Periodic cocktail check

All cocktails used to be accessible via the ‘periodic bar check’, but since I put the bar on hold for some time, that isn’t the case anymore. Time to do a cocktail overview, so you can easily link to the different recipes. I’ll be doing this periodically as well, although not every month.

Gin-based

Aviation

Cabaret

Devil’s Own

Dry Martini

Gin Ho

Gin Scaffa

Imperial

Lord Suffolk

Monk

Orange Bloom

Pink Gin

Poet’s Dream

Rolls Royce

White Lady

No base

D.O.M.

Humpty Dumpty Cocktail

Wailuc  (does contain gin)

Non-alcoholic

Eskimo Flip

Thanks for joining my expanding bar tour in 2013. May the next year bring some nice new additions (including a new base spirit) and more tasty cocktails to experience.

It’s not in the bar yet, but I hope you have some bubbly stuff to have a toast to the new year.

Salud!

Periodic bar check

Well, absolutely no new ingredients to report. I thought it was better to take a pause and explore the other possibilities we now have with the bar.
But in the new year we'll kick off with an ambitious new addition to the bar.

The bar now holds:

Bases

gin

Aperitif Wines

dry vermouth
sweet vermouth

Liqueurs
maraschino
Cointreau
Bénédictine

Bitters
Angostura bitters

Juices
lemon

General Ingredients

ice

Glasses

Old Fashioned glass

cocktail glass

Barware

jigger

bar spoon
cocktail shaker
juicer
bar knife
channel knife

Bar on hold: Lord Suffolk and the Gin Scaffa

Yes, there’s still more to do with the current bar: two extra cocktails (or one, if you want to be fundamental about it) for the recipe book.

Lord Suffolk

Who’s Lord Suffolk? I really wouldn’t know. Is it important? I guess not. Not for making this cocktail, at least.

It can be found in both the The Savoy Cocktail Book and the Café Royal Cocktail Book. They both give exactly the same recipe and I didn’t see any reason to tinker with what I found.

5 parts gin

1 part sweet vermouth

1 part Cointreau

1 part maraschino

glass:  cocktail

Stir with ice and strain into the glass.

A combination with two liqueurs, the first drink we encounter to do so. And it works. All ingredients are still quite discernable, but seem to work together just fine.

Gin Scaffa

This is actually opens up a whole new family of mixed drinks. The scaffa is different from the traditional cocktail, although we got used to the term ‘cocktail’ for all mixed drinks. While the original cocktail concept has spirit, sugar, bitters and water, the scaffa lacks the water (or more specifically ice) component. That’s right: a scaffa isn’t chilled, it’s supposed to be consumed at room temperature.

The word ‘scaffa’ seems to mean ‘cupboard’ in some obscure language. I’m not sure whether that’s really the origin of this type of drink, but it very aptly conveys the idea of the drink. You look what’s left in your drinking inventory and whip some of it together in a glass. It’s not fancy, but it’s pragmatic. It’s simple out of necessity or because you just can’t be bothered for once (we all have those moments).

I wouldn’t add juice to a scaffa, but it will normally contain a spirit, liqueur(s) and very possibly bitters. Just stirring it in the glass will do. That’s all there is to it.

There are scaffa recipes, like this one here. But it should be obvious that any iceless concoction you pull from your cupboard fits the bill, so don’t feel limited.

2 parts gin

1 part Bénédictine

1 dash Angostura bitters

glass:  any

Build in the glass and stir.

Adding a garnish or prescribing a specific kind of glass just doesn’t seem to fit the concept, in my opinion. So you can actually slack off and give it a fancy name. Brilliant.

Bar on hold: Cabaret and the Wailuc

Before year’s end I want to push through some extra recipes which can be made with our current bar. So let’s get to some mixing.

Cabaret

There are actually two kinds of the Cabaret cocktail. One version can be found in The Savoy Cocktail Book and uses gin, a quinquina (a type of aperitif wine), Angostura and absinthe (or pastis). But that’s not the version I’ll be putting forward here.

The other Cabaret can be considered a milder version of the Rolls Royce. Leaving out the sweet vermouth makes the cocktail a bit less aromatic and easier, even though the bitters fill up the gap that’s been left.

4 parts gin

3 parts dry vermouth

1 part Bénédictine

2 dashes Angostura bitters

glass:  cocktail

Stir with ice and strain into the glass.

Garnish with a cherry (if available).

Of course there are also different version of this type of Cabaret: ratios can vary between recipes. I’ve stuck to the ratio that Robert Hess uses.

Poet’s Dream

If you happen to have some orange bitters (probably not, but you if you like mixing you should really consider looking for them) you get a bonus recipe with the Cabaret.

If you substitute orange bitters for the Angostura bitters, your concoction would be called the Poet’s Dream.

Wailuc

This is an oddball. I stumbled upon it at the CocktailDB. It has gin and sweet vermouth, but the base spirit only gets a supporting role.

7 parts sweet vermouth

2 parts gin

1 dash maraschino

glass:  cocktail

Stir with ice and strain into the glass.

Garnish with a lemon twist

You’ll have to like sweet vermouth to like this cocktail, so much is clear. Use a high quality vermouth like Carpano Antica to get the most out of the Wailuc.

Since the gin takes a back seat, don’t hesitate to use a high ABV gin (I went for Tanqueray here).

The Golden Ratio

When discussing the Devil’s Own I briefly touched upon the golden ratio. It’s a system that has been put forth by Jamie Boudreau. Why not let the man explain the system himself:

Before we continue, a little quiz: do you recognize the bottle that he is holding at the beginning of the clip? It has seen some coverage in this blog.

Okay, so on the golden ratio.

Jamie is talking in ounces, but basically it comes down to a 6:3:1 ratio for spirits, aperitif and modifier. If you are using centiliters, you probably don’t even have to do some math: 10 cl sounds fine for most cocktail glasses.

This golden ratio is a starting point. It’s a bit risky to say it will work 95% of the time. And even though some recipes might work, that’s not the same as mixing a legendary recipe. It will require some thinking and experience to balance the flavors, certainly if you’re in the mood for a specific kind of cocktail. Even if you stumble upon something memorable, it might still pay off to tweak around a bit with the ratio or the bitters.

Don’t forget that Jamie mentions that you can add bitters to taste. Bitters are the magic wand of the bartender. We only have Angostura at the moment, but we will be adding more later. It’s that kind of finishing touches which can make a cocktail truly shine.

Apart from freeform mixing, when you are trying out new combinations, the golden ratio will be very useful in the following situations:

·        You are mixing somewhere else without access to your bar and have to make do with the stuff that happens to lay around (just pray they have some vermouth).

·        You are not satisfied with the way a vermouth cocktail tastes, and want to play around with the ratios. The golden ratio could be your choice alternative.

Just don’t go in blindly. In this forum someone tried a combination of tequila, Lillet and Drambuie. Well, the Lillet is not the problem here (it will probably never be, actually). But Drambuie is honeysweet whisky liqueur and tequila is the most outspoken, harsh, hard-to-mix spirit you could ever choose. There’s a reason there are not many cocktails with Drambuie and not many (good) cocktails with tequila: they tend to make problems with other ingredients. I can’t even start to imagine how these could work together in a drink.

There’s still something useful to gain from the forum page, though. As you can read there, the golden ratio isn’t the only ‘standard ratio’ or ‘no fail ratio’ that’s being used out there. And of course, not every cocktail has aperitif wine as an ingredient.

But go ahead and play around with the idea. Who knows, maybe you’ll stumble upon something brilliant.