An online speakeasy of potent potables and other pabulam.

Two weeks ago, Sean and I attended Tales of the Cocktail 2012 and had a great time. I hope to get a post up about Tales and some of my thoughts on what I saw, debates I heard and drinks I drank in the next couple of days. But first, I wanted to touch on the 2012 Olympic Games.

Like many of you, I’ve been glued to the (sometimes crappy) coverage of the Summer Olympic Games in London. I really enjoy the Games and have to say I get an up-swell in national pride watching the United States compete against the other nations of the world. Last night we had some friends over to hang out, have some grub, watch the Olympics and, of course, have a few drinks.

For the first drink, I found a tasty punch in the Cocktails+ iPhone app. I changed the recipe a bit so I’ll give you the original first and then my tweaked version. Unfortunately, in all the fervor of the games, I forgot to take a photo of the punch.

Roman Punch
1/4 oz sugar
1/2 oz raspberry syrup
2 dashes lemon or lime juice
1/4 oz curacao
2 oz brandy
1/2 oz Jamaican rum

Build over ice; garnish with various fruits in season and serve with a straw.

(Adapted from Harry Johnson, New & Improved Illustrated Bartender’s Manual. [Author, 1888] p. 166.)

And here’s the version I made. As you’ll see, I multiplied the ingredients by 4 in order to help take this from a single serve cocktail to a group beverage.

Roman Punch No. 2
1 oz simple syrup
2 oz raspberry syrup
Juice of half a lemon
1 oz Mandarin Napoleon
6 oz brandy
2 oz Applejack
2 oz Scarlet Ibis rum
16 oz sparkling water

Stir everything with a few ice cubes to well chill. Serve in small glasses over fresh ice and garnish with mint.

My version of the Roman Punch, although even with the addition of sparkling water, is a boozy punch. You can definitely taste the brandies and rum. Surprisingly the curacao comes through pretty strongly as well. All-in-all a tasty punch for a night of the Games.

The second drink I made is an original creation. I wanted something boozy and stirred with an international feel. You would think with the Olympics being held in London I would grab some gin. And oddly, once the drink was tasted, two out of the three tasters thought the base spirit was, in fact, gin. However, I actually grabbed mezcal. To be specific, I grabbed my bottle of Fidencio Sin Humo. The Fidencio mezcal is an unaged spirit and for a mezcal is very light on the smokiness that is a hallmark of mezcals in general. Upon reflection, an aged mezcal would provide a more golden color, but I would be afraid of too much smoke throwing off the balance. Of course, this is just fodder for more experimentation!

After grabbing the first ingredient from Mexico, I went across the Atlantic ocean to France and grabbed my bottle of Yellow Chartreuse. Ohhh, golden and delicious! Finally, I wanted to give a little bit more sweetness and a rounder flavor so I hopped over to Italy for my bottle of Maraschino. Mexico, France, Italy. Mezcal, Yellow Chartreuse, Maraschino. International ingredients for an international cocktail to enjoy during the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Gold Medal
1.5 oz Fidencio Mezcal
.5 oz Yellow Chartreuse
.25 oz Maraschino
2 dashes grapefruit bitters

Stir with ice and serve up. Squeeze lemon peel over top of drink and garnish with peel.

With a slightly golden hue and an herbal-berry roundness to the flavor, this drink soars like the gold medal athletes it celebrates.

Regardless who you are rooting for during the Olympics, give this drink a try and let me know what you think in the comments.

Cheers!

Happy July 5th! If you’re like me (and who wouldn’t want to be!) you really wish someone in the government would make today a National Holiday too. I mean, who couldn’t use the day after Independence Day to recuperate, amiright?

This Independence Day, at least here in the Washington, DC area, has been marked with a record setting heat wave and levels of humidity that almost necessitate a scuba tank. It’s seriously hot around here!

So while lounging around the Den yesterday watching Jaws & Independence Day, I, of course, whipped up a few refreshing beverages that really beat the heat. The names are less than desirable, but my brain was like fudge.

One thing about drinking when it is this hot out, I want ice & lots of it. So I tend to drink tiki drinks and long drinks in chimney glasses that will keep the heat at bay for a little while. These drinks definitely fit that mold.

For the first drink I wanted to utilize some of the great looking peaches I got at the market. And when I think about peaches and summer drinks my mind instinctively goes to whiskey. So this is what I came up with.

Peach-Whiskey Cooler
Muddle 1/4 of a fresh peach with .75oz simple syrup.
Add:
1oz fresh lemon juice
1oz Bonded Applejack
1.5oz Rye whiskey
1 dash Angostura Bitters
1 dash Fee Brother’s Peach Bitters

Shake and double strain into an ice filled chimney glass. Add soda water to fill and gently stir. Garnish with mint, a slice of peach and/or some lemon peel.

This drink fit the bill perfectly. You may think that the whiskey & applejack make this a heavier drink but in reality it is very light. The peach, lemon & soda mixture make this incredibly refreshing and the rye and applejack give just enough body to let you know you’re enjoying a potant potable.

The next drink I came up because I wanted to have a little English gin during my Independence Day celebration. I had a pink grapefruit hanging around and knew that some of the fresh rosemary we have growing on the balcony would be a great tasting mix.

Grapefruit-Rosemary Cooler
Muddle a 4 inch strip of grapefruit peel, a 2 inch stalk of rosemary and 1 oz simple syrup.

Add to that:
1.25 oz fresh grapefruit juice
2 oz gin (I used Beefeater 24)
2 dashes Bittermen’s Burlesque Bitters

Shake & double strain into an ice filled chimney glass. Top with soda water to fill and gently stir to combine. Garnish with some grapefruit peel & rosemary.

This was great! Light and citrusy without being cloyingly sweet. I could drink these all day during this heat wave.

So what kind of drinks do you make to beat the heat? Leave us your suggestions in the comments.

Cheers!

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

So Mixology Monday definitely caught me off-guard this month.  Fortunately for me, I had something up my sleeve purely by coincidence.

You see, one of our neighbors had a Christmas party on Saturday night.  When we were talking about he expressed interest in having eggnog.  None of us had really had eggnog before and his plan to buy some from the store and spike it.

Whoa whoa whoa, I said.  Give me a chance first.

I’d seen Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s recipe for eggnog and decided to give it a shot.  I went out to the store and bought all the stuff I didn’t have so that I could make up a batch: mostly, I needed whole milk, heavy cream, and fresh nutmeg.  Spice connection is a GO!  (Huzzah.  Nutmeg.)

I grabbed the sugar, Foursquare spiced rum – which I’d never opened, and some Chalfonte cognac.  I don’t have a traditional blender but I did have a stick blender.

Now I’m going to tell you something – this recipe is a pain in the butt to make by yourself with a stick blender!  I was smart enough to grate the nutmeg ahead of time, as well as to portion out all of the other ingredients involved.

When I was done blending everything I was tempted to try it right away.  Two reasons came up that kept me from drinking it: a) I wanted to let it cool first and b) I fell asleep.

For whatever reason I was busy the next night.  So it was yet another night before I could take a taste.

The eggnog kept torturing me and I finally got to take a taste.  I shook up the concoction, poured it into a glass, and topped it with a bit of fresh grated nutmeg.

Sip.

Wow.

I mean – great googly moogly!  This was some awesome stuff.  It reminded me in a lot of ways of a vanilla milkshake, though without an obvious vanilla taste (I did, however, strongly consider adding vanilla extract to the recipe).  At the same time, it wasn’t heavy while being as amazingly rich as it was.  Telling my friends who were dietitians what was in it was quite amusing – and one of them still slugged back a full cup of it!

It ends up for the party I stocked up to make a bunch of it.  My friend suggested how much we should make – I ended up buying two fifths of Sailor Jerry’s and two of St. Remy XO brandy, a gallon of whole milk, six pints of heavy cream, and four dozen eggs.

Uh…yeah.  We didn’t make that much.  We went through a dozen eggs, so we made six “batches”.

Still, everyone who tried it – from seasoned drinkers to lightweights – loved it.

This is the Scofflaw’s Den, though, and to make up for lack of a drink recipe from Marshall I figure I should post another one.

At the same neighbor’s house a couple of weeks before my brother and I had visited to watch the Redskins play – uh – somebody.  (Hey, I’m a Steelers fan.)  The neighbor asked that I bring a “tasty beverage”.

Initially I hadn’t really planned on anything but while I was at the store I had an idea.  I picked up some fresh apple cider and went home.   While I was at home I grabbed a bottle of Laird’s Applejack (the non-bonded kind), some St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram, and a bottle of Fee’s Aromatic bitters.

See the spice connection?  If you can’t consider allspice dram under the “spice” category I don’t know what counts!

I experimented a bit while I was over there but the general recipe ended up being as follows.  Our neighbor gave the drink its name:

Apple Cider Heaven
4 oz. fresh apple cider
2 oz. Laird’s applejack
1 oz. Jameson’s Irish whiskey
1/2 oz. St. Elizabeth’s Allspice dram
1-2 dashes bitter
Shake all together and strain into a double old fashioned glass.  If you’d like to garnish it, I suggest an apple slice with a light dusting of nutmeg.

You could make the drink a number of different ways.  For instance, it could be made hot (in which case I’d shake just the liquor ingredients, then pour it in a glass and add hot apple cider).  We made them in pint glasses, more like shooters, and free-poured most of them.

For the party I made more of them but I made one rookie mistake – we were short on space in the kitchen, so I went outside.  Yeah, you know, when it’s less than 32 degrees outside it’s going to lower the amount of water you get into a shaken drink, and thus, it’ll taste stronger.

Still, people loved them!  The combination of apple cider and allspice dram, in my opinion, is KILLER.  From there you can work on all kinds of combinations!

Anyways, thus goes Mixology Monday: Spice.  I’d like to thank Craig at Tiki Drinks & Indigo Firmaments for hosting it, Paul as usual for setting up Mixology Monday, and Jeffrey Morgenthaler for that killer eggnog recipe.  After making all that nog, and eating deviled eggs with it, I will be avoiding eggs for a while.  Probably until Saturday.