An online speakeasy of potent potables and other pabulam.

Ahhh, Mixology Monday – how I’ve missed you!

I was unable to do August’s MxMo, thanks to my trip to South Korea.  Thanks to Tales, we didn’t have one in July.  So the theme for this week, thanks to our hosts at eGullet, is “Dizzy Dairy”.  This means anything dairy, or it seems, egg whites.

I’ve had a lot of debates over what to make for this one.  I also did a lot of searching for heavy cream in case I wanted to do that.  I had bad luck in that regard – I first went to Harris Teeter near me and they were out.  So I got home from work and went to the mini-mart in my building, but they did have Guinness (which I may be using).  Nothing.  Walked up to Courthouse Plaza and tried the convenience store there – didn’t see any, but they had that Bud Light Golden Wheat which I had wanted to try.  From there I went to CVS, but they had none of those things, so I went back to the convenience store, actually found a carton of cream I’d missed (whew!), bought the Bud Light, then went back to my mini-mart for a four pack of Guinness pub cans.

Now let’s see if I use ‘em – because as of the time I’m writing this, I still haven’t made a drink!

Let’s look at some ingredients first.

My first instinct had been to use Castries, a rum-based peanut cream liqueur.  I love this stuff.  LOVE IT IN THE FACE.  It is delicious.  Actually, I typically drink it straight.  Hmmmm.

Then it occurred to me (thanks to a fortuitously timed e-mail) that I also had a bottle of the limited edition Kahlua coffee cream liqueur in my fridge.  As you know, a White Russian is equal parts Kahlua, vodka, and cream, so the easy (and perhaps lazy) thing to do would be a version of that – say, adding vanilla vodka to a measure of Kahlua coffee cream liqueur – but I wanted to do something different.

Thus the Guinness.

Depending on who I end up going out drinking with there’s a good chance I end up with a car bomb at some point – usually made where we go with Bailey’s and Irish whiskey.  That gave me an idea, though using the Kahlua coffee cream meant I should use something like a Spanish brandy, I thought.  Alas, I didn’t have any, so I went with some Armagnac XO.

I'm glad someone reminded me that I had this!

I fiddled around a bit and came up with a drink that’s delicious whether or not you use the beer.  I thought about naming it something related to the car bomb but thought some people might not appreciate it so much – whatever, I know, but hey, let’s think up a different name.

Uhhhh…I hate thinking up drink names!

Anyways, here it is:

The Cross Hemispheres
1 1/2 ounces armagnac (XO if you have it – I used Castarede)
1 ounce Kahlua coffee cream
1-2 dashes Fee’s Aztec chocolate bitters
Add ingredients to a mixing tin with ice and shake.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Alternatively, strain into a chilled pint glass and top with Guinness.  Let the Guinness settle, give a light stir, and drink.  If you add the beer, call it a Cross Hemisphere Fizz.

nom nom nom

But you know what the problem is – here at the Den, we like to give you two drinks for your Mixology Monday fun!  I’ve come up with a brand new drink (I think) so this time I thought I’d take a look through my copy of The Joy of Mixology (as much because it happens to be sitting right next to me) to see if there’s a drink I’d like to make in there involving dairy.

Unfortunately, I failed to be inspired.

Then I remembered that I’d come up with some drinks for the Thursday Drink Night we did with Kahlua coffee cream.  It was during the Steelers-Titans football game and, unfortunately, the last game that the Steelers won, so my two drinks named after various Steelers players I decided to skip – especially as my last drink is a bit fuzzy in my memory.

But the first one had some potential, so it was time to tweak, rename, and try it again.  Originally it actually used two cream liqueurs – Castries and Kahlua.  I kept that, but tweaked the proportions on those and the bourbon, added a garnish, and renamed it.

Tastes great and wakes you up! Oops…

That TDN was really the first one I’d done since – well, longer than I could remember, thanks to Tales and Korea.  My first drink, therefore, was called “I’M BACK” and, well, I don’t think that is such a great name.  Therefore we have a new name for it along with the before-mentioned tweaks.

The Bloodhound
1 1/2 ounces bourbon (Willett Pot Still)
1 1/2 ounce Kahlua coffee cream liqueur
1/2 ounce Castries
2 dashes Fee’s Aztec chocolate bitters
Shake with ice, double strain into a chilled cocktail glass half-rimmed with ground espresso.  If desired, sprinkle some additional ground espresso on top.

Man, this drink came out good!  It’s waking me up a bit, not necessarily a good thing right now, but it’s darn delicious.

If you notice, I had the same bitters in both.  There’s two reasons for that.  One, I haven’t got the Bittermens mole bitters yet, so I can’t compare and contrast.  More importantly, however, is that the combination of flavors I feel like works really well with the Kahlua coffee cream liqueur.

I think that’s about all for tonight.  I want to thank the eGullet folks for hosting, and I should also thank Kahlua for providing me with the sample bottle of Kahlua cream liqueur.  (I should note, too, that this bottle of Castries was also a sample, but lord knows I’ve bought enough bottles of it already…)

While most of the cocktail bloggers seemed to be having a joyous ole time down in N’awlins for Tales of the Cocktail (note: I haven’t actually read any of the blog posts, so maybe everybody came down with salmonella or something, not that I’d actually hope that’d happen but if something did happen and I’m sounding like an incredible jerkwad, well, uh, I’ve been fairly incommunicado all week) I got stuck with my usual July assignment – going to E3 on behest of the other site I write for, GamersInfo.net.

If you want my thoughts on the 28+ games I saw at E3, check out that site. If you want my thoughts on Irish Coffee, a bitters-less Manhattan, and other travesties of the LA bar scene, I’ll post on that later.

And then there’s the theme for this month: New Orleans. Or N’awlins, as I am wont to put it all the time whenever I’m writing out the name. I blame my psuedo-Southern heritage.

But what to make? The easy choice is the obvious one – the Sazerac. I do love me a Sazerac. But I didn’t want to do one of those, and though I briefly toyed with the idea of making my own version of the Hand Grenade I didn’t get around to doing any of those until too late, so I whipped out what I got, in other words, a couple of books, and decided to try a couple of cocktails that I hadn’t had before.

Because, you know, this is the Scofflaw’s Den, and even if I’m having to hand key in the HTML (and teach Marshall a bit about HTML) until we figure out why WordPress’s visual editor isn’t working, we’re still going to be doing multiple cocktails for MxMo ’cause that’s the way we roll.

First I went to one of the tried-and-true boosk – Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. There I read about the Vieux Carre’ (no, I can’t do the accent in HTML right yet), named after N’awlins’ famous French Quarter (i.e. “The Old Square”) and according to Dr. Cocktail, invented by Walter Bergeron in the soon-to-be (at the time) Carousel bar in the Monteleone Hotel. The drink reminded me a lot of the Cocktail a la Louisiane, for more than one reason.

Vieux Carre’ Cocktail
1 ounce rye whiskey (Wild Turkey Russell Reserve)
1 ounce cognac (Hennessy VS)
1 ounce sweet vermouth (Noilly Prat)
1/2 teaspoon Benedictine
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

Shake and strain into a rocks glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon.

This reminded me of the previously-mentioned cocktail for a couple of reasons. For one thing, look at the list of ingredients – take out the absinthe, add in cognac, and you’ve got this one. That also goes for the second thing, which is that it tastes very similar, but to me the sweet vermouth really cut through everything else. That might be my choice of vermouth, but as I gave my Cinzano to my mom (awwww!) and I didn’t think to try the Vya, and I know that the Carpano might be even stronger, that’s what I’ve got right now.

All that being said, it wasn’t a bad drink, but I’d probably go with the Louisiane when going with this style cocktail.

At this point in the evening, I was sans eggs, necessary for the next cocktail. I took my Vieux Carre’ cocktail outside with me for the first cigar I’ve had since E3, where I proceeded to read my copy of Future Washington from cover to cover while smoking a La Gloria Cubana Serie R and later a Cavalier Cigar while sipping Miller Lite after finishing the cocktail. I am, after all, on a diet. Supposedly.

My brother finally got home with the eggs (along with a steam cleaner and other things, thanks to – well, I’ll talk about that later) and so it was time for my next drink: the Coffee Cocktail.

Coffee Cocktail
Take 1 tea-spoonful powdered white sugar
1 fresh egg
1 large wine-glass [2 oz.] of port wine
1 pony [1 oz.] of brandy
2 or 3 lumps of ice
Break the egg in the glass, add the sugar, then the port, brandy, and ice. Shake thoroughly and strain into a glass. Grate a little nutmeg on top.

I initially chilled a cocktail glass for this and realized belatedly it was too small, so it was another Jack Daniels rocks glass for me.

This was definitely an interesting cocktail. I used a Horton Vineyards 2000 vintage port – one of my favorite vintage ports, especially for the price. You could quite tell the taste of the port over the armagnac that I ended up using and the rest, but it was still a tasty beverage.

If you couldn’t tell from the formatting of the ingredients, despite the fact that it’s on the next page of Vintage Cocktails and Forgotten Spirits from the Vieux Carre’ cocktail I had no idea about the N’awlins connection of this cocktail until I saw it in David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, with proper credit to Jerry Thomas, and David mentions that according to rumor it came from N’awlins. I can definitely see it.

Unlike Dr. Cocktail’s recipe, I used the whole egg in this recipe, and it was definitely lush and luxurious. Very tasty, but definitely perhaps maybe more appropriate as a digestif than a “post-dinner, post-cigars, post-beer” drink. It did lead very nicely into the brie, dry salami, and baguette that Matt brought home with the steam cleaner.

But that’ll do it for this month’s Mixology Monday. It was definitely good to try some random cocktails that I might not have had an impetus to try without this theme, so I’ve gotta give the shout out to Paul at Cocktail Chronicles for hosting this month. Tomorrow, once I’m safely back on the taxpayer’s dime, I’ll have to catch up on what I missed at Tales last week, and think fondly of next year when I’ll definitely be there!

The WSJ has an article about how cognac companies are trying to get a “signature cocktail”, like the mojito was for rum or the Cosmo for citrus flavored vodka, and popularize it.

One they mention in the article is ginger, lemonade, and cognac.

I’ve made more than a few cognac cocktails, though I often use armagnac instead.

What do you think would be a good one for ‘em?

(Yes, I have

tmfiii

and my orange liqueur tasting notes here at work with me – I’ll get to them, I promise!  I’ve just had, you know, actual work to do!)

My neighbor and his brother came over tonight.  My neighbor was sick.  I’d been reading Imbibe! the other day, so I made him a cherry smash:

Cherry Smash
by Julie Reiner via Imbibe! by David Wondrich

1 1/2 ounces Courvosier VS cognac (I used the Castarede XO armagnac)
3/4 ounce orange curacao (Cointreau)
3/4 ounce lemon juice
1/2 ounce cherry heering
Muddle four brandy soaked cherries in the bottom of a mixing glass.  Add the other ingredients and shake.  Strain into a cocktail glass and add two more cherries.

He liked it a lot; the big thing was that it was a bit strong in normal for what he usually drinks (as a note: he showed up drinking Jameson’s in a glass filled with ice – so it’s not a completely weenie drink that he’s looking for).

I didn’t try it, because he was sick, but I’m thinking of making one for myself.

I made myself a Rochester Cocktail, from Robert “Drinkboy” Hess in Imbibe!.

Rochester Cocktail
2 ounces rye whiskey  (I polished my old bottle of Sazerac rye.)
1 ounce Dubonnet (rouge, I assumed)
1/2 ounce Licor 43 (Cuarenta y Tres)
1/4 ounce absinthe (Pernod)
Stir, up, garnish with a lemon twist

I still suck at doing lemon twists but goshdarnit, I’m sure I can figure it out at some point.  Still, this was a good lush drink.

After he finished his cherry smash, I made my neighbor a Winter’s Touch:

Winter’s Touch
2 ounces bourbon (Maker’s Mark)
3/4 ounce vanilla vodka (Absolut Vanil)
1/2 ounce rich simple syrup (I put in 3/4 oz.)
2 dashes mint bitters
Shake, strain into a cocktail glass

I figured it’d be too much for him but he liked it – it was just strong.

But that led to me wondering: for someone not used to cocktails the way WE like cocktails, how do you inch them into cocktails that may be a lot stronger than what they’re used to?  I know I’ve made ones for other neighbors and my brother that they’ve liked – but they always comment on how strong they are.

Any thoughts?