Grenadine

An interesting thing happens when you start hosting events. The amounts of ingredients suddenly goes up. When we at Pittsburgh Cocktail Week planned and hosted the grand opening event at Maggie's Farm Rum I found myself making enough simple syrup and grenadine to outfit a brand new bar to make drinks for 4 hours for 30 people. (Note, this is much more of either than I make for home use.) The downside afterwards was having about 20 oz of fresh grenadine to hopefully use before it goes bad. Thus began my quest for grenadine heavy drinks, and there aren't a ton of them out there. 

Before we get to the drinks though, let's talk about the grenadine itself. Like many other boozenerds it started out with Pom Wonderful. In this case, 32oz to be exact. I decided to try and use Morgenthaler's recipe over here. I measured out an equal amount of sugar, (by weight not volume,) stirred that in to the pomegranate and then heated it in the microwave to speed things up. I didn't boil the syrup just heated it, this is important as Morgenthaler points out, boiling the syrup gives you brown grenadine. Now here is where i differ slightly from the illustrious Mr. Morgenthaler. He calls for pomegranate molasses and orange flower water. I didn't have any pomegranate molasses and lacked time to track any down. I did add orange flower water but also rose flower water. 1/4 teaspoon of each to entire batch. The flower waters really added a noticeable floral quality to the finished product, without either being overwhelming. Since then I've been trying to use grenadine in bulk with things like Cesar's Rum Punch (pg 120 Beachbum Berry Remixed) which uses a full ounce to offset the lime juice and Rhum Barbancourt. My wife has been particularly enjoying it as I end up with a lot of pink drinks which she finds "pretty". I'm still working on other recipes that call for grenadine, and I'm striking out from just drinks. You wouldn't think that grenadine goes with Kung Pao chicken, but you would be wrong. (I take no responsibility should you actually add grenadine to Kung Pao chicken)

Lovecraft Cocktails

As you can see above I was part of the Horror in Clay Kickstarter campaign to get a Cthulhu Tiki Mug. (You can get yours here.) In the photo above we have my Santa Cthulhu off of my Christmas Tree in my Cthulhu tiki mug, he's so cute and yet so evil. This kickstarter/mug was right in my wheelhouse H. P. Lovecraft has been one of my favorite authors for quite some time now, and my love of tiki drinks is well documented. Inspired by the Lovecraft/tiki crossover I set out to develop a series of Lovecraft themed drinks for my forthcoming mug. The first was the Cocktail of Cthulhu, (already posted here.) The others are Pickman's Punch and Haunter of the Dark and Stormy.

Pickman's Punch

2 oz Pineapple Juice

1 oz Orange Juice

1 oz Grenadine

1 oz Silver Rum

1 oz Gold Rum

.5 oz Lemon Hart 151

.75 oz Orgeat 

.75 Passion Fruit Syrup

blend with 6 oz ice

Haunter of the Dark and Stormy

2 oz Dark Jamaican Rum

1 oz orange juice

.5 oz key lime juice

1 teaspoon grenadine

roll with ice

top with ~6 oz ginger beer.

These are hardly the only Lovecraft inspired cocktails out there. For instance Kaiser Penguin has the Cthulhu Punch recipe.  If you have some other cocktails recipes from the eldritch blackness or cyclopean halls please feel free to share in the comments.

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.