Spirited Cocktails

During our Brown Liquor Tweetup earlier in the week, our group eventually made its way to a wonderful cocktail bar called the Clover Club. You may remember, I’ve posted about the Clover Club cocktail in the past, and while they seemed to do a fine job mixing their namesake drink, another cocktail on the menu caught my eye: the Ward Eight.

The Ward Eight is essentially a whisky sour, but with the addition of grenadine. In The Essential Cocktail, Dale DeGroff teaches us about its historic political roots in Boston’s Eighth Ward. The story goes that it was created on Election Eve 1898 to celebrate the victory of Martin Lomasney. Historians can debate if that’s true. While they do, I’ll be pouring myself a drink.

Here’s what you’re going to need:

2oz rye whiskey
3/4oz fresh lemon juice
3/4oz simple syrup
1/4oz grenadine
Cherry to garnish

Combine all of your ingredients along with ice in your cocktail shaker. Shake and strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice. Garnish with a cherry.

The more observant among you will notice that this cocktail is remarkably similar to yesterday’s cocktail: the Jack Rose, and you’d be correct! Just like the Jack Rose, the Ward Eight follows the traditional sour recipe (2oz base, 3/4oz sweet and 3/4oz sour), and adds a touch of grenadine as well. The difference, of course, is the choice of base. The Jack Rose uses Applejack or Apple Brandy, and the Ward Eight uses whiskey. Either way, you really can’t go wrong.

Cheers!

There’s something deeply satisfying about an apple. The combination of the sweet and the tart. The crunch of that first bite, and the soft flesh inside. Apples have always been one of my favorite fruits, and I relish the idea of bringing them to one of my other favorite things – cocktails!

The Jack Rose is an absolute classic. It has appeared in hotel bars for over a century, and has even shown up in the writing of Ernest Hemmingway. It’s made in the traditional sour style, using the 2:3/4:3/4 ratio, as you’ll see below.

Here’s what you’re going to need:

2oz Applejack
3/4oz fresh lemon juice
3/4oz simple syrup
1/4oz grenadine
Apple slice and/or cherry for garnish

Combine the Applejack, lemon juice, simple syrup and grenadine in a cocktail shaker along with ice. Shake and strain over ice into a rocks glass, and garnish with a cherry and/or apple slice.

This cocktail might not give you the crunch of an apple, but it does give you that sweet/tart taste that I’m certain you’ll enjoy.

If you want to fancy things up a bit, you could (and really should) use homemade grenadine (I was just being lazy). Homemade grenadine is a simple mixture of 1 part sugar to 1 part pomegranate juice. (Correction: this post originally called for simple syrup to pomegranate juice. What you actually use is just plain sugar. Make grenadine just like you’d make simply syrup, using pomegranate juice instead of water.)

You could also use Calvados (apple brandy) instead of Applejack, though if you prefer a sweeter drink, you might want to up the simple syrup to 1oz in that case.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers!

The Tom Collins is the classic gin-based sour. It follows the traditional formula of 2oz base spirit, 3/4oz sour and 3/4oz sweet, topped off with a bit of club soda for some fizz. The best thing about a Tom Collins is that it’s not only tasty and refreshing in its own right, but one might consider it the blank canvas of cocktails – it’s very easy to create variations to suit your tastes and impress your guests.

To make the basic Tom Collins, here’s what you’re going to need:

2oz gin (I like to use a particularly high quality gin here, like Plymouth, since it’s the main flavor)
3/4oz fresh lemon juice
3/4oz simple syrup
Club soda
A cherry and lemon or orange slice to garnish

Combine the gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup in your shaker, and add ice. Shake well, and strain into a Collins glass (of course). Top with club soda, and add your cherry and citrus for garnish.

At this point, you could easily be done. With absolutely no modification, this is one of my favorite cocktails (as long as quality gin is used). But there’s so much more you could do.

Variations

-In place of gin, you could use bourbon, in which case this would be a John Collins.
-If you were to serve this in a highball glass with no garnish, it would be a Fizz.
-You can easily add any fruit of your choice. Berries (blackberries, raspberries, etc.) tend to work best. For example, to make a Blackberry Tom Collins, combine 2-3 blackberries with my simple syrup, and muddle them well. Then just add the lemon juice, gin and ice, and continue per the method above. As an added touch, consider using your fruit of choice as your garnish.

So much better than the over-consumed gin & tonic, the Tom Collins is the perfect primer for the new gin drinker. Give it a try, and let me know what you think!

Cheers!

I’m always a little bit hesitant to pick up a new spirit when I can only think of one cocktail in which I might use it. Gin, bourbon, rye, and rum are all staples, and I have no doubt that I ill make good use of them (to put it mildly) regardless of cost. However, I wasn’t so sure when I came across a bottle of Pisco at my favorite liquor store recently. I was certainly familiar its namesake cocktail, the Pisco Sour, but was that enough to justify the purchase?

Yes. Yes it was.

Pisco is a grape-based brandy from South America – generally Chile or Peru. There are a number of brands and varieties, which you can read more about here.

In doing a little more research after picking up my first bottle of Pisco, I found there are a few other cocktails (and I hope you’ll write to me to share others!) but the Pisco Sour is by far the most well known.

Here’s what you’re going to need:

1.5oz Pisco
1oz simple syrup
3/4oz lemon juice (I’ve seen other recipes use lime juice instead; your choice!)
1 egg white
Dash of Angostura bitters for garnish

Combine the four base ingredients (Pisco, simple syrup, citrus and egg white) in your shaker along with a healthy portion of ice. Shake extra long and hard – remember, anytime you use egg white you want to shake a bit extra to fully emulsify the egg and create some nice foam. Strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with several drops of angostura bitters.(Definitely don’t leave out that last part – the bitters are a must in this cocktail. But why would you? Bitters are awesome.)

The result: a complex sour cocktail with a nice foam, an interesting base spirit and a fascinating history.

Cheers!

The daiquiri is one of the simplest of all cocktails, and also one of the most misunderstood. All too often, people confuse the daiquiri for that mix of sugar, cheap booze, and food coloring that comes out of a Slushy machine in Vegas. In truth, not only is the real thing easier to make at home, but it’s much tastier too!

The basic daiquiri follows the formula for a traditional sour:

2oz base spirit
3/4oz sweet
3/4oz sour

In the case of the daiquiri, the spirit is Rum, the sweet is simple syrup, and the sour is fresh lime juice. Simply combine those three ingredients in the 2/.75/.75 proportion (with ice!), shake vigorously and strain, and you’ve got yourself a very fine cocktail. But it wouldn’t be much fun if we stopped there!

I’ve been on a summer cocktail kick lately, and the strawberries are finally starting to look good again. To make a fresh strawberry daiquiri, simply add strawberries to the recipe above!

2oz rum (I prefer a dark rum like Santa Teresa or Barbancourt, but be sure to sample a variety of brands)
3/4oz simple syrup
3/4oz fresh lime juice
1 large (or 2 small) hulled strawberries

Add the strawberries and simple syrup to your shaker and muddle the strawberries well. Then add the lime juice and rum, and top off your shaker with ice. Give it a good shake, and strain into a daiquiri glass (which essentially looks like a rounded-off martini glass; no worries if you don’t have them – any cocktail glass will do!) Garnish with a small, fresh strawberry (hull still in-tact), sliced vertically from the bottom up towards the hull.

Prefer your daiquiri to be of the frozen variety (a bit more akin to the kind you see in Vegas but maybe… good?) Simply add the ingredients to your blender along with crushed ice and give it a few good spins!

Cheers!

If you do any reading at all about the art of cocktails (and I assume you do, since you’ve ended up here!), you’ve probably come across the name Dale DeGroff. If you haven’t, you need to read more! And you should start with Dale’s book, The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks.

Anyway, Dale is commonly known as the King of Cocktails (rightfully so), and you really can’t go wrong mixing one of his recipes. Among my favorite is his take on the classic Gin Sling.

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 1/2oz gin
1oz fresh lemon juice
3/4oz simple syrup
1/2oz sweet vermouth (the Italian kind)
A dash of Angostura bitters
Club soda

Mix all of the ingredients except the club soda in your shaker and top with ice. Give a good hard shake. Strain into a Collins glass over fresh ice, and top off with club soda.

Generally you’ll want to garnish this with a lemon twist or a spiral lemon peel.

The end result is refreshing, and simply delicious.

Cheers!

In my last post, I discussed the Earl Grey MarTEAni – an inventive cocktail from the mind of Audrey Saunders at Pegu Club. Today I’d like to cover another Pegu Club classic – the French Kiss (gotta love that name!)

The French Kiss uses an interesting liqueur called Pernod. Pernod is a pastis – an anise-flavored aperitif that was created as a substitute for Absinthe in the early 20th century. Pernod can certainly be consumed on its own – though to do so it is usually diluted with water (about 5:1). In mixed cocktails however, it lends a great anise (licorice-like) flavor, which I personally really enjoy.

So here’s what you’ll need (again, notice that common sour formula of 2oz base, 3/4oz sour, 3/4oz sweet):

2oz gin�
3/4oz simple syrup
3/4oz fresh lime juice
1/4oz Pernod
1 spring of fresh mint

Simply combine all of the ingredients in your shaker, top off with plenty of ice, and give it a good hard shake for at least 10-15 seconds.

You want to serve this cocktail straight up (no ice), and technically it should be double-strained. This is mainly because, as you’ll notice after shaking, you’ve got quite a bit of mint floating about, and most bartenders prefer a cleaner look. To double-strain, you strain first (into an intermediate glass) using a Hawthorn strainer, then again into your cocktail glass using a Julep strainer. This will help remove most of the bits of mint.

And there you have it – a French Kiss, once again, courtesy of the brilliant mind of Audrey Saunders.

Cheers!