I definitely did not have all of my share of vodka last year.

• This is a couple of week’s old now, but a new study has suggested that the average consumption of alcohol in Scotland runs to 46 bottles of vodka a year – per person. Of course, there are there are those wh remain unconvinced.
• Continuing the social responsibility theme, SF/futurist blog io9 touches on why drinking while pregnant is bad (DNA mutations aren’t as awesome as the X-Men would have us believe, apparently) while the New York Times’ City Room blog looks at a younger crowd appearing in the Big Apple’s bars.
• Minimum pricing is the concept that won’t go away, but will it work?
• Cocktail Virgin Slut rounds up the 30+ entries for this month’s MxMo.

Tea Cup Pot by Eduardo Mueses on Flickr.

From Japanese tea ceremonies to a construction worker’s tea break, tea is part of daily life across the globe. The attraction of this strange, exotic, herbal brew was one of the threads that drew colonial interest across the Ural Mountains in deepest Asia, threads that would bind together into trade routes and empires. It can represent sophistication and tradition just as easily as it embodies the chosen beverage of the working man.

And so we come to cocktails. The path through craft mixology is characterized by the search for new ingredients to incorporate into the cocktail tradition and tea is a compelling candidate. Whether it’s a black, green or white tea, or indeed, any variation, tea can add complexity and depth to different styles of drink.

A demonstration, then. Take an existing recipe and tea it up. The basis for the drink is the Pearlescent, which has picked up a bit of press over recent weeks. The original recipe calls for vodka, orgeat, Maraschino liqueur and a lemon zest, shaken and served up. It’s a great drink in its own right, but it also offers room for maneuver when adding twists.

The first of these twists was to use gin – Beefeater 24, if only for the inclusion of Japanese sencha tea in its botanical mix. The second was to switch the Maraschino for Limoncello and the lemon twist for a grapefruit twist. The final change was the addition of an Earl Grey rinse. The end result still has the pleasing sweetness of the Pearlescent, but with the added bonus of the rich flavours from both the tea and the gin mingling with the other ingredients’ citrus and almond notes.

The Incandescent

75ml Earl Grey tea
50ml Beefeater 24
2 barspoons Limoncello liqueur
1 barspoon orgeat
1 grapefruit zest twist

Rinse a chilled martini glass with the tea. Shake the other ingredients (including the zest) with ice and fine-strain into the chilled, rinsed glass.

It’s a brand new year, rife with possibility. What to do? Where to start?

• How about last year? Minimum drink pricing is back on the agenda, with its predictable supporters and detractors. Some might see minimum pricing as a stealth tax against the poorest sections of society; others look at the estimated £900 that alcohol abuse costs every person in Scotland.
• How about further back? Like 200,000 years ago? Apparently the caveman lifestyle is all the rage – in NYC.
• The Bronx Beer Caves.
• The Washington Post on the indescribable taste – and expense – of cognac.
• Oh Gosh! on Mozart Dry – unsweetened chocolate spirit.

And so this is Christmas, and what have I done? Back at the start of the year, I set out to post an original cocktail recipe here on the internet every week throughout 2009, and – a couple of missed weeks here and a couple of double posts there aside – so here we are. If I’m honest, the main idea behind the entire project was to force me to create content for the site. I’ve let blogs die before, usually through a lack of focus and discipline, so I thought that operating to a consistent framework would see what I started at ednbrg into something more substantial, something other than a half-finished idea gathering dust in the blind alleyways of the internet. When I started, I certainly didn’t see myself registering a domain and moving the entire operation into paid hosting. Then again, when I started, I didn’t see myself moving jobs halfway through the year.

2009 has probably been my most productive year as a bartender. I don’t have well-defined goals, but a first appearance at a national final of a cocktail competition is definitely progress and also makes a great response to everyone who tells me to get a proper job. This project has been an education. It’s forced me to broaden my thinking about mixed drinks and look further for inspiration. Throughout the year, I’ve gained that from the massed ranks of cocktail enthusiasts that can be found online – if there’s a link in the sidebar over there, then you’re in my RSS reader and I thank you for the good work you’re doing. I should also share some love with Liqurious for letting drinkgeeks show off the wonderful things they’ve found online (and driving 75% of my referred traffic…). While I’m not sure if the FDA care that much about me, I should point out that a decent amount of the products I’ve used during the course of the project was provided free of charge, either through sympathetic bar managers or from the brands themselves. Particular thanks are due to Abelha Cachaca, Maxxium UK, Diageo, and Bacardi Brown-Forman.

Slide Rule Detail by Dominic’s pics on Flickr.

This year in drinks has thrown up some interesting numbers – the most commonly used base spirit across the 52 recipes was vodka which featured in 20 drinks, though I’ve not made a distinction between flavoured and unflavoured vodkas. Next most popular was rum (10/52) ahead of brandy and gin (6/52 each) and a surprise top five slot for cachaca (5/52). Products also tended to bunch together – four of the five cachaca recipes came over a five week period in the summer and the effect was even more pronounced with liqueurs and modifying ingredients. I would often use a newly discovered ingredient with a variety of base spirits in a short space of time, hence there are clumps of recipes involving Edmond Briottet Creme de Mure, Fee Brothers Aztec Chocolate Bitters and Fernet Branca at various times of the year. The slight majority of drinks were of Embury’s Aromatic Type (27:25), with lemon juice just shading the Sour Type drinks over lime (12:9; one drink had both).

Of course, I’m writing this like it’s all over. It’s not, not yet. I’m not planning on stopping posting original recipes here through 2010, but I’m going to take some time to decide how I’m going to approach the coming year. Until then, however, I still owe one more drink.

Another Castle

45ml Bols Genever
20ml Drambuie
30ml apple juice
5ml absinthe (in an atomiser, I used La Fée Parisienne)

Using a lighter, flame the absinthe into a chilled martini glass. Stir the other ingredients with ice and strain into the chilled, absinthe-flamed glass. Garnish with a lemon zest twist.

It’s the season of goodwill and a time to remember the birth of – wait, gifts?! Have a great Christmas!

Relativity

15ml Belvedere Cytrus (any citrus flavoured vodka will do)
10ml St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
2 dashes Fee Bros. Peach Bitters
Top with champagne (the drier, the better)

Build in a chilled champagne flute. Garnish with a lemon zest twist and a cocktail cherry.

Elephant Room by S.A. Young on Flickr

Bourbon was declared as a “distinctive product of the United States” in 1964, but it’s stood as the flagship of American spirit production for long before that. There are a couple of key distinctions between bourbon and European (Scottish and Irish) whiskies, not least the sour mash process. Arguably, given that pretty fundamental difference in production combined with the different grain base (at least 51% corn for bourbon versus the traditional malted barley for Scotch), comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges. Maybe not so much apples and oranges – oranges and grapefruits might be more appropriate.

Lunch at the Pendennis Club by Southern Foodways Alliance on Flickr.

The natural question at this point is why has it taken me fifty weeks to feature one of the major spirits? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. For one, dark spirits are not as popular as white spirits in the UK market, and bourbon is somewhere behind rum and Scotch in that category. As such, it doesn’t feature in my thinking all that often and while it would be unfair to say that brands don’t support their products with competitions and the like – Maker’s Mark recently held took their UK finalists to the States and held the final in the Pendennis Club – but these are often a rarity among a calendar filled with events sponsored by vodka, gin and rum producers.

However, even on these distant shores, bourbon is deserving of more than a tip of the hat. Bourbon is the whiskey on which the cocktail tradition is built which makes it impossible to ignore. When talking about it in cocktails, the obvious point of reference is the Manhattan – I’m hearing an imaginary chorus of people shouting about proper Manhattans being made with rye, but if I put my hands just here over my ears, we’ll be ok – and the overwhelming urge is to go old school. And if we’re thinking old school, the obvious point of reference is the Sazerac and yes, the rye chorus has a point here. It’s the aromatic rinse that makes the Sazerac great, and although absinthe pairs well with rye, it tends to overpower the more delicate flavours in most bourbons. It’d be incredibly opportunistic to claim that adding a rinse to a Manhattan constitutes a whole new recipe, so I’ve opted to add a couple of complimentary flavours from the great American tastebook in the form of maple syrup and Fee Brothers’ Aztec Chocolate Bitters. Still incredibly opportunistic, though.

Maple Union

40ml bourbon (I used Maker’s Mark)
20ml sweet vermouth (Cinzano Rosso)
1 barspoon maple syrup
1 dash Fee Bros. Aztec Chocolate Bitters
10ml Yellow Chartreuse

Rinse a chilled martini glass with the Chartreuse. Stir all other ingredients with ice and strain into the chilled, rinsed glass. Garnish with an orange zest twist.

I’ve been exploring the idea of seasonally appropriate flavours over recent weeks which, naturally, got me onto thinking about seasonally inappropriate flavours. Things that work in the context of sunny summer afternoons often don’t on rainy winter evenings. Beyond that, certain types of ingredient have fallen into specific contexts over time. If I’d thought about it at the start of this project, the notion of using a vermouth in a refreshing citrusy cocktail would have seemed counterintuitive, given my own attitudes towards fortified wines back in the day. Context – or more accurately, the previous contexts in which an ingredient or technique are found – is a useful guide, but it shouldn’t be taken as a stonecrafted edict.

And so we come to orgeat. No, this is not supposed to be a non sequitur.

Orgeat is beloved by many, but is rarely used outside of tiki drinks and more rarely still with spirits other than rum. If it appears in a recipe, you’d get incredibly long odds on the drink not falling into Embury’s Sour Type classification. This may be as much because including an opaque sweetener in an Aromatic Type drink runs against the standardized aesthetic of a brilliantly clear beverage as it is because orgeat combines so very well with citrus and rum. However, once I’d realized that orgeat is hardly used outside of the tiki/rum/sour context, the obvious thing was to try it in an entirely different one.

This is how we end up talking about hot drinks.

Tea Cup Pot by Eduardo Mueses on Flickr.

There are exceptions – the Irish Coffee being the most notable – but hot alcoholic drinks are rare. It’s worth remembering that they existed before iced cocktails, given the difficulty of obtaining a consistent supply ice in the era before refrigeration. One of the most popular concoctions of the North American colonists was flip, which was “mixed with a device called a loggerhead…”

“- a narrow piece of iron about three feet long with a slightly bulbous head the size of a small onion. It was originally created for heating tar or pitch, with the bulb buried in the glowing coals until it blazed red-hot, then quickly withdrawn and plunged into the pitch to make it pliable. The instrument served a similar heating function when plunged red-hot into a beer-rum-and-molasses concoctions. The whole mess would foam and hiss and send up a mighty head.”
Wayne Curtis, And a Bottle of Rum, p. 83

As I’m lacking in both an open fire and a loggerhead, I’d have to go for less dramatic means of heating my drink. In time, I’d also opt to steer clear of coffee and dairy. Fernet Branca and cloves were chosen as complementary flavours on top of a whisky base, the Glenrothes Select Reserve in this case. As for the orgeat, it really does work in this drink. Sometimes, taking things out of context is the only way to go.

L’Étranger Cocktail

50ml The Glenrothes Select Reserve
15ml orgeat
15ml Fernet Branca
5 cracked cloves
50ml hot water

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass or suitable heat-proof  container. Fine-strain into a small tea-cup or rocks glass (if you’re going for a glass, make sure to heat it first so it doesn’t crack). Garnish with a twist of lemon zest and a cinnamon stick.

Midwinter

25ml Finlandia Cranberry Fusion
12.5ml Guignolet de Dijon (Cherry Marnier or Cherry Heering are acceptable substitutes)
12.5ml gingerbread syrup (from a well known, Seattle based, international chain of coffee shops, if you must know)
25ml lemon juice
1 dash egg white

Combine all ingredients in a shaker. Dry-shake; add ice and shake. Fine-strain into a chilled martini glass.

And so, it is cold out and daylight’s a fleeting thing. We’re in the part of the year when those rich, warming spice flavours come in favour. In fact, spice goes so well with winter that last December’s MxMo (hosted by Colonel Tiki) was themed for it. As part of my preparation, I made a batch of homemade Krupnik – a traditional liqueur sweetened with honey and flavoured with spices, and popular in Poland and Lithuania. There is at least one commercially produced Krupnik available in the UK but I made another batch a couple of weeks ago to use in our cocktail of the week at work. The recipe is so simple but our customers seem to have really appreciated the fact that we took the time to make our own ingredients.

Of course, if you’re going to make your own liqueurs, it seems foolish to only use it in one drink.

Spiced Apple Sidecar

Half of a Pink Lady apple
30ml Cognac
15ml Krupnik (I used our homemade variety, but there are commercially produced versions. If you can’t find one, Drambuie works as a substitute.)
15ml Grand Marnier (If you use Drambuie instead of Krupnik, I’d suggest using Cointreau or another Triple Sec with a neutral spirit base.)
20ml lemon juice
Dash egg white

Apply a mixture of ground cinnamon and caster sugar to the rim of a martini glass. Muddle the apple in the base of a shaker and add the other ingredients. Dry-shake all ingredients; add ice and shake. Fine-strain into the cinnamon/sugar rimmed glass.