Lockdown recipe diary #3: Happy Moments

Scotch whisky has long had a slightly weird position with regards to cocktails. You can pick up any old cocktail book and find any number of recipes for gin or American whiskey drinks, but not many Scotch ones. A quick glance at Martin’s New & Improved Index of Cocktails & Mixed Drinks (app store - seriously, if you haven’t got it, get it) lists 2,588 recipes but only 79 are defined as having a “Scotch base.”

While that’s not a lot compared to other spirits, there are some gems in there that haven’t hit in the same way as some of the more famous rediscovered classics of recent years (your Last Word or Aviation, for example, or your Seelbach…no, wait). One of the them is Happy Moments from Approved Cocktails Authorized by the United Kingdom Bartenders’ Guild in 1937 - I first encountered it when Robin Honhold put it on the first menu at the Lucky Liquor Co. back in 2013.

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Happy Moments

35 ml / 1 oz Scotch whisky (I used a 6yo single cask Glenglassaugh from the Bramble Whisky Co.)
20 ml / 0.66 oz dry vermouth (I used Noilly Prat Dry)
10 ml / 0.33 oz passion fruit syrup
10 ml / 0.33 oz orange curaçao

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Fill shaker with ice and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Strain into a chilled Nick & Nora glass and garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

As ever with vintage recipes, I employed a bit of adaptation when we put this back on the menu in 2019. The original recipe has equal parts of whisky and vermouth plus we took the opportunity to add a bit of acidity into the passion fruit syrup, adding a 1.5% scaling of powdered citric acid. This recipe from Epicurious is a pretty good start or there’s commercially available versions; just add 1.5 grams of powdered citric acid to 100 grams of finished syrup.

Lockdown recipe diary #2: Teller of Tales

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One of the fun parts of my job has been working with really amazing people to do super fun things. One of those amazing people is Georgie Bell, Bacardi’s global scotch whisky ambassador (and Whisky magazine’s 2020 scotch whisky brand ambassador of the year), and one of the super fun things was working with Edinburgh Food Studio to create Craigellachie cocktails to accompany a dinner celebrating Burns’ Night back in January 2019.

Teller of Tales

45 ml / 1.5 oz Craigellachie 13yo
15 ml / 0.5 oz amontillado sherry
15 ml / 0.5 oz Martini Riserva Rubino vermouth
7.5 ml / 0.25 oz Cherry Heering
10 ml / 0.33 oz raisin shrub

Pour all ingredients into a mixing glass. Fill with cubed ice and stir for ~20 seconds.
Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

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Craigellachie

There’s a great many distilleries that haven’t made a lot of their whisky available under their own name, and Craigellachie was one of them for most of its history.

The distillery was established in 1891 and the house style uses unpeated barley dried using an oil-fired heater, bringing a hint of a smoky, sulphurous note to the whisky.

Raisin shrub

150 g raisins
150 g water
300 g granulated cane sugar
150 g red wine vinegar
75 g balsamic vinegar

Combine raisins and water in a large airtight container and leave for at least 6 hours.
Add sugar and leave for at least 4 hours.
Add red wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar. Stir until sugar is fully dissolved.
Strain out solids and transfer to a clean bottle.
Keep refrigerated.

Yields ~400 ml.

Lockdown recipe diary #1 - Panama Swizzle

I honestly can’t remember exactly when I set this blog up - there was a spell on Wordpress before moving to my own domain and it definitely happened some time around 2006/07 - but I can remember why I did it. I’d started working at a big venue with multiple bars within the site and it was the first time I’d had any kind of formal training on cocktails which led me to low-key geeking out about that part of the job. After a few months (and a few changes of staff and managers) I hit a point where there weren’t that many people at work who’d be interested in talking to me about drinks, so I started the blog as a place where I could talk about the things I found interesting.

My gift for understatement tells me it’s been pretty quiet of late - since 2013, I’ve been working for a company where cocktails are a core part of what we do so that engagement with drinks hasn’t really been lacking in my professional day-to-day, and so I’ve felt less of a need to devote lots of my free time to it.

But, given the coronavirus lockdown, I now have a lot more free time and a lot less work time so I’m bringing back an old…fav? A thing we used to do at any rate - a cocktail recipe, every week until either I run out of them or we all get to leave our houses again.

Stay safe folks.

J
Edinburgh, April 2020

This is not new news, but coffee is a whole thing. It’s also a whole thing when it comes to cocktails - there’s a good chance that an Espresso Martini will be high up on the list of most-requested drinks in any bar (y‘know, back in the day when people could go to bars and request drinks) and there are a few notable recipes that call for coffee or a coffee liqueur (your Irish Coffees, your White or Black Russian, whatever the fuck this is *) - but I always feel like the known coffee cocktails tend towards a certain kind of feel. They’re usually sweet, and they’re almost always aromatic in nature (that’s to say the recipe doesn’t call for a sour element of some, even if they’re not aromatic in the way David Embury might recognise).

I don’t know if it’s all that surprising, being honest. Coffee largely fits into our lives in two specific occasions - it’s the morning pick-me-up or it comes beside your dessert when you’re dining out. ** Given that drinking alcohol in the morning hours is still largely frowned upon in western culture, the context of coffee relating to dessert is well-established so it strikes me as mostly logical that a lot of coffee cocktails aim to fit that niche.

But if there’s one thing for which food and drink people can be relied on, it’s to challenge convention and the past few years have seen increasingly interesting uses of coffee in drinks. One of the key drinks for me was the popularity a few years ago of the Espresso and Tonic serve - it’s coffee in a brand new context and certainly had its moment as Instagram’s favourite drink for an entire minute - and that was something I had in my mind when we refreshed the cocktail menu at the Last Word a couple of years ago.

* I jest, we know what the fuck that is - it’s what happens if you throw a bunch of liqueurs at a Black Russian and put a meringue on top of it for some reason? 

** Obviously, this is a gross generalisation but who comes to a blog for nuance in 2020.

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Panama Swizzle

45 ml / 1.5 oz aged rum (I used Ron Abuelo 7yo)

10 ml /  0.33 oz coffee liqueur (I used Cross Brew)

10 ml / 0.33 oz falernum

1 bar spoon sugar syrup

3 drops Bittermens Xococatl mole bitters

15 ml / 0.5 oz lime juice

Pour all ingredients into a sling glass.

Half fill the glass with crushed ice and, using a bar spoon, mix thoroughly.

Fill the glass with crushed ice, and garnish with a mint sprig and a dehydrated lime wheel.

The obvious departure from the norm is the inclusion of a straight-ahead souring agent (lime juice in this case) and, because we don’t generally have a lot of experience of coffee as a flavour in that context, some of the other ingredient choices are there to bridge the gaps between those two elements. Rum, for example, pretty much always works with lime and darker styles often play well with coffee.

The recipe isn’t particularly ground-breaking - it’s the kind of thing you’d probably come up with tooling around with tiki formulas - but I like that it gives the chance to experience a familiar flavour in a new way and I think that, a lot of the time, is kind of the point when we do anything with cocktails.

PSA

The company I work for operates three cocktail bars in Edinburgh and, right now, they’re closed in line with government advice. The reasons why are clear but it’s an incredibly tough time for the hospitality industry because a lot of people can’t do the thing they’re good at. It’s bad for bar owners and it’s bad for bartenders. 

We’re lucky that we have a online shop selling spirits, liqueurs, and bottled cocktails (with free UK shipping on orders above £20 - I’m sorry to say that I don’t think we can currently ship outside of the UK) and any sales we can make through that help us while the bars are closed. If anyone reading this needs some delicious things to drink will social distancing themselves, I’d be grateful if you’d check out mothershipscotland.com/ 

Humblebrag

If there's one thing that's going to make a grown-ass dude squee out loud, it's discovering that a national newspaper named one of the bars you work in as one of the best places to drink in the country (I mean, not the best place to drink in the country but Dandelyan is amaze and I guess you don't get to be precious if you've won it before).

If there's one thing that's going to cause any pretence of humility evaporate, it's noticing that the two drinks highlighted in the previously-mentioned national newspaper are my recipes and also Ericka said it was OK.

The Walt Whitman's a drink we designed to answer a specific demand - Old Fashioneds are now a thing; not up to the level of a Mojito or a Cosmopolitan, but it's definitely an order that people will call without looking at a menu. Their popularity, I think, derives from them being delicious, versatile and available basically anywhere. The plan with what ended up as the Walt Whitman was to create something that would work for that guy who orders an Old Fashioned without thinking about it but is also a little more developed, a little more unique.

Walt Whitman
40ml Buffalo Trace bourbon
20ml Cocchi Aperitivo Americano
10ml Yellow Chartreuse
1 bsp Islay single malt whisky (your choice; originally I used Ardbeg Uigeadail)
Stir the first three ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled rocks glass over a large block of ice. Float the single malt.

The recipe's a bit of chimera - essentially, it's a bourbon-based Bobby Burns with a bit of steal from Sam Ross' Penicillin. There's sweetness from the Chartreuse, a hint of bitter from the Cocchi and I opted to keep it on bourbon to maintain that Old Fashioned feel and to provide a counterpoint to the single malt. The steal from the Penicillin comes in the idea that it starts rich and intense with the float but then starts to mellow out as you drink it.

Actually, I did a shift in Bramble a few months ago and a dude asked, "what can you tell me about the Walt Whitman?"

"It is," I said, "fucking delicious."

I mean is it too soon for Braveheart references

This is a post I wrote for the blog on the Bramble website; as if that excuses using the first-person plural.

In much the same way it happens for New Orleans in July, London finds itself the focus of the massive, weird and thoroughly fun world of cocktails, spirits, liqueurs, bars and bartenders for a week in October. London Cocktail Week just completed its sixth edition - and the first in its new home at Old Spitalfields Market - and, for the first time, we brought a little bit of George Street down.

London’s not super far from Edinburgh and we’ve wanted to do something during Cocktail Week for a while but this year was the first time we managed to turn a loose plan into an actual thing, thanks to all-round excellent person (not to mention genuinely published author) Ryan Chetiyawardana and the guys at White Lyan agreeing to let us take over their bar for one night. That in itself would make for an epic night but there’s one thing about White Lyan that made the project a) really interesting and b) not super easy.

White Lyan’s been open for just over two years and since its inception, they’ve committed to a philosophy that foregrounds the consistency of their drinks. That includes not using ingredients that can be variable or perishable and that precludes ingredients like fresh citrus juices and ice. It’s a unique approach to a bar and one that isn’t an impediment to quality: Time Out named them the number one cocktail bar in London and they hit 26 on Drinks International’s 50 Best Bars list. It is an approach, though, that means rethinking a lot of things that bartenders often take for granted.

The easiest example of this is the Bramble. It’s a simple drink - four ingredients plus ice - and yet so good we named a bar after it. Of those five components (gin, Creme de Mure, sugar, lemon juice and ice), two are off the table and that has a big effect on the drink.

On the face of it, lemon juice should be relatively easy to replace. A similar volume of citric acid solution with a concentration of around 6% by weight will provide pretty much the same amount of acidity; the downside is that while it provides the acid content, it doesn’t provide any of the other complex flavours bound up in lemon juice and in a drink that has four liquid ingredients, the absence of those other flavours becomes damagingly apparent.

To fill in those gaps, we ended up adding a couple of ingredients. Instead of using straight citric acid, we used a blend of citric, malic and succinic acid - the idea was to add some layers of flavour within the acid component, similar to the use of multiple citrus juices in a Zombie. To back that up and re-introduce some bigger citrus notes besides pure acidity, we added a little bit of Lillet Blanc; it’s a natural partner for gin and brings some freshness and some bitterness as well.

As for ice - it’s actually relatively easy to compensate for things like chilling and dilution. If you’re making a straight-up drink (let’s say a martini for an easy example), all you need to do is weigh the drink before you stir it and weigh it after; the difference in weight will tell you how much mass is added by the act of stirring and from there, it’s pretty easy to work out the dilution rate. Once you know that, you simply add water to that rate (~50% dilution is a pretty decent ballpark, BTW). All you need to work out the chilling effect is a thermometer and all you need to replicate that effect is effective refrigeration.

(Side note: yes, if you take this approach to a shaken drink you will end up with a different texture compared to a shaken version of the same drink. If you want a similar texture, you could use some carbonated water when you’re diluting your drink to serving strength.)

(Side note to the side note: serving strength is a whole other rabbit hole we’ll spare y’all right now.)

The thing with a Bramble is that we can compensate for chilling and for dilution but the removal of ice changes the character of the drink; it goes from a long drink to a short drink and one of its most interesting characteristics - the way it changes as the ice melts and the Creme de Mure integrates into the remaining liquid - is lost.  We felt that was a hallmark of the drink so we did the obvious thing and split the Creme de Mure.

It’s only obvious, though, if you’re lucky enough to have a rotary evaporator. Running the liqueur through one gives two liquids - one clear, colourless distillate that has a light blackberry flavour and zero sweetness (which is pretty uncanny in itself) and a rich, darkly-coloured and super-sweet uberliqueur. We added the blackberry distillate to the gin, Lillet, acid blend along with some sugar, some water and a touch of soda; we made a paint from the other liquid with some pectin and a touch of citric acid.

Once we’d done all of that, we had a drink that was both a Bramble and not a Bramble. Without wanting to sound immodest, it was kind of popular.

There’s a whole bunch of people without whom, this entire endeavour would have been a lot less possible. So many, many thanks to Ryan, Robin, Maja, Tiernan and Iain along with everyone at the Mr. Lyan empire; our awesome DJs Fly T and Maxwell Pastor; brand ambassador buddies Ally Martin (Hendrick’s Gin), Grant Neave (Monkey Shoulder) and Metinee Kongsrivilai (Bacardi); our own social media maven Ericka Duffy; and, of course, everyone who came down for the great drinks, epic tunes and average chat!