An online speakeasy of potent potables and other pabulam.

FIRST OFF: If you haven’t heard by now, legendary bar man Murray Stenson (left, photo courtesy John Keatley) is having heart issues. You can go to MurrayAID.org to find out more information. Locally, the Passenger will be having a benefit for him on November 5th, 5 PM to close. 10% of revenues and 100% of all tips will go towards his medical bills as Murray, like many folks in the industry, does not have health insurance.

I’ll leave the political comments off of the blog, but I will say one thing: the next day is the election, so you can go to the Passenger, booze it up, go to work late the next day and tell your boss “I was voting”. I can’t do that, because I voted early, but if you also vote early, you’ll have the sticker to prove it!

I’m just saying.

(And a special hint: both Brown brothers are supposed to be behind the bar, along with JP Featherston and Alex Bookless, so really, get your butt in there and drink yo’ face off. IT’S FOR CHARITY!)

Second, in the spirit of giving, the Passenger hosted our five year anniversary party a couple of weeks ago. We raised a couple of hundred bucks for our charities (the Museum of the American Cocktail and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation) and had an overall great time. Many thanks to our sponsors: The Passenger, Chartreuse and Edinburgh Gin, Whisked Bakery, Diep 9 genever, Catoctin Creek, and Chairman’s Reserve Rum.

Now my drink came in second to Marshall’s in voting, but since Hurricane Sandy is about to give our area a punch to the nose, it seems appropriately named and timed for me to give you my drink.

Dark Storms Travelling Slowly
2 ounces Chairman’s Reserve Rum (gold)
3/4 ounce lemon juice
1/4 ounce allspice dram
2 dashes Bittermens Hellfire Habanero Shrub
Shake ingredients together and pour into a highball glass unstrained. Top with two parts ginger beer, one part soda water. Garnish with a wheel of lime.

(Also see this news article for the origins of the acronym I used.)

Yes, it says “whiskey” here but they insist it’s “whisky”.

Third, also in the spirit of giving, thanks to Joe at Taylor Strategy I was sent a sample of George Dickel rye whisky. (No “e”! Except on the sample bottle. Oops!)

The aroma out of the bottle was nice. Kind of sweet. I poured some into a glass and tried it straight.

It’s … different than a lot of ryes I’ve had. My very first taste, I liked it at first, then the after taste I did not care for. However, my second and third tastes I liked a lot better, and got the impression it has a different over all “build” to the taste than a lot of ryes have. I haven’t played with it in a cocktail yet but I’ll probably make a Manhattan and/or a Sazerac at some point this weekend OH MY GOODNESS I FORGOT TO STOCK UP ON VERMOUTH BEFORE THE FRANKENSTORM I HOPE THERE IS STILL SOME TOMORROW AT THE STORE!

(Any rumors that I might have also done a “Gangnam Style” tasting, dancing around in my house with no pants on and listening to the song while drinking Dickel rye out of the sample bottle, may be completely and utterly true.)

So I’m off to finish preparing for Sandy’s vengeful wrath upon DC. Have a great weekend everyone! And hopefully see you November 5th!

Is no match for a Kaiser Penguin!

Yes, tonight’s drink we go after what some might consider an easy target – Rick over at Kaiser Penguin.  If you’ve spent any time near him at all you know his love for Fernet Branca, and how could I make a drink named after him without using some?

This one does have a slight variation that I thought up but didn’t try.  But enough jibba jabba, let’s see the drink!

The lime wedge is a mighty orca amongst the ice flows inhabited by kaiser penguins.

Kaiser Penguin
2 1/2 ounces Bols Genever (alternate: 2 ounces Citadelle Reserve Gin)
3/4 ounce Fernet Branca
1/4 – 1/2 ounce simple syrup (depending on taste)
Shake over ice.  Pour directly – do not strain! – with ice into a glass half filled with smashed ice.  Add more smashed ice to fill.  Squeeze a lime wedge into it and put it in to model the mighty orca that gets savagely deprived of its food by the sitcom-esque antics of kaiser penguins.  Best served with a cigar, I suggest a Padron 3000.

Kaiser Penguin question for the comments: have you tried this with Citadelle Reserve?  What did you think?  Also, can you spare $5?  I need more Fernet.

[Ninth in a series of drinks named after bloggers, mixologists, and random others who'll hopefully be at Tales.  The first post in the series is here.]

The Wild Drink Blog, hosted by Tristan Stephenson, is hosting this month’s Mixology Monday.  This was my first time checking out his blog, and so I say “welcome!” to the joys of a Mixology Monday.

The theme is “Superior Twists” – as you may have guessed by the title of my post.  What this means is not the usual garnish of an orange or lemon twist but rather a variation of a classic drink and one, that in the opinion of the blogger, works out better than normal.  He was also curious what our favorite song to do the twist to was, and upon thinking about it I have to say GWAR’s “Sex Cow”.  Now you know.  (And knowing is half the battle!)

I’m getting ready to move so I’ve started packing.  I started with a lot of my books and thus, all my cocktail related books – I thought – were in a sealed box.  Then I remembered my Museum of the American Cocktail pocket bar guide!  I thumbed through it for a few minutes while thinking of things I liked to make.  The first thing I noticed that really spoke to me is the Old-Fashioned Whiskey Cocktail.

The recipe in the book is listed like this:

Old-Fashioned Whiskey Cocktail
1 sugar cube (1 tsp)
1 tsp water
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 oz (60 ml) rye (or bourbon) whiskey
Muddle sugar, water, and bitters together until the sugar is mostly dissolved.  Fill glass with ice, then add the whiskey.  Garnish with a twist of lemon peel, or orange slice and cherry.  Serve with a swizzle stick or straw.

It’s then noted that it’s better to muddle a slice of orange peel so that you get the essential oils from the peel without getting the pulp.  I trimmed off some of the inner bitter pith before putting in a slice, did the muddling, then left in the orange while adding the whiskey and such.

It’d been a while since I had one and OOF!  I’d forgotten the hit that a drink like this will give you on first sip.  I let it sit for a while while I got out the ingredients for my superior twist (heh) on this drink while trying to remember who, exactly, inspired the variation I typically drink.

It’s really between two different sources.  One of them is our friend Jake, who I believe was the first person to initially suggest using the different spirit in an old fashioned.  The second is The Gibson, the popular bar down at 14th and U that had a drink I absolutely loved – the Malt & Hops.

Yes, I’m talking about making an Old Fashioned with Bols Genever.  Ever since I started making those I’d have to estimate that of previous bottles of Bols Genever, probably 90%+ was used in gin-based Old Fashioneds.  Here’s how I make them.

Bols Genever Old Fashioned
2-4 ounces Bols Genever
1 solid squeeze of demerara simple syrup
1-2 dashes Bitter Truth Repeal Day Bitters (or Marshall’s Moonshine Bitters)
Pour into a small glass.  Add several cubes of ice.  Stir in the glass for a few minutes, and if desired, add a twist of lemon or orange.

Maybe it’s just me, but this version is just so damn good it’s not even funny.  It’s smooth, it’s strong, it’s a bit sweet – I like a decent size squeeze of simple syrup in mine, and you don’t risk the granularity you might end up by using straight sugar cubes.  The flavorful and complex bitters adds another level to the rich, malty gin making this the kind of drink you can just sip on for hours – but have to be careful about, because it is damn easy to drink way too many of them!

So that’s all well and good but if you know us here in the Den you know that we don’t like to let a Mixology Monday slide by without a chance to throw in a bonus drink.  Therefore and thusly I flipped a page or two more in the book and saw the Picon Punch.

Just recently I’d finished making up a triple batch (oops!) of Jamie Boudreau‘s amer picon replica.  One batch went to the before-mentioned Jake; the other two batches I bottled up, with the majority of them going to other bloggers and people I know about town.

The night it was done I was looking for a drink to make with it and over in the Mixoloseum chat room Greg Boehm suggested that I make a picon punch.  The recipe he gave me was very similar to the one in the guide:

Picon Punch
2 oz (60 ml) Amer Picon
0.5 oz (15 ml) lemon juice
0.5 oz (15 ml) grenadine
4 oz (120 ml) soda water
Shake the Amer Picon, lemon juice, and grenadine with ice, and strain into an ice filled highball glass.  Top with soda.  Garnish with seasonal fruits.

Now, I’ll admit, I’m lazy, and didn’t garnish.  But I made it, and it’s not a bad drink, though sometimes drinks like this (and the Suffering Bastard variation that uses bourbon and gin) make me feel really lazy – I don’t want to shake, then strain, then top, etc. etc. etc.!

But I have other lemon-based beverages, and better yet, I debated how to use them to make the drink easier and faster to make – and perhaps tastier.

On the left is Simply Lemonade; for orange juice, I almost always buy the orange juice that they make and I’ll often have a bottle of the lemonade sitting around in case I have a hankering for it.  On the right is Fentiman’s Victorian Lemonade, a tasty dry lemonade that I picked up last weekend over at Ace and will post more about it later.

But there’s the thing – the former is sweetened while the latter is more complex and less sweet.  On the other hand, the Fentiman’s is also carbonated while the Simply Lemonade is not.

The answer, for me?  I used the grenadine with the Fentiman’s, but instead of using it also for the Simply Lemonade and risk it being too sweet, I used 100% pomegranate juice (here, POM).  Since the lemonades were replacing both the lemon juice and the soda, and I wouldn’t be shaking these, I altered the recipe a bit.

Amer Boudreau Scofflaw Punch
2 ounces amer picon (amer boudreau recipe)
0.5 ounce grenadine or pomegranate juice
6 ounces lemonade
Build over ice in a Collins glass, stir.

From left to right we have the Simply Lemonade/POM variation, the Fentiman’s & grenadine, and then the traditional (in the highball glass).  Notice I used Collins glass for the others.  I prefer that for this kind of drink, as a) they seem more like summer drinks to me and b) I think it makes it easier to enjoy the drink.

But that’s just me.

In tasting them, I used the traditional Picon Punch as the “standard”.  Personally, I like it, but not hugely so; I think it’s the soda water.  I’m using Stirrings Club Soda and it just doesn’t seem quite right to me.

The Simply Lemonade variation is still very lemonade-y (in the American style of lemonade sense) though with a backend of the pomegranate juice and not a lot of room for the amer picon to shine through (note that my amer picon is a bit light, it seems).  As a summer time drink it wouldn’t be bad at all though I might consider using something instead of amer picon in it – perhaps even a triple sec plus bitters or amaro.  It might be worth experimenting to see what’s good.

The Fentiman’s combination, on the other hand, really works for me.  I think it helps that the Victorian Lemonade is just a darn tasty beverage without being as cloyingly sweet as even the Simply Lemonade can be; and perhaps the Stirrings grenadine doesn’t hit as hard as the POM pomegranate juice.  (My next grenadine will be made from POM, after I move; that might give a better comparison.)

Give these drinks a shot and let us know what you think – and don’t forget to enter Marshall’s Templeton Rye contest!  Damn him, I’d enter it if I could!  GRRRR!

And thanks again to Tristan for hosting this month!  Can’t wait to see the round-up!

Though none of y’all will really care about this bit of administrivia, this is my first post from my new high powered personal laptop, and man…I love me a new computer.  The fact that I also dragged myself away from WAR is an accomplishment, too…

I really probably wouldn’t have thought of this as a big gin week except for two major things – one related to a certain gin cocktail, the other a gin itself.

First off, I was at Marshall’s and decided to have a negroni.  Now, ever since I did my miracle fruit tasting of Campari I’ve been in love with it.  A Hendricks negroni in NYC was quite wonderful, but we went more traditional at Marshall’s – just Plymouth, I believe.  The trick was the additional ingredient.

You see, Marshall had gotten himself a bottle of the new Fee’s Rhubarb Bitters and added that to the negroni.  WOWZERS.  That added a whole new dimension to it which I loved.  I’d planned on getting some from Kegworks but our friendly local liquor store said that he’d be getting some in soon so I decided to wait.  He’ll also be getting in some of their new cherry bitters.

The other big thing that happened this weekend was a new kind of gin.  One I should’ve been expecting but had forgotten about it.  Something that made me very, very excited.

See how excited I was?  Hayman’s Old Tom Gin!  HUZZAH!

The first thing I made with it was what Jay Hepburn over at Oh Gosh! recommended, which was Jamie Boudreau’s recipe for a Martinez.  That is:

Martinez
1 1/2 ounces Hayman’s Old Tom Gin
1 1/2 ounces Carpano Antica
2 bar spoons Luxardo maraschino liqueur
2 dashes Fee’s West Orange bitters
Stir with ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with a twist of orange, if you have it, I didn’t, so whatever.

Wow.  What a great drink.  I made the second one with the Bitter Truth orange bitters and honestly, I think it made it better – I bet the orange Angostura bitters would work also.

The second drink I made with it was a Ramos Gin Fizz.  I used the recipe out of Gary Regan’s _The Joy of Mixology_.

Ramos Gin Fizz
2 ounces Hayman’s Old Tom Gin
1 ounce heavy creme
1 raw egg white
1/2 ounce simple syrup
1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice
1/4 ounce orange flower water
club soda
2 half wheels of orange, for garnish
Combine everything but the club soda and garnish into a shaker with ice.  Shake for a long time.  Until your hands hurt and arms get tired.  Keep shaking.  Don’t be a wimp.  When you finally do wimp out, and you better have gone for at MINIMUM 60-90 seconds HARD, strain into two champagne glasses if you’re the kind of person who does that kind of thing, or just strain it into one white wine glass if you’re me.  Top with club soda (I used Stirrings) and garnish (I did not).

Wow.  That drink hit the SPOT on a Sunday afternoon!  It was fan-freakin’-tastic.  I can’t get over that, even if I did have to walk outside to shake it so I wouldn’t wake up the future sister-in-law from her nap.  One recommendation I’d make: maybe go a bit less than 1/4 ounce of the orange flower water.  That’s very potent stuff.  You might also want to measure out the creme last; it can coat the measuring cup and make it hard to see for other ingredients until you thoroughly wash it.

The final gin drink was actually a bit later.  I was walking over to a friend’s house to watch the ‘Skins-Cowboys game and wanted a drink for the walk.  I made a double (almost) Negroni, using Zuidam genever gin, added in a couple dashes of orange Angostura, and topped it with the club soda I had leftover from the Ramos Gin Fizz.  Ahhhh – a tasty travel drink that set up as a nice apertif for the dinner later.

If you have the chance, I highly, strongly, almost blasphemously recommend that you go find yourself some Old Tom Gin.  The Hayman’s that I have is fantastic, and now I want to get more kinds and try them out, too.