MxMo Irish Wake

It's always bittersweet when things come to an end. And now, after over a hundred Mixology Mondays, it's time for the monthly cocktail party to come to an end. In honor of that end we're celebrating with an Irish Wake. In the midst of the online discussion leading up to the deadline the discussion the degree of difficulty got ratcheted up a notch to Irish whiskey tiki.
The early discussion instantly led to a variant on an Eastern Sour, Bourbon's shining beacon in tiki. However, I wanted to go another way. I decided to go a different way. My first thought for Irish Whiskey in a cocktail defaults to Irish Coffee. So with that in mind I set about making a tiki drink with coffee flavors. I started with a Mai Kai classic drink, the Black Magic. In addition to the coffee flavors I wanted to bring a lot of tiki spiced flavors.

Irish Magic:
2 oz Irish Whiskey
1 oz lime juice
3/4 oz coffee liqueur
1/2 oz grapefruit juice
1/2 oz cinnamon syrup
1/4 pimento dram

The spice comes through but doesn't dominate and the coffee really shows up on the finish.

I'll miss the camaraderie of the online cocktail party that is MxMo. I admit that I haven't been as active as in the past, but that doesn't mean that it won't be missed.

Thanks to Frederic over at Cocktail Virgin not only for hosting this month, but for keeping it alive a while longer. 

MxMo CII Spooky Sips

This Month's Mixology Monday is being hosted by friend and fellow tiki-phile JFL over at Rated R Cocktails. Halloween is my favorite holiday, so I couldn't in good conscience pass it up. Even though participating did mean having to take a break from carving pumpkins and making tombstones for the yard. Almost instantly I had a name for a drink pop into my head, the Karloff Colada. In case your knowledge of horror movies stretches only as far back as Paranormal Activity 4, Boris Karloff was one of the classic horror great actors. He played the Monster in Frankenstein, the Mummy in the Mummy, and numerous other horror roles, (also he voiced the Grinch in how the Grinch stole Christmas).

For the drink itself I decided to riff on the Pina Colada, and specifically riffing off another riff the Angostura Colada.
2 oz Pineapple juice
1.5 oz Coco Lopez
1 oz lime juice
1 oz Amber Martinique rhum (Neisson Eleve Sous Bois)
.5 oz Navy Style Rum (Lost Spirits Navy Style)
.25 oz Pernod
 6 oz crushed ice
blend the above ingredients and float .25 oz black rum on top, (I used Goslings, but dark Jamaican would work as well)
top with grated nutmeg
There are a few things that change this up from a regular Pina Colada or Painkiller. The lime juice helps to make the drink more tart and less sweet. The anise flavor of the pernod sits there at the finish to again offset the sweetness of the Coco Lopez. What I feel like you end up with is a very well balanced drink that still has the Pina Colada characteristics.

Be sure to check out the other drinks for this months MxMo

Ice to See You

I'm back again for what seems to be one of the few things that actually gets me to blog on occasion, Mixology Monday.  This month's theme is ice, so naturally I took my post title from the McBain movie. Ice is one of those things that alot of bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts like to obsess over. This time I only have one picture but I have three tips.

The first tip is on making shaved ice. Pittsburgh has something of a local icon in Allegheny Commons with Gus and Yia Yia's shaved ice. When the family and I stopped there the last time I noticed how they shaved the ice for the snow cones. They had a large block of ice and something in their hands that produced a find shaved ice in short order. A bit of research and I discovered that the tool for shaving ice was available on Amazon and it was cheap. I tacked one on to an Amazon order and was ready to make some shaved ice. Rather than buy a block of ice, I took one of the wife's metal cake pans filled it with water and stuck it in my beer fridge's freezer. A day or so later I had a home sized block of ice to shave. Me being a rum fiend, a shave ice daiquiri was my first thought. As you can see in the below photo the shaver produces a fine white fluff of ice crystals, though it is adjustable so you can produce different sizes. I should have filled the glass more full to create a full glass of shaved ice, but frankly, my arm was tired. If you were to try this for yourself, I would suggest that you do like I did get the ingredient ready first, then shave the ice, so it doesn't melt while you put the drink together. I also made a nice cool treat for my 2 year old daughter with some shaved ice and homemade Fassionola I had for a Cobra's Fang. 

Tip number two was on how to make a clear ice ball in the home freezer. Basically I used Camper English's technique with a travel mug and a silicone ice ball mold. The travel mug was free with something or other, so it wasn't the best quality mug.  The trick with this is to have the hole in the mold pointed down into the full mug. This will slow the ice formation beneath the mold and for the air bubbles into that chunk of ice and out of the ice ball. 

The third tip is even simpler, and it was given to me recently when I found myself with two spare pineapples. I used one of those nifty little pineapple corers to pop out the center and leave myself with two pineapple cups. Rather than using these right away, I put both of them into the freezer so that when they are used, the drinking vessel itself is frozen and it won't water down the drink as it thaws. 

Check some of my older posts for techniques like making an ice shell and also my break down of the melting rates of different sizes of ices.

Thanks to the Muse of Doom herself over at the Feu  de Vie for hosting this month.  

Winter Blues

'Tis time for another Mixology Monday (and also time to abbreviate 'it is') and the theme this month is "blue." Naturally, being a tiki guy this meant it was time to break out the blue curacao. But that was only the beginning.

Of course for my drink I turned to the old standby for blue drinks, blue curacao, but that's probably the most mundane of the ingredients in this drink. 

Winter Blues

1 oz Guanbana syrup

1.5 oz Silver Rhum Agricole

1 oz Pineapple Rum

.5 oz Blue Curacao

.5 oz Orgeat

Shake with crushed ice. 

There is a lot there that I need to explain in that recipe. Let's start off with the guanabana syrup. Guanabana is known by many names: guanabana, soursop, cherimoya, custard apple or good old Annona Muricata. It is a tropical fruit prevalent throughout the Caribbean, Africa, southeast Asia and the Pacific and the taste is... unique. As the soursop name indicates it is an acidic tasting fruit, so it's being used here in place of the usual citrus component. It has also been described as having a taste like a cross between a strawberry and a pineapple. Most important for me was that when you don't look closely the bag of frozen pulp looks like it says guava. That's how I came to have frozen guanabana pulp in my life. I decided to treat it like I would passionfruit pulp that I wsa making into syrup and defrost it, mix it with equal parts simple syrup, and then strain it to make it nice and smooth. Tasting a sample I picked up on the pineapple tastes and I decided that my drink needed to have pineapple in it. This gave me an excuse to use the pineapple rum that I made over the summer.

Not being provided with a bottle of Stiggin's Fancy by Plantation Rums, like some people were, I took some fresh pineapple that I had laying around (like I said, tiki guy) and decided to infuse a bottle of gold rum. 

The guanabana also has a certain... 'funk' to it that I felt would best match up with an agricole rhum as opposed to, say, a drier white rum. I tasted the pairing so far and felt that it needed something to help round it out just a little bit, thus the orgeat. Though I feel like coconut cream would have also been a good choice. 

Thanks to Ginhound for hosting this month, we'll see you in February. 

MxMo: Shims

I'll admit it, it's been a while since I've added to the ol' blog. I could give the standard bevy of excuses, family, work, Cocktail Week, but that's only part of the story. It's not that it doesn't interest me or anything, but I'ver really been much more interested in getting deeper involved with the local stuff and building my own knowledge. So I started up a Booze University group where we went through and read 9 cocktail books and talked about them like a college level reading course. I plan on doing it again in the Spring focusing on booze history. But you aren't here for me to talk about myself, you're here for the drinks.
I am once again participating in this month's Mixology Monday.

This month's MxMo, brought to us by Bibulo.us, is all about shims. These low alcohol cocktails are the session drinks of the spirits world. Now, I'm a tiki guy by trade, and those aren't exactly known for their subtlety. Someone recently asked if I new of any lower alcohol tiki drinks, the best I could come up with only had 1.5 oz of rum. I was perusing Remixed for the 705th time and came across a drink called Omar's Delight and I was almost instantly inspired. I have two bottles of ruby port sitting around leftover from cocktail week that I didn't know what to do with. I saw that Omar's Delight was in reference to Omar Khayyam, the Persian scholar most famous in the West for his poem the Rubiyat. Thus was born the Ruby Yacht:

Ruby Yacht:

2 oz Ruby port

1/2 oz lemon juice

1/2 oz Grand Marnier

1/2 oz Peach Brandy

1/4 simple syrup

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Twist a lemon peel over the top. 

The lemon, peach, and orange reflect the flavor profile in Omar's Delight. As for how it tastes? i only had a brief taste of the drink before I lost it to my wife. She pronounced it to be quite nice and kept it for herself. So I went and made a Saturn for myself, it was a light tiki drink, only having 1.5 oz of gin. 

MxMo 82: Sours

This MxMo Ginhound invited us to examine sours. Sours are one of the most easily adaptable classes of drinks, to go from a daiquiri to a margarita to a whiskey sour to any number of other drinks requires only a little bit of tinkering. And this month, it seems like everyone is examining their fresh copies of Potions of the Caribbean as I've seen no less than 4 people talking about the Queens Park Super Cocktail. With that in mind I decided that I didn't want to just talk about existing cocktails, though I did want to work through the La Florida daiquiris. Instead I decided that I needed to create something new.

With that in mind I set out to finish reading my own copy of Potions, while setting the depths of my little brain to work on putting together something. Simultaneously, I also have way too much grenadine in the house and need to use (more on that later). So I started thinking about how to use the grenadine in a sour. I decided that I would follow the lead of such luminaries as Trader Vic, and start with an established cocktail. What I ended up with is the Eden Sour.

Eden Sour
1 oz Dark Jamaican rum
1 oz amber Martinique
3/4 oz grenadine
1/2 oz lime
1/2 oz demerara syrup
1/4 oz orgeat

Does the recipe look like a Mai Tai to you? That's the basis for this drink, I toned down the lime and orgeat and added grenadine. The grenadine adds a certain tartness to the drink that is different than the lime juice. It's not too sour, and the grenadine also adds a floral note. While this isn't a Trader Vic original it does appear, to me at least, like something he would have tried at some point.

Por Cuba Libre!

Ok folks, hold on for the ride for this post, mainly because I don't really know where I'm going with it and I definitely don't know how it ends.

This month's Mixology Monday is all about highballs. (Given the polar vortex earlier in the month, I'm sure that lots of us had high balls, but that's probably different.) Since a highball is a pretty basic drink, generally just spirit plus fizzy stuff, I didn't bother trying to come up with a new recipe, but rather take a look at Cuba and one of their more famous drinks, the Cuba Libre.

Rum and coke is probably one of the first and most common drinks for teens and college students, there's no mixing required, the coke brings plenty of flavor to the party, and it works with just about any quality and style of rum. However, that doesn't mean that it's not good. I still drink these on occasion and every time that I do it reminds me of my trip to Cuba.

In late December 2000, as part of a college class, we flew to Havana out of Toronto and spent 2 weeks taking classes in the morning and touring the country the rest of the day. I wish now that I was old enough to truly experience it properly,though from a cocktail nerd perspective it certainly seems like I checked all the boxes. I toured a cigar factory, visited a rum distillery, went to the Hotel Americano, drank a Daiquiri at El Floridita, and had a Mojito at La Bodeguita del Medio. Despite all of that the drink that I most associate with Cuba is still the Cuba Libre.

Whether it's because they used Havana Club rum, Mexican Coke, or local limes; they were some of the best Cuba Libres I've ever had. I suspect that the most likely reason is the proportions. In Cuba, the Havana Club was cheap, my bottle of silver was $3, but the Coke imported from Mexico was expensive, ($5 a liter).  So when mixing the drink it was a whole lot of Cuba, and just a little bit of Libre. I remember specifically the drinks that we had at the resort at the Bay of Pigs, (yes that Bay of Pigs) the Cuba Libre was mostly rum with just enough Coke to color them.

If you insist on a recipe try this:
Bahia de Cochinas Cuba Libre
4 oz Havana Club silver
1 oz Mexican Coke
1 lime wedge.

Stir with mixing straw in a disposable plastic cup and serve to German tourists and stupid college kids.
Thanks to Joel over at Southern Ash for hosting this month.

MxMo Fire

It's time for Mixology Monday once again and this time we're en fuego. The theme for this month is fire, thought up and hosted by the Muse of Doom herself.

There is a story involved with my drink this month, more so than normal. In addition to boozy subjects I also have been known to photograph sailboats of various sizes. It is for that reason that I found myself getting up at 6 AM to drive to Cleveland on a Saturday in July. I had secured myself a place on a yacht for the Leukemia Cup races (you can see those photos here). However I am an efficient man with a nose for rum. Rumors of a Cleveland distillery making rum on the shores of Lake Erie had reached me and I wanted to look into it for myself. I found Portside Distillery and looked through their porfolio of spirits. Rums like Maple Vanilla and Hop infused rums served to inspire my creative drink juices, but I also wanted to be sure that the drinks had a definite Cleveland theme to them as well. 

One of the Portside Rums is a spiced rum, and I have been playing around with spiced rums a bit myself by substituting it for gin in classic drinks. My thinking there is that the basic idea behind spiced rum and gin is reasonably similar. With that in mind I came up with a Cuyahoga Fizz inspired by the Cuyahoga River that runs through Cleveland into Lake Erie. 

Cuyahoga Fizz

1.5 oz spiced rum

1 oz lime juice

1 egg white

.5 oz demerara syrup

1 oz cream

2 oz soda

Combine all ingredients save the soda in a shaker with ice and shake until you can't feel your hand anymore. strain into a tall glass and then top with soda water. The claim to fame of the Cuyahoga river is that it has a tendency to catch on fire. Yes, the river has caught on fire no less than 13 times. With that history of inflammation it hardly seems right to leave the top of the drink a pristine white meringue. instead sprinkle on a little brown sugar and 2 dashes of Angostura bitters, then get out your torch and brule that sucker. Not only does the brown sugar caramelize and form a crispy crust (like on a creme brule) but the generous application of heat to the bitters brings out a fruity quality that I had never noticed before. 

Hey! Still reading? Good. There's a reason why the old blog has been a little slow this year. I've been part of the committee putting together Pittsburgh Cocktail Week (and on Facebook). If you are available to to check it out it looks to be a good time.

MxMo 74: Cherries!

  Time again for another Mixology Monday. This time the theme is cherries and hosted by Andrea of Gin Hound. While this could be an interesting opportunity to break out a shrub or a cherry infusion, I've been much more interested in classic cocktail both 'normal' and Tiki. So as I've been reading up and researching classic drinks I kept bumping up against a single ingredient that I didn't have. It was getting annoying. So I finally went out and picked up that ingredient. That mystery ingredient: Maraschino Liqueur.  Since most of the people who will read this post already know and love this liqueur it can be easy to forget that it's not that widely known among the commoners. This was well illustrated for me when the cashier at the store, actually asked me what it was and what you do with it. I just smiled and said that it's used in a lot of classic cocktails and left it at that. 

Anyway, I have been playing around with finally having a bottle of Luxardo and mixing drinks like Papa Dobles and Aviations because I could all the while chiding myself for not getting it earlier. So when the cherry theme came around this month I knew what I wanted to use for this month. A quick trip through Beachbum Berry's Grogalizer showed me a nice selection of tiki drinks that also used the lovely maraschino liqueur. I chose the Gold Cup recipe from Remixed. 

3/4 oz Lime Juice

3/4 oz simple syrup

1/2 oz maraschino

1.5 oz gold Jamaican

teaspoon Pernod

3 drops almond extract

The ice shell for the glass was surprisingly easy to make with a little help from Dr Bamboo's advice on ice cones. I froze my blender to make sure that it was nice and cold so that when I made some snow the ice didn't immediately melt leaving only water and large chunks. This is an amazing drink with a depth that defies the simplicity of the recipe. 

It's definitely been useful studying up on the classics to see how just the right mix gets you an amazing drink. Look for more coming forward as part of a project that I'm slowly trying to put together. 

MxMo Invert

It's MxMo time again. And this week the theme is Inverted Drinks. While the prospect of renting out the Vomit Comet to take pictures of upside down drinks did have some appeal, it turns out that the idea is turn the recipes upside down somehow. In the announcement post over at Putney Farm Stewart threw out the challenge of making a clear Manhattan adding "good luck with that." Well that was enough of a challenge for me. And with that I immediately sprang into action, first mixing a clear Manhattan, (left,) and then a clear Sazerac (right) just for the added degree of difficulty. My secret weapon, Wigle Whiskey's white rye, the 95% rye in this case. Now on to the recipes:

Clear Manhattan
2 oz Wigle White Rye
1 oz Dry Vermouth
2 dashes Barrel Aged Bitters
Stir over ice, strain into a chilled glass.

A few notes on this one: first my somewhat unconventional recipe comes straight off the glass that I mix it in. I was given a "vintage" portable bar set for Christmas a couple years back and the glass has drink recipes on it.  The Manhattan Recipe calls for that 2:1 whiskey to vermouth ratio, and that's what I've always used. Also key in maintaining it as a clear drink is to make it a Dry Manhattan, rather than a more traditional sweet version. To further invert this drink one can use aged bitters with an unaged whiskey.

Clear Sazearc
1.5 oz Wigle White Rye
.5 oz simple syrup
Herbsaint
3d Bittermen's Burlesque bitters

Rinse a chilled old fashioned glass with a small amount of Herbsaint, (Pernod, or Absinthe,) in another glass stir the rye, simple and bitters. Discard the excess Herbsaint, (I usually read this as drink it straight,) and pour in the chilled whiskey/simple/bitters into the glass. While the traditional recipe calls for Peychaud's bitters, I really love the Bittermen's bitters in this drink.

(Bonus points to anyone who clicked on the photo for a bigger view and noticed that the globe has North at the bottom.)

MxMo: Fortified Wines

It's Mixology Monday time again, unfortunately I've had to skip the last couple of them but we are back with 

a new drink. This month's theme is fortified wines.  My entry this month is the Puerto Anticado.  Lately I've been playing around with mixing up variations on the old fashioned. I've been using my Christmas presents to play with different bitters, different spirits and different sweeteners.This has been everything from using rum, rye, or even some aged Wigle Whiskey.  I've really enjoyed that so long as you stick to a pretty straight forward recipe and use quality ingredients you are reasonably assured of coming up with a satisfying after dinner drink. I was trying out using some resposado tequila, Maestro Dobel Diamond to be precise, with some of the jalapeno syrup from the B'ak'tun, and Bittermen's Xocolatl Mole bitters. Just as I was finishing up, my ship's decanter full of tawny port caught my eye. On a whim I decided to add some of that to the drink. It turned out a lovely color and the flavors melded well with some very nice depth to it. For once my luck worked out in such a way that it was the next day that the MxMo theme for the month was announced and my drink fit nicely. 

Puerto Anticado

1.5 oz Resposado Tequila (Maestro Dobel Diamond)

1 oz tawny port

.5 oz jalapeno syrup 

4d mole bitters (Bittermen's)

stir with ice strain into a rocks glass with service ice. 

MxMo: Bein' Green

This month's Mixology Monday had a theme of Bein' Green and given the month I decided to break out a new recipe that I had created for the Cthulhu Tiki mug Kickstarter of which I am a backer. I wanted to create a green cocktail as part of my Lovecraft inspired tiki drinks.My starting point was the Fu Manchu listed in Beachbum Berry Remixed. I started off trying to make the creme de menthe play nice with the other tiki ingredients and while I did get them to mix ok, I don't particularly like mint. Sure it's fine as a garnish, but overall, I'm not a fan.

In the meantime due to the alcohol vagaries of Pennsylvania I couldn't find any curacao in the state stores other than blue curacao, (freakin' Quakers.) The result being that up until I finally ordered a bottle, all of my mai tais had blue curacao in them largely by default. Adding a blue curacao to the otherwise standard mai tai produces a rather sickly green color that isn't typically appealing. So while bashing my head and taste buds against creme de menthe I was also disappointed by having a sickly green mai tai. I think that you can see where this is going. I ditched the creme de menthe and started over with a more traditional style tiki drink that ended up being the sickly green I was looking for.

The Cocktail of Cthulhu
1.5 oz gold Puerto Rican Rum
1 oz silver Puerto Rican Rum
.5 oz blue curacao
1 oz coco lopez
1 oz orange juice
1 oz pineapple juice
3d 'Elemakule Tiki Bitters (sub Angostura)
6 oz ice
blend for 5 seconds
garnish with pineapple mint (I was out due to a cold snap at the time of photography)

Be sure to check out the behind the scenes of this shoot over on Drinktography.