Periodic bar check

One very important category is still missing: bitters. Let's see if we can fix that in the next month.

The bar now holds:

Bases

gin

Aperitif Wines

dry vermouth
sweet vermouth

Liqueurs
maraschino
Cointreau
Bénédictine

Juices
lemon

General Ingredients

ice

Glasses

Old Fashioned glass

cocktail glass

Barware

jigger

bar spoon
cocktail shaker
juicer
bar knife
channel knife

Bénédictine (Rolls Royce)

This is going to be the spot where I’m going to make a very personal choice. We’re building up bar, concentrating on the basics. Sure, we’re only using gin as a base for now, but it’s not very necessary to branch out in the bases just yet. And because I like classic cocktails, it’s geared towards that kind of style. Maraschino was a bit of an offbeat choice, but defendable from that position.

However, this time I’ll just be forcing through what I like, not what would be the most reasonable, practical or logical.

Enter Bénédictine. It’s a honeysweet, herbal liqueur with a deceptive history. The inventor, Alexandre le Grand, invented a story about a Normandic abbey that was destroyed in the French Revolution and a recipe lost in time. Quite a smart marketing trick… it’s almost a pity that Bénédictine did not originate with Dom Bernardo Vincelli, the Benedictine monk. It makes a good bar story.

But a story alone doesn’t make a good drink, and that’s where this liqueur does deliver. Made from 27 plants and spices, it has a complex flavour. Should that be a reason to generally ignore this ingredient in the cocktail world? Is it too complex to invent good recipes? I have to say no to that.

Chartreuse is much celebrated, especially in the classic cocktail revival, but it is every bit as complex (or even more so, with its 130 ingredients). Sweet vermouth isn’t very straightforward either.

Mixologists have found ways to tinker around with the troublemakers, often with quite nice and occasionally great results. There’s no reason Bénédictine should be left out.

By the way, talking about bar stories: the recipes of both Bénédictine and Chartreuse are closely guarded. Only three people will know the specifics of the recipe at the same time. How’s that for keeping something secret?

And let’s not forget that some true classic cocktails have Bénédictine as a key ingredient. The original Singapore Sling, as served in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, calls for Bénédictine. B&B, which is Bénédictine ‘diluted’ with brandy, became so popular that the company started to produce B&B as a premixed product.

So don’t hesitate to search out this liqueur and make up your own mind. It’s one of the CocktailDB’s special recommendations, so I’m not even alone in my enthusiasm for this liqueur. The beautiful bottle will surely not mar the look of your drink cabinet.

The distinctive ‘DOM’ on the label doesn’t allude to Dom Bernardo, but it’s short for ‘Deo Optimo Maximo’, which translates as ‘To God, most good, most great’, the motto of the Benedictine order.

And although not the most logical addition to the bar, it does present us with a great opportunity: a promising inroad to inventing your own cocktail. It’s no surprise that a lot of combinations have already been tried throughout one and a half century. A lot of things you might come up with, have probably already been tried by others. But Bénédictine remains quite unused. So if you want to have a promising shot at your own creation, this is a good starting point.

Rolls Royce

Another one that can be found in The Savoy Cocktail Book. Since I like Bénédictine, I’m not going to mess around with a dash or dashes: I add a full part of the stuff. The vermouths make sure this remains quite an aromatic recipe.

The Rolls Royce is also a nice example of the Perfect Martini type: it uses equal parts dry and sweet vermouth.

4 parts gin

2 parts dry vermouth

2 parts sweet vermouth

1 part Bénédictine

glass:  cocktail

Stir with ice and strain into the glass.

Yes, that’s a great colour for an autumn cocktail.

Sweet vermouth (Orange Bloom)

According to Albert Stevens Crockett in The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book, half the cocktails known prior to World War I ‘had vermouth as an essential [ingredient]’.

Since I like classic cocktails and we still only have one kind of vermouth, we’ll pair the dry with its older sister.

Originally meant for medicinal purposes, the precursor to the modern vermouths was produced by the Italian merchant D’Alessio in the early 16^th century. The recipe was based upon the German Wermut wines that were made on the other side of the border. Wermut is the German term for wormwood, the necessary ingredient in absinthe. It’s easy to see where the term ‘vermouth’ originated.

Around 1800 the proper sweet and dry variants begin to materialize. Another Italian merchant, Antonio Benedetto Carpano introduces the first sweet vermouth in Turin in 1786. Dry vermouth will follow some two decades later in France.

Sweet vermouth is originally red (rosso) and bittersweet. There is a bianco which is almost colourless, but it was introduced much later, around 1960. There’s really no reason to stock your bar with a bianco vermouth: red vermouth will always do as a sweet vermouth and is historically more correct.

One brand of sweet vermouth deserves special mention: Carpano Antica Formula (or Carpano Antica in short).

This vermouth radiates history. It comes in a hefty 1 litre bottle which has a unique number. If there’s some way for you to acquire this specific ingredient, I highly recommend it.

^*  ‘The Joy of Mixology’ by Gary Regan 

Orange Bloom

This cocktail is found in both The Savoy Cocktail Book and the Café Royal Cocktail Book. It shouldn’t be mistaken for an Orange Blossom, which is the gin equivalent of a Screwdriver.

I’ve tried tinkering with the ratios of this cocktail, but ended up using the original recipe. This cocktail seems quite straightforward, but is actually quite hard to do just right. The vermouth easily overtakes the Cointreau, but it really needs the sweet touch to make it work. It’s also quite susceptible to over-dilution. See if you can make this one work for you.
Ironically, the colour of this cocktail isn’t orange from the orange liqueur, but it’s orange from the red vermouth.

2 parts gin

1 part sweet vermouth

1 part Cointreau

glass:  cocktail

Stir with ice and strain into the glass.

Garnish with a cherry (if available).

Okay, I know: the bar doesn’t have cherries yet. But both books listed the same garnish specifically. And I was lucky to finally pick up some cocktail cherries, after looking for them for a long time. So it would be a waste not to use them.

It could still take quite a lot of time before we add cocktail cherries to the bar, so I’ll just sneak in some cherries here and there. And you’ll have to admit: it does look better that way.

Cointreau (White Lady)

I already hinted on orange liqueurs when introducing maraschino. And I reasoned we’d get to that soon enough. Now would be that time.

The point is that we need some kind of orange liqueur. But the world of orange liqueurs is extremely blurred. One thing is certain: the main distinction in orange liqueurs is between curaçao and triple sec.

Curaçao is of Dutch descent, with a little help from the Spanish. Originally it is made by steeping the dried peels of the Laraha fruit in spirits (although only the Senior distiller of Curaçao continues to use the limited Laraha harvest for their product). It comes in several colors: blue is (sadly) the best known variant, although there aren’t many good cocktails which are blue. Orange comes in second, and is the staple color to use. Red is also known, and even wilder colors might be found. An easy way to differentiate between curaçao and triple sec is checking whether it has a color.

Triple sec would be the colorless one. It’s the French answer to curaçao, although there’s still a debate whether Combier or Cointreau was the first triple sec. It’s also unclear what the term ‘triple sec’ means, but I’ll go along with those that assert it indicates a triple distilling process. When inferior products began to stain the reputation of triple sec, Cointreau decided to strike the term ‘triple sec’ from their bottles. Combier likes to present itself as the untarnished, original premium triple sec. All this is not without reason: there are certainly some bad triple secs on the market. So let’s stay away from those.

I won’t go into too much detail about the curaçao/triple sec confusion. That’s not the purpose of this blog and others have done more research into the subject (although still with plenty uncertainties). But if you want to get to the bottom of things, you can find more information here and here.

From a very practical viewpoint, one orange liqueur of fine quality would do to cover most cocktail recipes. So we’ll go with Cointreau. Not only because triple sec is used more often than curaçao in cocktails. But also because Cointreau is often named specifically as an ingredient, such as is the case with the legendary White Lady.

White Lady

Legendary, but relatively unknown. Harry Craddock considered it his signature cocktail. There’s some debate whether Harry McElhone (bartender, writer and eventually the owner of Harry’s New York Bar in Paris) or Harry Craddock can claim the White Lady. I’d have to side with Harry Craddock.

Sure, McElhone might have come up with the name: in 1919 he mixed a White Lady that contained crème de menthe, Cointreau and lemon juice. In his ABC of Mixing Cocktails he switches out the lemon juice for brandy. At the end of the 20s he finally conforms to the gin based variant. All in all it doesn’t strike as a thoroughly thought-out plan.

Meanwhile, in 1927, Harry Craddock buries a cocktail shaker which contains a White Lady in a wall of the American Bar at the Savoy (which hasn’t been reclaimed yet, by the way).

That’s not something one would do with just any cocktail: it means Craddock considered the White Lady something special.

It’s one of those simple recipes that are extremely logical, but somehow the White Lady didn’t survive the decades as well as the Sidecar or the Margarita. But that doesn’t have to stop us from continuing Craddock’s legacy.

4 parts gin

3 parts Cointreau

2 parts lemon juice

glass:  cocktail

Shake with ice and strain into the glass.

To be honest, the ratio is different from Craddock’s version. The Savoy calls for 2 parts gin, and 1 part each of Cointreau and lemon juice. I prefer the variant with slightly more Cointreau, but feel free to try both versions. You might even end up with your own ratio: that’s just fine. Recipes are the basis for mixing, not the final word. Tinkering with ratios and ingredients is part of the game.

As you can see, the White Lady is certainly lighter than the Aviation sans Violette. The lemon juice used here was carefully strained and extremely clear.

I prefer the White Lady without any garnish: it wouldn’t be a lady if it needed decoration to impress.