like 80x more. It’s the melting, called the “heat of fusion,” that makes ice magic.

So what does this mean for whiskey stones?

In the marketing materials, they say they used soapstone because it has “unique ability to retain temperature for extended periods of time.” and that’s true: compared to most stones, the specific heat of soapstone is high. But comparing it to ice is like comparing a foot massage to oral sex: it ain’t the same league, it ain’t even the same fucking sport.

In my trials, 2 Whiskey Stones in 1oz of whiskey, which is not much, brought the temperature down a measly 10.3°F. By comparison, a frozen glass (very thin) chilled it 14.9°F, ice chilled it 22.5°F, and a frozen glass (thicker) chilled it 25.2°F.

I’m also definitely not the first person to do this:

• the Art of Manliness found Whiskey Stones register a 8°F difference
• the appropriately named Cool Material posted a 7°F difference
• drinkhacker put a ridiculous 3 stones in 0.65oz whiskey and posted a 12.8°F difference
• Doing Science to Stuff found a meager 6.2°F difference
• the metric folks at Scotchblog.ca found it to be 9°F (I converted for you).

This graph is pretty typical:

Taken from drinkhacker.com

Basically, somewhere between 6-10 degrees, depending on how many you use. Which if you’re wondering, really isn’t much. It’s barely noticeable in the glass against the room temperature ones.

Conclusion: Whiskey Stones don’t chill for shit.

(2): Is Chilling without Diluting Something You Even Want?

But what’s the value of this? I mean, what’s the relationship between spirits enjoyment and temperature anyway?

Experiment time:

I tried 1oz of 45% whiskey, side by side, 5 different ways, and took temperature readings after 5 minutes:

neat, at room temperature (66°F)
whiskey stones (56°F)
frozen thin glass (51°F)
frozen thick glass (41°F)
ice (44°F)

Because so much of this falls to personal taste, I tasted with Vikki and we both silently jotted down our favorites, then shared them:

Conclusions:

• I usually drink Japanese whiskey straight, so it’s unsurprising that I would like that best. Vikki’s no stranger to Japanese whiskey either, though she liked it 2nd best.

• The frozen thick glass was the coldest, and while the cold temperature did suppress some of the more delicate flavors, it also suppressed some alcohol burn and also added silky viscosity, which we both loved. I wouldn’t always have whiskey so cold, but for casual drinking (instead of tasting/experiencing all possible nuance), it was great.

• As for our old friend ice, we both loved it in the beginning, as a little dilution of a 45% spirit does release and stretch out some flavors. But after a while it became too diluted and therefore gross. Get bigger ice or drink faster.

• The big question was why did we love the frozen thick glass but not the frozen thin one? For this, I can only guess — the thin glass made the spirit cold enough to suppress flavor but not enough to add texture, and seemed to be in some weird middle ground, neither as flavorful as neat nor as silky as actual cold.

Out of the freezer: thick glass vs. thin glass.

(3) What is is like to use them?

And finally, Whiskey Stones. Both of our least favorite, by far. The temperature change was negligible. The threat of taking a rock to the teeth, however, was not. Drinking whiskey, or really doing anything at all, doesn’t exist in a vacuum: the same whiskey in the same glass at the same temperature would taste a lot better enjoyed around a fire with old friends, and a lot worse at a Motel 6 in Gary, Indiana.

Atmosphere and aesthetics matter. Temperature-wise, it didn’t really do anything but disappoint me. Beyond the disappointment, beyond the constant specter of dental injury, I ultimately found it a weird bit of superfluous pageantry to drink with actual rocks clunking around in my glass.

So, are Whiskey Stones worth it?

No. They’re not.

86 Co. Spirits

December 14, 2014December 18, 2014 / jasonobryan / 4 Comments

In late 2012, a few guys named Simon Ford, Dushan Zaric, and Jason Kosmas launched a booze line under the banner 86 Company Spirits. For those of you who don’t know, 86 is restaurant slang for either we’ve run out (“86 lobster, we’re subbing shrimp”) or we threw someone out (“Guy on 22 was drooling like a basset hound and tried to pay in nickels, so we 86’d him.”)

All three of these guys come from the bar, and wanted to create a spirits company specifically accommodating to bartenders. So in this case, the 86 refers to “86 the bullshit.” As in, we are going to tell you exactly what is in our products, exactly how we made it, in what proportions and in what amount of time. No apocryphal yellowing recipes, no arbitrary ties to great men of history, no juju magic. Here is what we make, here is how, here is why.

[86] Full Line

That why is important. The transparency alone would be enough, but the fact that each of these products has a why — a real reason to exist — is what makes them so special.

There are way too many craft distillers making vodka and gin and shitty white whiskey and 9 month old bourbon just to do it, and their products neither taste better, nor are meaningfully different, than what is already abundantly available. This is why so many of them attempt to tie themselves to Napoleon or Hemingway for no reason at all, and why so many of them claim that their recipe dates to the 18th century, even though they’ve only been making it for 9 fucking months. And this is why the 86 Co. products are so refreshing. Each stands on its own merits, and each one (save, of course, for the vodka) is made to satisfy a cocktail need that had, up until now, been unmet.

If you’ve ever stood within earshot of the cyclonic bloviations of liquor marketing you’ll know that almost everyone says their products are designed “specifically for cocktails,” but in this case, it is fundamentally true: when creating them, the Ford and Zaric let the needs of the cocktail shape the spirit, not the other way around.

I’m not going to write everything about them. They have been extensively reviewed all over the web, to say nothing of fact that every production detail about them can be found on the website, or, handily, on the labels themselves. But a couple weeks ago, Dushan himself came to Kettner Exchange to give us a little training on their wonderful line, and there are a few interesting things that are worthy of special note.

Caña Brava Rum

First things first: daiquiris (rum + lime juice + sugar) are amazing. In the desperate yearning heart of every 2oz of rum is the unspoken desire to be turned into a daiquiri. Yes, rum is mixed with other stuff sometimes, but it never really wants to be. It wants to be a daiquiri. Because daiquiris are amazing.

So, the goal with Caña Brava was to create an authentic, prohibition-era Cuban style light rum, a robust, dry spirit bottled at higher proof so to shine in daiquiris. They went to Don Poncho Fernandez, who was the master blender of Havana Club for decades and is now in Panama (making him, let’s just say, a Panamaniac), and together created Caña Brava. Apparently Dushan showed up to the distillery with sacks of limes and boxes of sugar, and made daiquiris with each rum sample until they nailed it.

It is extremely dry, allowing you to manage your own sweetness. It’s bottled at 43% instead of the standard 40%, providing cocktail infrastructure, and it has a mid-palate explosion, the point in the tasting experience where most drinks suffer. It makes a brilliant daiquiri, and is, therefore, an enormous success.

Note: Loyal readers will recall I once wrote something similar about Banks 5 Rum, and indeed, these two products aspire to the same thing. The difference, then, is in how they try to get there: Banks blends in Indonesian Arrack for a dynamic and wholly original flavor profile, while Caña Brava aims at recreating the Cuban style straight through distillation. They’re almost too different to compare, but I can say that the two products make daiquiris that taste nothing alike and yet are both enormously tasty.

[86] pouring

Ford’s Gin

Made at the Thames distillery in London, Ford’s aims to be the ultimate cocktail gin: to be good for Tom Collins’, good for Negronis, good for Martinis, and to work with both lemon and lime. I admit, this education was the first I’d ever heard of this lemon vs. lime business — apparently some gins work better with lemon and some with lime, which through some deficit of palate or experience, I’ve never encountered (it’s also always possible that’s not a real thing, but honestly, I’m inclined to trust Dushan’s palate over my own).

In any event, they experimented with oil extraction and botanical steep time until they got it just right, at 15hrs. Its viscosity and balance is ideal for martinis (it was the best London Dry Gin in the Great Martini Experiements). Like the rum, it has a mid-palate explosion of flavor. Because gin is all about specific tastes at specific strengths, much of it falls to personal preference. What I will say is that it can stand shoulder to shoulder with its legendary peers, which is, for a London Dry Gin, the biggest compliment I have to give.

Tequila Cabeza

The tequila is bottled at 43% instead of the standard 40%, which in and of itself gives it broad shoulders. But more than that, they wanted a tequila that could present a bold agave flavor even when mixed. The agave is the most delicate flavor and the first to get drowned out, Dushan complained, and too often you’ll have a margarita that has all the pepper and vegetal notes and creaminess of the tequila, but no agave.

They went to El Ranchito distillery in the highlands, NOM1414, and worked with the distiller to craft the product. They found the tequila can only be made in the winter, interestingly, when the temperature is lower and fermentation can happen more slowly, because only a long fermentation can give the flavors they wanted. So after about 10 days of fermentation, it’s distilled to industry standard 55%, cut back to 43%, and bottled.

Taken neat, it’s a bit rougher than it’s peers, probably because of those proof points. But those are what makes it pop in cocktails, with a giant mid-palate agave sweetness, a bit of bitterness from the extra booze, and a nice creamy texture. Very cool, utterly unique.

Aylesbury Duck Vodka

… is vodka. I don’t know. It’s good vodka. It’s well priced and well made and it’s not hurting anyone. Plus, the label is funny.

____________________________________________

Trivia: I had always assumed the term 86 was some antiquated computer code or something, but apparently it’s at least 70 years old and no one actually knows how it came about. There are several competing theories, and they are all equally unsatisfying.

More Trivia: I wrote “juju magic” up there because it felt right in the sentence, then got nervous because I wasn’t sure if it was some kind of slur. In the process of looking into that, my googling took me to The Racial Slur Database, an organization that for some bizarre reason categorizes these things. They have a search bar, or you can just browse by ethnic group. They have a homepage feature, “Racial Slur of the Day.” In the submission section, they take pains to remind you that only racial slurs will be accepted, and gender and sexuality slurs are strictly prohibited.

I have nothing more to report on this, just that it exists and I find that fact endlessly amusing.