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. 

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 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.

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. 

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.