About ten weeks ago good friends of my wife and I approached me about creating custom drinks for their wedding. Although just a small thing, really, on such a momentous occasion, I was deeply honored to be asked.
When Scofflaws Den gets asked to create special cocktails, whether it be for a wedding or other event, we’ve modeled this service after the process for choosing a wedding cake. The recipes are theirs now so I won’t include them here. In this post I want to tell you about some of the fun, and not-so-fun, aspects of this process.
I started by sitting down with the couple to ask what they had in mind; any particular spirits, styles, dis-likes, allergies, etc. in order to figure out exactly what they want. The bride is from Kentucky so she requested something with bourbon. She also wanted it to be fall themed since it was a fall wedding and I found out there was a history with relatives making and sharing fresh apple cider. They didn’t want anything with a licorice flavor or anything overly herbaceous.
As we talked it also became clear that his-and-her punches would be best. For one thing the caterers would be serving the drinks. They would not be trained bartenders and as such I didn’t want to create anything labor intensive to mix, shake, stir and serve. Second, since these drinks would be served during a finite time frame, it would be better to have something pre-batched that could be poured over ice and served to more people in a short time.
With these points in mind I began creating recipes. Because the bride-to-be had more specific desires as to her drink the recipes were pretty easy to come up with – bourbon, apple and fall spices were going to be in the mix. In the end, I presented the couple with three punches for the bride. One was bourbon, apple cider, lemon, pimento dram, sparkling apple cider and bitters. Another was bourbon, becherovka, apple juice, vanilla liqueur, sparking apple cider and bitters. The third was bourbon, apple cider, concord grape syrup, lemon, a spice tincture and sparkling water.
The groom’s punch was a little harder to figure out. He really didn’t have any restrictions on ingredients so everything was at my disposal. The groom-to-be is a prolific homebrewer so I decided to do something with hops. And this is where the real fun/frustration began. The question was how to use the hops. To begin, I started a hop and gin infusion. This turned out to be a bad idea. My guess is that I allowed the hops to infuse for too long but the result was a bitter mess. This stuff made Malort taste like fresh lemonade.
For my second attempt, I made a hop and grapefruit “tea” which I carbonated. Mixed with gin, some simple syrup, fresh grapefruit juice and dry cura?ao. This turned up much better. It was still on the bitter side but certainly nothing a little tweaking couldn’t fix. The final recipe for the groom’s punch was probably the simplest and best tasting.
After creating a very light, citrusy, gin punch, I dry-hopped the punch. Basically, I quickly infused the hops into the punch directly. This gave the punch the aroma of hops without overly bittering the punch.
So after I had these 6 different recipes, I had the couple over to hang out and try each punch. We discussed what they liked and didn’t like about each one. I also made it clear that if they didn’t like any of them, I’d take the notes from this tasting back to the drawing board.
In the end, they picked the easiest two punches to make. Each one hit the couples directives and even more important, they thought each punch was delicious.
