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.