Fare thee well, thou first and fairest

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Every year, Scots throughout the world set aside January 25th for celebrating the life and work of our national poet, Robert Burns. The man’s influence extends far beyond the borders of this little corner of Northern Europe – where would the literary tradition be without “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men”, or indeed his influence on the Romantic poets who were to come? – and into some interesting areas.

Now, this being nominally a blog about cocktails and all, would be the point at which I’d direct your attention to the Bobby Burns. It’s one of the all-time great Scotch whisky drinks and is more than worthy of carrying the name.

But I’m not going to do that. One of the hallmarks of Burns’ poetry is finding the profound, the wonderful in something that might seem otherwise unremarkable. In To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough (1785), one of his most famous works, Burns takes that initial calamity – for the mouse, at least – as the starting point for a train of thought that takes in man’s attitude to the world he inhabits and whether all the bells and whistles of civilisation are ultimately worthwhile.

By all means, if you have access to some vermouth and Bénédictine, raise a Bobby Burns to commemorate Burns’ 253rd birthday. Me, I’m going to leave off wearing any tartan or listening to bagpipes. I’m going to pour myself some Scotch and see where it takes me.

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2011 in numbers

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So it turns out that December happens to coincide with the time at which everyone starts putting together their year-in-review or best-of-the-year lists. For me, and for this little site here, 2011 has been a mixed year – there’s been some good (previously 1, 2, 3) and there’s been some bad - but rather than throwing up some kind of greatest-hits-of-2011 post (let’s be clear, I can’t necessarily remember what I drank with breakfast never mind that drink I had one time in that random bar somewhere), I thought I’d take a look at some of the stats generated by the Old Town Alchemy Co. over the course of the year.

A couple of notes before we get started:

  • These stats have been pulled from Google Analytics; I haven’t done any kind of comparison with other analytics tracking services because I’m a) cheap, and b) lazy, so don’t think of this as advocacy for that particular service.
  • I don’t have any data between March 3rd and April 30th; my WordPress install was hacked a couple of times and it took a while for me to notice that I’d screwed up incorporating the Analytics code while reinstalling WP.
  • Monkeying around with numbers can be a lot of fun, but I’m not writing this post to trumpet my (un)spectacular traffic figures. It’s trivia, more than anything.
At the time of writing, oldtownalchemy.co.uk has received 4,499 visits from 2,284 unique visitors. Those unique visitors have come from 92 countries around the world (OK, 91 because I guess “(not set)” hasn’t been recognised at the UN yet).

Manhattan 3

Top 10 Countries (by visits)
  1. USA – 2,269 visits (top city Portland – 1,048 visits)
  2. UK – 1,136 (London – 284)
  3. (not set) – 85 (n/a)
  4. Canada – 81 (Toronto – 15)
  5. Australia – 66 (Melbourne – 25)
  6. France – 65 (Paris – 20)
  7. Germany – 52 ((not set) – 8 )
  8. Russia – 50 (Moscow – 22)
  9. Brazil – 46 (Pelotas – 25)
  10. Netherlands – 41 (Amsterdam – 12)
Seeing the US and UK at the top of the list isn’t unexpected, but the apparent popularity of the site in Portland is kinda surprising. The top five cities by visits goes Portland, Pittsburgh (306 visits), London, Edinburgh (242), Seattle (88); the only non-English speaking city in the top ten is Athens (28 visits) at #10.

Inception

Top 10 most popular posts (by pageview)
  1. Labwork 1: stumbling in alone (2010-10-01, 1,472 pageviews)
  2. Black Daisy (2011-07-04, 240 pageviews)
  3. Labwork 2: Two-Step Mojito & Ex Aqua (2011-02-17, 159 pageviews)
  4. MxMo LII: Forgotten Drinks (2010-11-22, 89 pageviews)
  5. Saint-Antoine (2011-07-14, 87 pageviews)
  6. Secret histories of cities and spirits (2011-04-29, 66 pageviews)
  7. Mirrorball (2011-05-09, 58 pageviews)
  8. Leftovers (2010-06-09, 54 pageviews)
  9. Road Trip: Balmenach Distillery & Caorunn Gin (2011-09-25, 53 pageviews)
  10. The secret of Cartagena (2010-07-21, 51 pageviews)
Once again, the occupier of the top spot isn’t a huge surprise – the Inception (looks like a Martini, tastes like a Daiquiri) was featured on the BBFB Training Team website in a drink of the week video; outside of that I’m a little surprised to see the Black Daisy pop up at #2 and I suspect that the post at #3 would be higher if I’d ever got round to doing some photos for it.
If there’s a caveat here, it’s that I don’t really do a lot of promotion – I’ll fire a tweet off when a post goes live and pop a link up on the OTA Facebook page, but that’s pretty much it. I used to post links up on Liqurious but not so much anymore – occasionally one of my posts gets linked which is totally amazing and thanks so much to anyone who has done that.
Post count: 16
And finally, the least impressive stat. The 2010 total was 35 (including 13 posts that were purely outbound links); in 2009 it was 99 (with 10 posts of outbound links). In my defence, 2009 was the whole new-recipe-every-week year and I’ve got more responsibility at work now than I did then.
Still, sixteen’s way low.
2011, though, is looking bright. There are a couple of things from the past few months to catch up on, and there are a couple of things coming up in the early part of the year that are pretty relevant to what I do here.
To everyone who has left a comment, linked back here, or even just visited the site, thank you so much. To everyone, have a great new year.

The Matinee

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I’ve previously written about my participation in Bacardi’s annual Legacy Cocktail Competition; despite qualifying for the regional finals twice, I never really managed any great success in it. Luckily for anyone who’s interested in how things go beyond the initial stages, Metinee Kongsrivilai, head bartender at the Bon Vivant up here in Edinburgh, not only qualified for the UK final but made it into the final round as one of “three most promising” competitors. The other finalists are Quo Vadis‘ Zdenek Kastanek and Jody Monteith from bar consultancy the Liquorists.

The Matinee

50ml Bacardi Superior
2-4 kaffir lime leaves
12.5ml Martini Rosso
12.5ml lemon juice
12.5ml vanilla sugar syrup
12.5ml egg white

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into a chilled stemmed glass. Garnish with a kaffir lime leaf.

One of the difficult parts of a competition entry is the name and it’s always interesting to hear how they come about. Metinee says that “the Matinee itself is based – not on my name, even though it start out as a joke, but on the basis that I wanted the drink to a form of entertainment you can enjoy, day or night. I also felt that it’s a nice, short and memorable name and it suits the drink well.”

A lot of the recipes I put together are for events or promotions and are designed to fulfil a particular brief. Once the event or promotion – or competition – is over, I don’t tend to dwell on them. The difference between the Legacy competition and other competitions is that if you make that final round, you’re going to be spending a year promoting that one drink. As Metinee puts it, “I don’t even need to go Puerto Rico, I just want this drink to have a future.”

Starry Night

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There are lot of cocktail competitions throughout the year and sometimes when you submit an entry, you don’t really think about it too much after you hit the “submit” button. For me, that was the case with the Bols Genever Classic Competition – I sent in a drink called the Stuyvesant and didn’t hear anything back for a while and so it slipped off my list of immediate concerns.

Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh (June 1889)

That changed a couple of months ago, when representatives from Bols Genever and Maxxium UK got in touch with the general manager at Sygn looking for a venue for a Scottish final for the competition. After a couple of meetings, they agreed a date in early November and selected six finalists – Grant Neave from Monteiths, Tom Walker from Bramble, Ryan McDonald from the Voodoo Rooms, Jo Karp and Byron Abbot from Bond No. 9, and me. The final was covered by two intrepid correspondents from Imbibe magazine and is due to be featured in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue.

After we’d all presented our original online entries, word came down that the judges had picked two competitors to face-off for the prize – a trip to Amsterdam with the winner of the English final and Bols brand ambassador John Clay. The two finalists were Tom and myself and we were given fifteen minutes to come up with a contemporary style cocktail using Bols Genever.

I was keen to keep the genever at the forefront but I also wanted to complement it with ingredients that don’t require too much buy-in from a customer. One of the things I’d talked about with John Clay earlier in the day was the difficulty in getting the idea of genever across to a customer in, say, two sentences. It’s a really interesting category, but it takes some explaining and that can be tough to do in a busy bar environment.

I opted to make a long drink and I opted to make a sour-type drink; for all their qualities, aromatic-type drinks lack the same degree of accessibility, particularly for people are massively into cocktail culture. As I put the ingredients together, I realised that I was making a pale drink with a ginger top so I named it after a painting by another famous son of the Netherlands, Vincent Van Gogh.

Starry Night

Starry Night

35ml Bols Genever
15ml apricot brandy (I used the Bitter Truth)
25ml lemon juice
25ml apple juice
2 bsp acacia honey
Top with ginger ale

Shake the first five ingredients with ice and strain into an ice-filled highball glass. Top with ginger ale and garnish with an apple fan.

Tom went down a different route, taking his inspiration from the New York scene and the work of Sam Ross in particular. It was an impressive drink and hopefully he’ll get something up on his blog about it. Ultimately, I think that my focus on making something consciously accessible to people unfamiliar with the category helped; I won, by something like one point between three judges.

It’s alway nice to do well in comps, and it’s extra special to be able to do it on home turf. Thanks to John and everyone at Bols Genever and Maxxium UK, and to the guys from Imbibe for taking the time to check out the Edinburgh scene.

Road Trip: Sipsmith

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Having lived in Scotland for pretty much all my life, I have a fairly well-developed idea of what a distillery looks like. It would be hidden away at the end of a glen somewhere remote where the taxation officers would be unlikely to stumble across it, with a cluster of copper pot stills in one building and a two-storey-high wooden washbacks for fermentation in another; otherwise it would be a sprawling industrial complex, all 40ft column stills and piping, that would draw comparisons with your choice of near-future urban dystopia.

Distillation, though, is not something that requires a lot of space in itself and that point was well-illustrated when I stopped by an open day at the Sipsmith Distillery in West London during London Cocktail Week.

If you didn’t know what you were looking for, it would be easy to miss the otherwise unremarkable garage amongst Hammersmith’s rows of terraced houses. But the unassuming setting hosts the first new distillery to be granted a licence in London since Beefeater in 1820.

At the heart of the distillery – even though she’s located at the back of the room – is another rarity. Where many new products are made either under licence or in second-hand or recycled stills, Sipsmith’s range is produced in a new copper pot still. Dubbed Prudence, the still was created by CARL, Germany’s oldest still manufacturer, and also has small column attachment – through which Sipsmith’s English barley vodka is passed – and a Carterhead attachment which has apparently been used for experiments in flavouring vodka.

One of the upsides of a micro-distillery is that the tour doesn’t take too long and our group (of six people from anywhere between Manchester and Japan) spent a large chunk of the afternoon tasting the range with Sipsmith’s James Grundy. Their London Dry gin and English barley vodka are fairly well known (partly thanks to the involvement of drinks historian Jared Brown, I suspect), but they’ve recently expanded into liqueurs with a sloe gin and a damson vodka – the interesting aspect of the latter two is they seem much less sweet than liqueurs of that type generally are which lets the base spirit come through more, particularly in the sloe gin.

Sipsmith are an almost perfect definition of the kind of operation craft bartenders fall for. They’re not pushing the boundaries of spirit production, but I get the sense that, for now, they’re not inclined to do that. It’s a range of artisanal spirits produced by people with a clear passion for both the process and the products they create and it’s hard not to like that outlook.

Road Trip: London Cocktail Week

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It’s been a while since I took some time off work, so being nominated for CLASS Magazine’s Bartender of the Year award seemed like the perfect opportunity to sack it off for a week and check out the bright lights of London town. Happily, the competition coincided with the second edition of London Cocktail Week, which meant there was a long list of events and seminars that would keep me off the streets.

Sorting out the award was the first order of business, and the other nine finalists and myself – Justyn Bell (Hausbar, Bristol), Ryan Chetiyawardana (Worship Street Whistling Shop, London), George Collyer (Hotel du Vin, Bristol), Maxime Creusot (The Player, London), Jamie Jones (Cocktail & Spirits Initiative, Chester/NE England), Tristan Stephenson (Purl, London), David White (Tigerlily, Edinburgh), Susie Wong (Australasia, Manchester), and James Wynn-Williams (All Star Lanes, London) – met at the Cabinet Room in Bermondsey to do battle over three drinks and a written test set by the Soulshakers‘ Kevin Armstrong.

The Cabinet Room, incidentally, is the bar that takes up the ground floor of Simon Difford’s apartment. It’s among the more impressive living rooms I’ve seen, with cabinets of vintage glassware adorning one wall, super comfy leather sofas, and a fully featured bar right in the middle. The back bar contains no less than three different brands of blue curaçao – that stat just became my benchmark of how well stocked a bar is.

The three drinks required were a classic Daiquiri, “any cocktail of your own creation” (with a Bacardi Brown-Forman Brands product as the base spirit), and a classic cocktail drawn at random from a list of fifteen. My Daiquiri didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped – I made some good decisions (using the Bacardi 1909 Heritada limited edition bottling at 44.5% ABV as opposed to the standard Superior) and some bad ones (there’s a reason no-one uses icing sugar as a sweetening agent, I guess); I drew the Whisky Sour for my classic and that went pretty well, although some of the judges felt it may have been a touch too sour for their tastes. I was happy enough with my original drink but the point I kept hearing back from the judges – CLASS magazine editor Simon Difford, BBFB’s head of training Alex Turner, 2010 winner Joey Medrington, and Kevin Armstrong – was that they felt bourbon and Campari wasn’t a natural pairing; by extension, perhaps the recipe’s missing just one more ingredient to bridge to the two.

Sophomore

45ml Woodford Reserve Bourbon
15ml Campari
15ml clarified lemon juice
10ml grenadine

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled 8oz stemmed glass. Express and then discard a twist of orange zest. Garnish with a cocktail cherry.

The written test was appropriately brutal, fully a reminder that, for all that I claim some kind of knowledge about spirits, cocktails, and alcoholic beverages in general, there is so much I don’t know. Helpfully, that no longer includes the Latin name for Hops, the recipe for a Scarlett O’Hara, or the knowledge of what a “spile” is.

I didn’t win; Purl’s Tristan Stephenson took the honours, and I’ve no complaints about that. I felt that there were at least three guys who absolutely nailed their presentations and Tris was definitely in that group. It was a fun day, and I didn’t leave completely empty-handed – I’m pretty certain I beat Dub-Dub in a blue drink shake-off.

With the comp out of the way, I spent the early part of the week checking out some of the trade events at the Drinkology Studios in Shoreditch. There was a decent chunk of the Edinburgh scene on show at the BBFB Training Team‘s Magic of Maturation talk, presented by Ian McLaren and Craig Harper and featuring an interesting discussion on aging cocktails with Bramble‘s Jason Scott and Mike Aikman (and I totally managed to score a barrel-aged, hand-bottled Affinity cocktail, which are generally in short supply up here).

I did a couple of other things in LCW – a visit to the Sipsmith Distillery in Hammersmith, which is probably deserving of its own post, for one – before I hit the CLASS Awards at the Old Street Classic Car Club and met up with probably everybody I know in the industry. With four different bars – Belvedere (Red), Tiger, Sailor Jerry, and Bacardi – we were well served for drinks (apparently, yes, you can have too many Last Words) and the cabaret theme was suitably epic. Although the Scots missed out on a couple of awards – Tonic were nominated for Best Classic Bar which went to Be At One, and Edinburgh alumni Meimi Sanchez (Havana Club) and Shervene Shahbazkani (Bacardi) were up for Best Brand Ambassador against the eventual winner, Grand Marnier’s Julien LaFond – we didn’t go home empty-handed with the Best Bar Menu award going to the Blythswood Square Hotel in Glasgow.

For a sophomore effort, London Cocktail Week was really impressive. Over 250 bars signed up to offer £4 cocktails to attendees over the week and there were trade and consumer events all over the city every day. I don’t have a frame of reference to compare it against but what I did see seemed to run smoothly and was well-received, and that’s to the credit of the organisers – particularly Hannah Sharman-Cox at Odd Firm of Sin, and to Simon Difford and Emma Ramos who had to put up with my chat on more than one occasion.

Road Trip: Balmenach Distillery and Caorunn

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Scotland – and it’s likely that I’m not the first person to notice – has a long history of distilling. The obvious product of that history is whisky – single malt or blended – but like any country with that kind of tradition, it’s not uncommon for producers to branch out into other spirits. Up and down the length of the country, you’ll find vodkas, gins, liqueurs, and much more besides, all produced on scales from a single shop to multi-national distribution runs.

All of this became particularly relevant as I accompanied Andrew Kearns from Monteiths, the winner of the Edinburgh heat of Caorunn Gin’s cocktail competition, to the Balmenach distillery in Speyside. We travelled up with the Glasgow party, including regional winner David Smillie from the Blythswood Square Hotel and Caorunn’s brand ambassador Ervin Trykowski, and met up with 99 Bar & Kitchen‘s Mike McGinty and the Aberdeen contingent at the distillery. Continue reading →

All these things that I have done

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August is generally a quiet month in Edinburgh, except for the major international arts festival and the accompanying Festival Fringe that allegedly increases the population by roughly 100%, and that makes it the perfect time for lots of cocktail competitions. One of them was the regional qualifier for CLASS Magazine’s Bartender of the Year award and I was lucky enough, along with Dave White from Tigerlily, to qualify for the final in October.

More details on the finalists, along with their winning recipes, can be found in the latest online edition of CLASS.

Leaving the Twentieth Century

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I’ve been in the process of working up a small cocktail offering for a function we’re hosting at Sygn in a couple of months time. There are some obvious choices for it – the event isn’t industry-focused so I won’t be going too obscure or bleeding edge with anything – but flicking through various menus and recipe books led me to the Twentieth Century cocktail.

Twentieth Century Cocktail

35ml Gin
15ml Lillet Blanc
15ml Crème de Cacao (white)
25ml lemon juice

Shake all ingredients with ice; fine-strain into a chilled martini/coupe. Garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

According to Ted Haigh‘s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, it was named for a train, the 20th Century Limited, that plied the route between Chicago and New York in the near aftermath of Prohibition. Haigh suggests that earliest written record comes from the Café Royal Bar Book of 1937 and that “we now have a firm idea of exactly what Art Deco tastes like.”

On a personal level, I found the Twentieth Century profoundly depressing. It’s not because it’s a bad drink – it certainly isn’t – but there’s something about the way those four ingredients just sing together that make me wonder if I’m ever going to put together a recipe that comes close.

On paper, it’s just four ingredients. In the real, it’s exceptional, and that’s something to aim for.

Saint-Antoine

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So, I was chilling out at work, doing my thing when I got a phone call from Grant Cunningham at Blavod/Luscious Liquid who said there was someone he’d like me to meet. That person turned out to be Paul Bungener who is the UK brand ambassador for FAIR., the producers of the world’s first range of Fair Trade spirits and liqueurs. The range consists of the world’s first quinoa based vodka along with a Goji berry liqueur and a coffee liqueur, and while they’re available in retail (at Harvey Nichols) they haven’t entered the on-trade in Edinburgh yet.

Since 2010, FAIR. have been sourcing sustainably farmed ingredients – Bolivian quinoa for the vodka, Tibetan Goji berries and Mexican coffee beans for the liqueurs – and shipping them over to Cognac for distillation. The vodka is distilled once through a two-column continuous still, so it has a more distinct flavour than one that’s been through a triple- or quadruple-distillation; there’s a pleasant peppery note that comes from the quinoa. The Goji berry liqueur has a phenomenal bright red colour; it has an odd, generic red berry flavour – recalling strawberries and raspberries but not directly emulating them. It seems like an ingredient that would work quite well as a bridge between flavours that don’t necessarily overlap.

The coffee liqueur really stood out for me. It’s a complete change of pace from better known brands like Kahlua or Illyquore – in comparison, they immediately seemed heavier and more cloying. That’s not to say that FAIR Café isn’t sweet but it comes across as a much more delicate creature, with notes of fresh espresso mingling with some chocolate and Tiramisu.

Fair Trade is one of those ideas that it’s hard not to get behind so it’s refreshing to see those principles being applied to distilled beverages. It’s also refreshing to see that those principles aren’t the only compelling reason to pick one of the products – they’re at least as good as anything you’ll see on an upmarket backbar; in the case of the Café maybe better.

I was lucky enough that Paul left a sample of the FAIR Café to play with before he moved onto his next appointment. Seeing as this is going up on Bastille Day, combined with the fact that FAIR. is based there, Cognac was definitely in my thoughts.

Sainte-Antoine

35ml Merlet Brothers Blend Cognac
15ml FAIR Café
5ml Fernet Branca
10ml Demerara syrup (Fair Trade, of course.)

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a vanilla bean wrapped in an orange zest twist.

(The Bastille – as famously stormed on 14th July 1789 – stood on the Rue Sainte-Antoine.)