An online speakeasy of potent potables and other pabulam.

Ahhhhh . . . There’s a nip in the air and the leaves are starting to change color and drop to the ground. The night descends earlier (or is it faster) and the grip of winter is just around the corner.

It isn’t a secret that autumn is my favorite season. I love the cold air and early evenings. There is nothing better than curling up on the couch under a warm blanket on a cold day watching hockey, football, or hell, even reading a cocktail tome.

But another reason I love the fall is that it is my favorite cocktail season. Tiki drinks and refreshing gin cocktails are replaced with whisk(e)ies and bitter amaros. Pineapple and coconut are replaced with apple and cherry. Limes are supplanted by lemons as the citrus of majority in my fridge.

I mention apples and cherries in particular because I love playing with those flavors this time of year. I love mixing with calvados, Applejack, or maybe some Leopold Brothers apple whiskey or apple liqueur. Bringing some cherry to the party may come from Cherry Herring, maraschino, kirschwasser, or my latest toy, Maurin Quina.

Another thing I love to mix with is apple cider. We had an apple press growing up and every fall made our own fresh-pressed apple cider. It was fantastic! Unfortunately you can only find pasteurized cider for sale nowadays. But if you own a juicer, you can make your own! Lately I’ve been boiling apple cider down into a thick concentrated syrup. Amazingly, along with the concentrated appleness, it develops an amazing tartness. This really comes in handy it you don’t want to add lemon, but need that acidity to balance out your cocktail. To make it, simply boil down apple cider until it has reduced by 75%.

I decided I wanted to play with the cider syrup and thought it would play very nicely with scotch. So I pulled out my new bottle of Great King Street blended scotch from Compass Box and set to work. This is what I came up with:

Orchard Bonfire
1.5 oz blended Scotch
.5 oz cider syrup
.25 oz honey syrup (2 parts honey & 1 part water)
1 barspoon pimento dram
1 dash Whiskey Barrel Bitters

Shake & double strain into a cocktail glass rinsed with a smokey scotch. (I used Peat Monster.) Garnish with a maraschino cherry.

What do you like to drink when fall arrives? Leave a comment and let us know!

Cheers!

PS. Scofflaw’s Den celebrated it’s fourth birthday earlier this month. We thank all of our readers for sticking with us and we plan on providing a lot more content and recipes for you to enjoy for at least another four years. -Marshall

Well, it’s been a while, but it was time for Mixology Monday again!  This time it’s being hosted at Rock & Rye by Dennis.  Thanks, Dennis!

The theme is “Forgotten Cocktails”.  Given the resurgence in cocktail culture, and my relative lack of scholarship done “on my own”, I did what I figure most folks would – grabbed my copy of Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails (2nd edition, natch) and started thumbing through it.

I didn’t have to thumb through it for long.

Bourbon has always been a passion of mine.  Lately – and I blame Harry Turtledove’s “American Empire” series of books for this – I’ve been on a Calvados kick.  I don’t make a lot of drinks using Calvados because I tend to drink it straight (and usually while smoking a cigar) that doesn’t mean I avoid Calvados cocktails.

Speaking of sexy, it's Trader Tiki stuff!

The Avenue is one of the first cocktails in the book.  Immediately I noticed the bourbon and the Calvados, but what really got me interested was the third ingredient listed: passion fruit juice (or nectar), which Dr. Cocktail suggests can be replaced with passion fruit syrup.

Why, I have passion fruit syrup – the ever-so-delicious Trader Tiki variety – and I even have Trader Tiki grenadine!  Let’s see here.

The Avenue
1 ounce bourbon
1 ounce Calvados
1 ounce passion fruit juice (or nectar)
1 dash real pomegranate grenadine
1 dash orange flower water
Shake in an iced cocktail shaker and strain into a cocktail glass.  Garnish with a carnation boutonniere.

Sorry.  I ain’t got no boutonniere, carnation or otherwise.

Oooo, golden! But no flowers.

The book suggests that you replace the grenadine with a dash of lemon juice if you use passion fruit syrup.  I really wanted to use the hibiscus grenadine, so I used a dash of it ANYWAYS and DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES.  Actually, I also added a dash or so of lemon juice, too.

The drink ended up still a bit sweet but tasty.  The texture is actually quite silky and I’m really digging it.

In fact, I’m very happy with how this drink came out!  It’s a departure from what I usually look for in a cocktail – it’s not bitter, for one – but on a cool fall evening, it works well.

I’m glad I went looking for a new forgotten cocktail, and I guess that means I have to thank Dennis for hosting this month’s MxMo!  I’d thank Paul, too, but don’t want it to go to his head too much.

What little-known or forgotten cocktails do y’all like?

First off – happy belated two year anniversary to us!  I admit we maybe haven’t been blogging perhaps as much as we should be, and I’m trying to get off my tookus and do more.  Tales of the Cocktail and that trip to Korea broke my rhythm!  But the good news is that I’m finally working things out right again.  I think.  Ask me that again in a week.

Second off – Phil Greene alerted us to this post covering the cocktails from the DC bracket of the Domaine de Canton competition.  I know I’ve tried a couple of those – the Domainatrix by Rachel Sergi, now over at Againn, and the Thai’s the Limit by Gina Chersevani of PS7 (which also features your Scofflaws in the Washington Post video about it).  I want to say I’ve tried the Owen Thomson (of Bourbon) Jack O’ Ginger but I might just be confusing it with another drink.

So – now to drinking and reading.

When I moved into my current apartment my parents commented on how it seemed like all the boxes I brought in had one of two things in them – either books or liquor.  Well, duh, I thought – what are my hobbies?  Cocktails and reading!

Them's a lot of words!

As I settled down recently to reread a ten part alternative history by Harry Turtledove (the Timeline-191 series, if you must know, where the South won the War Between the States thanks to not losing Lee’s Special Order 191 to McClellan), I did it my usual way – most of the time outside, on my balcony, drinking a beer and smoking a cigar.

mmmm, beer and a cigar

As I read through the first book How Few Remain that was mostly fine, but then I got into the Great War series with American Front.  That series introduces what has to be my favorite character in the entire series, Quebecois farmer Lucien Galtier.  Unlike most of the characters in the book (slight spoilers here, I’m afraid) his life doesn’t entirely suck.  In fact, his often humorous sections really help out through the grimmer parts of the series.

It was also his sections quite a while ago that got me introduced to Calvados.  Calvados is an apple brandy produced in France, and while the character drank basically a moonshine variation of it – after all, he’s a farmer in Quebec, not in the Calvados region of France, and it’s so often wartime with occupation forces etc yadda yadda yadda – that I had finally managed to get a bottle a few years ago.

I still remember the first time I actually tried Calvados.  It was on a date at a place called Sonoma here in DC and I was so excited to see it on the menu that I spilled red wine on my shirt.  (Hey, that was like over 2 years ago!  I had no idea what I was getting myself into.)  I didn’t care for it much straight, and the bottle I had tended to only be used in cocktails for a number of years (that number being two).

As I started rereading the series, I thought, hey, I should drink appropriately for the books.  Cigars are fine, a lot of the characters smoke them though the US characters will remind you repeatedly that their cigars are bad compared to Confederate ones (the Confederacy, in these books, own Cuba as well as the prime tobacco growing parts of North America).

At first this started with sipping on Calvados while reading them, which helped with the Galtier parts to feel more “into it”.  Depending on night of the week and compunction, I started adding in other things.  Whiskey, for instance, is an easy choice for a lot of the characters, as well as beer – which I had before, naturally – and occasionally for the characters from Sonora and Chihuahua some mezcal, specifically, Del Maguey crema de mezcal.

Of course, you can’t keep up with the characters in the book, but on the other hand, keeping it close to what you’re reading helps a lot.  I feel an urge to read The Great Gatsby again, since I think it’d fun to drink appropriate cocktails to that – though it is kind of funny to try to figure out what to drink while reading my Warhammer 40K novels.

Right now?  Well, I’m reading The Space Wolves Omnibus and therefore drinking ale.  In fact, I started tonight with a Sam Smith Yorkshire Stingo.  Sure, I probably should drink something more viking, but they drink ale in the books, and I don’t have any Skullsplitter.  A lot of the characters drink amasec in 40K, and the description of that seems to be “brandy” as it’s distilled wine.  Hey, I’ve got plenty of brandy in my house…

What do you drink while reading?

It’s another Mixology Monday and this month we are hosted by that Pegu drinking wild man Doug over at The Pegu Blog.  Doug’s chosen theme is “Made From Scratch” wherein he instructs “mix up a drink which is produced with one or more ingredients that you make yourself, be it bitters, infused liquors, liqueurs, syrups, or even the garnish!”  Well, that is certainly something up my alley as much as I love to make syrups, tinctures, infusions and the like.

I looked around the kitchen at my sundry bottles and decided I wanted to use two homemade ingredients – one that everyone should have in their repetois and one that is more esoteric.  The two chosen made from scratch ingredients?  Grenadine and Swedish Punsch!

Let’s begin with the grenadine.  If you are used to Rose’s Grenadine, then you aren’t using grenadine.  What you have there is red-dye-number-5-colored-high-fructose-corn-syrup, most likely with some sort of artificial cherry flavoring.  Real, honest to goodness grenadine is pomegranate syrup.  Further, homemade grenadine is one of the easiest bar staples anyone can make.  There are tons of recipes for making homemade grenadine.  Don’t believe me?  Go ahead, google it.  I’ll wait.

See?!?!  A vertiable cornocopia of recipes.  To me though, everything can be distilled down to two basic methods – cold and hot.  The cold method is straight forward.  Equal parts pomegranate juice and sugar; shaken until the sugar dissolves.  That’s it.  Simple.  You get the fresh tart flavor of the pomegranate and the sweetening power of the sugar.

The second method, the hot method, is a little more complicated.  At its most basic level, you heat the pomegranate juice and sugar and stir to dissolve.  Some recipes tell you to reduce this down by a certain amount to make it thick and even more syrupy.  Some have you add orange flower water after everything is reduced and cooled.  The only thing I can tell you is to try out different recipes and find one you like.  The last recipe I used came from Food & Wine’s 2008 Cocktail Book.

This particular recipe says to simmer two cups of pomegranate juice with one cup plus two tablespoons of sugar until thick enough to coat a spoon.  Then add 1/8 teaspoon of orange flower water.  Bottle and refrigerate for up to two weeks.  I also add about an ounce of 100 proof vodka to the final, cooled, syrup to help with shelf life.  And I’ll tell you, this is some tasty grenadine.  Damn tasty!

The second “made from scratch” ingredient I wanted to highlight was swedish punsch.  If you aren’t familiar with this ingredient, don’t be surprised.  It comes up most often in old cocktail books and recipes usually dating prior to Prohibition.  After reading through several old cocktail books and online discussions (especially on eGullet) I turned to the recipe used by Erik over at Underhill-Lounge.  I won’t recreate Erik’s recipe here, but here is a link to his site.

The swedish punsch is some tasty stuff and personally, I hope I find more things to use it in.  Everytime I see a recipe, I copy it down, but unfortunately, tend to forget about it until I find my bottle of punsch in the cabinet.  Shame on me!  The mixture of tea, arrack, rum and lemon is fragrant, pungent and completely enrapturing.

Now to find a cocktail that uses both of these ingredients.  Whipping out my trusty Iphone, I started searching the Cocktails app for drinks contains swedish punsch.  As an aside, if you have an Iphone and are a cocktail geek, you really should have this on your phone.  It is by far one of the top three apps I have and worth way more than it cost.  Seriously, buy it.  DO IT!!!

Anyway, I found a drink that I had never tried before that used both grenadine and swedish punsch – C.F.H. Cocktail.  The app tells me it is from page 43 of Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book, circa 1930.  So that is where I turned.

C.F.H. Cocktail
1/6 grenadine
1/6 Swedish Punch
1/6 Calvados
1/6 lemon juice
1/3 Burrough’s Beefeater Gin

That is the recipe – no instructions given in the Savoy.  Luckily the Cocktails app instructs to shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  The other problem is the ratios – why can’t these guys use a standard measure?!?!  Sheesh!  Well, looking at the recipe we can see that each ingredient, except the gin, is exactly one-half of the measure of the gin (1/6 v. 1/3).  Knowing this, and not wanting to drink a humongous cocktail (at least not yet), I used one ounce of gin.  This provided the following drink:

.5oz grenadine (homemade)
.5oz Swedish Punsch (homemade)
.5oz Calvados (Clear Creek Distillery’s Eau-de-vie-de-Pomme)
.5oz fresh lemon juice
1oz gin

This is one tasty beverage.  Seriously, I was kind of surprised, but WOW!  It is just sweet enough and everything plays so nicely in the glass.  For the first one I made (and yes I made more than one!), I used Plymouth gin.  The second one I made, I used Aviation gin.  I was a little worried that the extra oomph of the Aviation would throw the drink out of whack.  I was wrong.  It adds an extra layer of flavor and really highlights the calvados and the punsch.  This is certainly a cocktail that requires a little bit of experimenting with using various gins.  Something I plan to do in spades!

I want to thank Doug at The Pegu Blog again for hosting this month.  This should be a great theme that will keep plenty of people in the kitchen for a bit.

Cheers!