Homemade Tonic

Here in Wisconsin, we're finally starting to see lemongrass available at our farmers' markets. This means only one thing in our house--homemade tonic. (As an aside, you can buy fresh lemongrass and freeze it in the appropriate sized batches and pull it out to use in tonic in the off-season.) Store-bought tonic is fine in a pinch, but after tasting the homemade stuff, prepare to be ruined on cheap tonic forever. I've sort of created my own recipe by mixing together the recipes from Imbibe and Jeffrey Morgenthaler. My recipe goes like this:

• 4 cups water
• 3 cups pure cane sugar
• 3 tbsp powdered cinchona bark (this is the quinine; order from a herb store online if you can't find it locally)
• 6 tbsp citric acid (you can get this in the canning section or the bulk section of many grocery stores)
• 2 limes, zested and juiced
• 1 orange, zested and juiced
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• 1/4-ish cup of lemongrass stalks, roughly chopped
• 1 tsp allspice berries

Mix the water and sugar together and heat until the sugar dissolves. At this point, you've made some 4:3 simple syrup. Now, add in the rest of the ingredients and heat on low for 25 minutes. The part that I find the most annoying comes next--strain all the junk out. I do this by first using a strainer to get all the big chunks (the zest, lemongrass, etc.). Then, I use a tea strainer (I use a Finium stainless steel strainer, but anything like that would work as long as it is fine mesh) and a Chemex coffeemaker, although really that's sort of overkill--any pitcher would do, to strain out all the bark. It's going to be brown, so no worries about that. After it cools, I add about 2 oz or so of vodka to the syrup so it lasts longer and bottle it. I have been able to find nice bottles at TJ Maxx and Ikea. As an added bonus, you can freeze the syrup and thaw it as you need it. For this, I use plastic cups (like a Solo cup) and then seal them in a baggie. I get about a liter or so of the syrup, but this equals a lot more tonic water when it's mixed with fizzy water. I do about a 3:.75 ratio of fizzy water to syrup for a gin and tonic, but of course, you can do it to taste.

I am not sure how long this lasts before going bad, but I'm pretty cautious and try to use it all within about a month and a half or so. Because it makes so much, the freezing option is a good idea so you can use it for much longer.

Here are some photos of the process:

The ingredients. I had to use packaged lemongrass here.

Simple syrup mixture.

After the rest of the ingredients have been added.

Nearly there!

Filtering. This is a time-consuming process but really important.

Bottled!

Ready to become a gin and tonic.

Homemade tonic never fails to impress people, and if you're like me and a bit of an introvert, bringing a bottle to a party instantly gives you something to talk about. I like to mix up a bottle with fizzy water before a party so it's easier to manage on the fly. The large quantity you get out of this makes it pretty affordable compared to some of the nicer tonics that you can buy, and I think it's super tasty. 

Aged Negronis

One cocktail trend I've noticed is the act of aging cocktails in some sort of barrel. I first saw barrel-aged negronis on a menu when I was in Portland last fall. I was pretty intrigued by this--what gets aged in the barrel? Is the cocktail mixed and the whole thing aged or was just one ingredient aged (and if so, which one)? What sort of barrel was it aged in? Once I got home, I did some research and found a good entry on the barrel-aged cocktail trend on Jeffrey Morgenthaler's blog. I like the idea of pre-mixing drinks; it certainly makes dishing up drinks at cocktail parties much faster. I love a drink experiment, so I thought about what I wanted to make and how I was going to age it.

I thought about what would benefit from being soaked in a bourbon barrel (or equivalent) for a few weeks, and I pretty much immediately wrote off bourbon-based cocktails. The bourbon's already been aged for years in bourbon barrels, what's the point of aging it a few more weeks? I can see aging a specific ingredient like Campari or sweet vermouth and then mixing it with bourbon, but that's a test for another day. Because my two main spirit bases are bourbon and gin, I decided to focus on a gin drink. Since Morgenthaler did negronis, I figured I start with that, too. Essentially, you can age anything that's all booze, but I wanted to start simple and focus on a drink that I'm already very familiar with.

Now, I had to decide what I was going to age it in. There are multiple places online to get mini barrels, but that seemed like a lot of booze when I had no idea if this was going to be drinkable or not. One of the places that sells mini barrels, Tuthilltown Spirits, also sells kits that have a 375ml glass bottle along with a wood stick from a barrel. These sticks use something Tuthilltown calls "honey comb" cutouts; the sticks have many little holes drilled at all angles to provide for more surface area. The price on one of these kits is low ($12.50) and it requires a lot less booze, so I went with this.

At some point in my research I came across this blog entry from ManMade. This guy was doing exactly what I wanted to, so I used this as a model. I ordered a bag of Jack Daniel's Wood Smoking Chips from Amazon as an alternative to the barrel staves from Tuthilltown (I used 12 grams of chips so it would be nearly the same weight as the stave) and went to work mixing my batches of negronis.

The recipe I used was a basic negroni mix, but because I was making two batches that were 375ml, I upped the size of my batch. Each bottle had:

• 1/2 cup Plymouth gin
• 1/2 cup Campari
• 1/2 cup Carpano Antica sweet vermouth

The picture on the left is the barrel stave kit from Tuthilltown; the right is a mason jar with Jack Daniel's wood chips.

Pre-aging

I put these both in the root cellar (a dark, cool place) for two weeks. I shook them up every three or four days. After two weeks, I opened them up, strained each into its own pitcher, and invited folks over for taste tests. I also made a pitcher of "fresh" negronis as a base line. Right away I could see that the aged batches were much darker in color than the fresh. I thought that might tip everyone off to which was the fresh, but it didn't. I labeled each pitcher A, B, or C so it was a blind taste test. To really nerd out, I made up a questionnaire to capture what people thought as they tasted each sample. If I was going to do this again, I'd probably give everyone all three samples at once so they compare each against each other.

Some photos:

 

 Pouring Sample A

Filling out the questionnaire for Sample A

Pouring Sample B

The samples have been consumed...now to score these!

Sample A was the wood chip version, B was the fresh, and C was the barrel stave version. I added an small orange peel garnish to each. Most people thought the wood chip version was the most bitter and they generally liked the barrel stave version the most. Personally, I thought A was pretty smooth, not overly smoky, and quite sweet. No one else really agreed with this opinion, but maybe I was biased because I was hoping the best would be the one with the cheapest barrel ingredient. Anyway, the two smoked versions were really very different from the fresh and from each other. I would definitely make either version again as they were both quite tasty.

I plan on aging other cocktails in the future--so far I've thought about the Bijou (gin, sweet vermouth, green Chartreuse, and orange bitters), the Martinez (Old Tom gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino, and bitters), and the Dubonnet Cocktail (gin and Dubonnet). Dear readers, have any of you jumped on this trend? Post in the comments what you've aged and how you've aged it.

Dubonnet Cocktail

The Dubonnet Cocktail is to the French as the gin and tonic is to the British--both are delicious and have the added benefit of being an antimalarial. As gin made tonic a more palatable means of imbibing quinine for citizens of the British Empire, Dubonnet, a fortified wine, made quinine more palatable for French Foreign Legionnaire troops stationed in North Africa in the mid-19th Century.

I'm not sure what it is about quinine fortified beverages, but they do catch on. The Dubonnet Cocktail was also a favorite of the Queen Mother--rumor has it that she had one or two everyday before lunch (she preferred 70% Dubonnet to 30% gin with a slice of lemon tucked under the ice). In fact, the Queen Mum is so closely associated with the cocktail that the Dubonnet Cocktail is also sometimes called the Queen Mother Cocktail.

We chose to make the recipe that is featured in The Savoy Cocktail Book--the ratio of gin to Dubonnet is an easy 1:1 and we added a slice of lemon as well. I think the drink would also be delicious with a little orange bitters as well. The overall flavor is sweet and slightly astringent. We used a neutral tasting gin, Plymouth, since the Dubonnet is a pretty overpowering flavor. I figured there's no sense in having a gin attempting to compete with the favors of the Dubonnet; rather, I think a gin that gets along well with others is a better choice. Also, I would encourage the use of a lemon since the acid sort of cuts through the sweet and floral notes in the Dubonnet.

Also, I have to point out that I love the advertising associated with Dubonnet. There are a variety of posters, but I like this one the best:

Of course, I'm totally taken with the cat featured on the label and in much of the advertising as well.

Okay, here's the recipe!

Dubonnet Cocktail

1 oz. Dubonnet

1 oz. gin (we used Plymouth)
Slice of lemon

Pour the Dubonnet and the gin in a pitcher filled with ice, stir for about 30 seconds. Stain into coupe glasses and garnish with a slice of lemon.

El Presidente

We acquired some rum and some pineapple juice, so I was looking for something to use both. Of course, there are a zillion tiki drinks that use both, but I wanted to do something else. I looked in the usual places: CocktailDB, Joy of Mixology, the Playboy Bar Book, and I kept seeing El Presidente. I liked the idea of this one, being very simple, but the recipes I was seeing were not the same. They all started with rum, but some used white rum and some used gold rum, some had a whole ounce of lime juice, and some even had dry vermouth instead of pineapple juice. I definitely wanted to use pineapple juice, and I wanted to try the gold rum, so I sort of made up my own version, based on the recipes I had seen. I know that I tend to like cocktails in the Sours family, and I tend to like them when the "syrup" agent and the citrus juice are equal. So, here's what I came up with:

2 oz gold rum
1 oz pineapple juice
1/2 oz lime juice
1/2 oz grenadine

Wow, this turned out GREAT. This is going to go into regular rotation at our house, for sure. The pineapple is just the right amount, not too sweet, not too much lime. All the components taste balanced and really delicious. The juice makes a lovely foam on the top. I think this would probably still be good if you only have white rum, though the gold with the pineapple is very smooth.

Dark & Stormy, Cuba Libre

My husband just got back from a trip to Costa Rica, so he's been inspired to cook, and we've been eating black beans and rice, chicken, mangoes, avocadoes, pineapple -- great stuff. It has put me in the mood for rum drinks. Now, we've all ordered a rum & Coke in a bar, and frankly, I have always thought it was kind of terrible. The combination of cheap white rum and the kind of cola that comes out of a bar gun, filled out with way too much ice, is just uninspired and overly sweet and bland.

I have read before that a rum & Coke becomes a Cuba Libre when you put some lime in it. I've been reading Gary Regan's The Joy of Mixology and trying some of his recipes for basic drinks, as a sort of starting point, so I thought I'd see what he had to say for the Cuba Libre. To me, it looked like a lot of lime and not much Coke. Hmmmm. Turns out that changing that ratio is what makes a not very interesting rum & Coke into a rather delicious, refreshing, and well-balanced highball.

Cuba Libre
2 oz white rum
1 oz lime juice
3-4 oz cola

Some will say you can't make a Dark & Stormy unless you're using Gosling's Black Seal rum and Gosling's ginger beer. I've never had one made this "official" way, but dark rum with ginger beer or ginger ale and lime is a great basic highball that you shouldn't avoid just because you don't have any Gosling's. Call mine a Dim & Drizzly if you must. I used Kraken, which is a spiced rum, but the spiciness is pretty subtle. I often use it in a recipe that calls for dark rum, just because we happen to like it. We have been known to have homebrew ginger beer in the house, and we enjoy Fever Tree's ginger beer, too, but we didn't have any of that stuff right now, and we did have a bottle of Blenheim's ginger ale. Blenheim's has a spicy kick to it, so it's not a bad stand-in for ginger beer. I consulted Gaz Regan again:

Dark & Stormy
2 oz dark rum
3-4 oz ginger beer
squeeze of lime wedge

It was interesting to have these two drinks back-to-back -- the Coca-Cola in the Cuba Libre and the dark rum in the Dark & Stormy both have that sort of brown sugar/coffee/caramel flavor that tastes like the Caribbean and goes so perfectly with rum and lime. Now that I've had these with the right proportions, they are definitely both going into my regular rotation.

The Harvest Moon

So, those of you who know me know that I have a real thing for Crème de Violette--it's so sweet and floral and reminiscent of violet pastilles. The only Crème de Violette currently on the market in the U.S. is by Rothman and Winter. They also make a wide variety of other "Orchard Liqueurs," although they're a challenge to find (at least in our parts). However, this weekend we found the Orchard Apricot Liqueur at Surdyk's in Minneapolis. 

Orchard Apricot Liqueur, according to the Haus Alpenz website, "combines juice from the seasonal harvest of Austria’s famed Klosterneuberger apricots (known locally as "Marillen") with an eau-de-vie produced from this same fruit." The flavor is sweetly apricot with a boozy punch. 

On our drive home from Minneapolis (two and a half hours in blinding snow) I came up with the idea to make a variation on the Blue Moon--I even came up with a name for this drink, "Harvest Moon," for what I imagined would be the glow of a combination of Plymouth Gin, Orchard Apricot Liqueur, and lemon juice. Tonight, the Harvest Moon was born!

Okay, so it wasn't as orange in color as I imagined it would be, but it was completely delicious. Peyton added a few dashes of Peychaud's, which was a smart decision since the apricot is very sweet and the bitters cut the sweetness and added a bit more depth to the cocktail. After the Harvest Moon, I'm going to try this liqueur in champagne for an Apricot Royal. 

Ingredients:
2 oz. Plymouth Gin
1/2 oz. Orchard Apricot Liqueur
1/2 oz. lemon juice
2 dashes Peychaud's bitters

Add the first three ingredients in a shaker with ice and shake vigorously. Strain into a glass and add bitters.

Sloe Gin Fizz

Since my last post, I've had some amazing bar breakthroughs. I acquired a lovely 10 cubic foot refrigerator, located just a few feet from the bar that allows me to store all my supplies downstairs, which makes it far easier to prepare a drink without three trips up and down the stairs. I also found some amazing new liquors, so I've managed to swig back a couple new cocktails.

I've discovered a new love, the Sloe Gin Fizz. First of all, I know. We've all had a miserable experience with this weird cough syrup-like swill. I too had an unfortunate time with a bottle of De Kuyper's "Sloe Gin" shortly after the Jack White/Loretta Lynn song "Portand, Oregon" was released.

Anyway, it was 2004 and during those heady days, this weird faux sloe gin was all that was available, so I had one Sloe Gin Fizz (SGF) and a bottle of sloe gin that sat in my cabinet for approximately four more years before I threw it out.

Cut to this 2013 and I'm searching out vintage and curious cocktail recipes. In many of the new books I've gotten, sloe gin has popped up more than once and is always referred to as "Plymouth Sloe Gin." Interesting, as the only Plymouth I've ever seen is their spectacular regular gin. Their sloe gin has thus been on my shopping list for awhile, but until a few weeks ago, I hadn't been able to find it. We were in Madison, Wisconsin for an overnight trip and went to a liquor store there where, lo and behold, they had Plymouth Sloe Gin! It's not cheap (like $35), so I only bought one bottle. This past weekend, I wanted to try something new, so I found a recipe in The PDT Cocktail Book (I like this book, but many of the drinks are so complicated and call for such obscure ingredients that it makes Imbibe recipes look basic). There are a ton of different SGF recipes out there. Out of the books I have, maybe three of them include SGF recipes. All three of these are different. The PDT references a recipe from J.A. Grohusko in Jack's Manual from 1910, and because that was the oldest I saw, it won. A good friend had a good amount of Meyer lemons and she gave me some wonderful Meyer lemon simple syrup and I used it here (by the way, AWESOME). I've noted how I adjusted my recipe to account for this.

• 1 oz. Plymouth Sloe Gin
• 1 oz. Plymouth Gin
• .75 oz. lemon juice
• .25 oz. simple syrup (I used .5 oz. Meyer lemon simple syrup and .5 oz of lemon juice)
• 3 oz. soda water

Mix all ingredients except the soda water and pour into an ice-filled glass. Top with soda.

I am absolutely in love with this drink. The sloe gin is nice and fruity and not cough syrup-y at all. There are a lot of good articles out there about sloe gin (sloe gin at Wikipedia, how to make your own sloe gin from Gordon's, and the always-helpful Imbibe Magazine with Elements: Sloe Gin), so I won't get into all that. Just know that in England, sloe gin is one of those drinks like limoncello that people often make at home. This sort of explains why good sloe gin is hard to find, as there doesn't appear to be much of a market for it. I like this drink so much because it is incredibly drinkable. I think the mixing of regular gin and sloe gin kind of thins out the sloe gin and makes it more palatable. Additionally, the lemon adds just enough sourness to the sweetness of the sloe gin and simple syrup.

Even if you've had a bad experience with sloe gin in the past, give this a try. I'd love to hear of your past SGF indiscretions and current better experiences, so leave me some feedback in the comments section.

The Manhattan

It's hard to believe that we haven't blogged about the Manhattan yet--especially since it was probably my gateway cocktail to the world of other delicious cocktails. It's one of those drinks where you're likely to already have all the ingredients on hand (whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters, and a cherry, if you like), but don't let the simple ingredients fool you into thinking the Manhattan is a simple drink. A good Manhattan is sweet, smooth, and vaguely herbal. It goes down too easy as many attendees of our annual February Doldrums Party can attest to. Some folks like them up, others on the rocks. Some shake a Manhattan, others stir. However, these are the finer points you can explore later.

The history of the cocktail dates back to the late 19th Century and is one of cocktails named for NYC's five boroughs. I just tried the Brooklyn and will be blogging about that experience very soon. And, of course, at some point the Bronx, the Queens, and the Staten Island Ferry will also be featured (although the Staten Island Ferry sounds retched, draw your own conclusions).

Although some prefer a perfect Manhattan (half sweet and half dry vermouth), I prefer mine with all sweet vermouth, Carpano Antica or Vya are delicious if you can get your hands on either. Also, I should confess that I like my Manhattan with bourbon--but, let's be honest, I prefer bourbon in every whiskey cocktail. However, a traditional Manhattan is generally made with rye or canadian whiskey (never brandy, Wisconsin, never brandy). For more history on the Manhattan, check out this little NYT article.

Ingredients:
2 oz whiskey (bourbon or rye)
1 oz sweet vermouth
2 dashes bitters (we used Fee Brothers, but orange bitters are also nice)
1 Luxardo cherry

Stir all liquid ingredients with ice and strain into a glass. Serve up or over ice and garnish with a cherry.

The Cardinal's Cocktail

Well, I did some drinking over the holidays, but I did not write anything. Suffice to say that my husband and I finally discovered what a difference homemade makes when it comes to eggnog. Husband made two batches of a somewhat famous recipe from an old Four Roses ad, and we were invited to share some of a friend's batch that had been aged for one year (Really! Alton Brown's recipe). The two eggnogs were different, but both were delicious and in no way like the stuff you buy at the grocery store.

Speaking of homemade being well worth the effort, a friend of ours gave us a bottle of homemade falernum and a bottle of homemade orgeat yesterday. I will write more about the falernum soon, but for tonight I tried the orgeat. Orgeat is a syrup made of almonds and a few other ingredients. Its most well-known use is in the Mai-Tai, but I wanted to try to find something different, so I consulted the CocktailDB and found this one that I had never heard of, called Cardinal's Cocktail. I have had no luck finding out any history of this one because most drinks I have seen called Cardinal involve red wine or Campari, for the bright red color. I'm not sure why this version is not better known, because it's really delicious. The only problem I could find with it was that it was all gone way too quickly.

Cardinal's Cocktail
1 1/2 oz white rum
3/4 oz lime juice
1/4 oz triple sec (Cointreau)
1/4 oz grenadine
1/4 oz orgeat

I have tried store-bought orgeat that was a "gourmet" brand and I didn't think it had much almond flavor at all, but this homemade stuff is terrific. It's thick with a pinky-beigey color, and you have to shake it really well but the flavor is sweet almond, like marzipan.

This recipe as written had 1 oz of lime juice, but it made more sense to me to cut it to 3/4 oz, to make it equal parts lime juice and sweetening ingredients. The balance came out just right, I thought. It definitely didn't need more lime.

If you don't know CocktailDB.com, definitely check it out. It's run by Martin Douderoff and Ted Haigh, aka Dr. Cocktail, the author of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. Not only is it a great resource about recipes and ingredients, but also it features really fun photos of bottles from Haigh's personal collection.