A Bitter Day

 

 

 

For the last month I’ve had four mason jars on my bookshelf doing nothing but staring blankly at me and slowly turn shades of brown, red and gold. For a month I’ve been walking past them eyeing them with a mix of patient joy and apprehension. I would often wonder if all that time would be wasted.

Today is the day to open them and say hello. The first two jars hold the denizens I had mentioned a few post earlier. Organic Ontario peaches sitting in bourbon. The third jar contained the aromatic herbs, and the fourth jar the bitter herbs. The herbs used are listed below in their quantities.

Aromatics

2 tsp Hibiscus flower
2 tsp Lavender
2 tsp Cherry bark
2 tsp Lemon Grass
1/2 tsp Fennel pollen
3 cloves
2 pods Cardamom
1 stick Cinnamon
2 pods Star Anise
200 ml Vodka

Bitters

1 tsp Wormwood
1 tsp Gentian root
1/2 tsp Fennel Pollen
200 ml Vodka

 

I’ve strained the liquid from the jars, keeping them separate. The peaches were simmered in a pot for about a half hour in a cup of water, fine strained through cheese cloth, and added to the bourbon. Same goes for the Aromatics, which I’ll leave for another week, shaking every day. The bitters are really bitter and don’t need any more extraction.

 

What peaches!

 

Aromatics

I tried mixing a bit of each together: 1.5 oz peach bourbon, 1 oz aromatics and .25 of the bitters. The bitters could go less as they really shine through, but I have not added caramel yet, that should smooth things out into something more palatable. One more week and I’ll mix them again and add the caramel as well. Hopefully, they’ll be ready for a drink. Now, to decide on a cocktail…. any suggestions?

Ginger Beer for What Ails You

 

Spicy goodness awaits all

 

It is a dark day.  The sun is hidden by the vindictive clouds looming low on the horizon, thunder claps peal across the city and my thoughts turn to Ginger Beer.  Specifically, I’m gagging for a Dark and Stormy right about now, and seeing as the weather is such, I thought to while away the afternoon making the all important product.

   I popped out to the shops to get the few ingredients for this ultra simple, yet immensely rewarding recipe.  A bag of lemons, ones with thinner skin are better for juicing; a couple pounds of raw ginger and some sugar.  Personally, I prefer using Turbinado sugar to make this.   White sugar will do but you’ll miss out on flavour.  Demerara or a generic brown sugar adds too much molasses, muddying up the flavour and colouring the GB a bit on the brown side.  

The recipe:

1 oz of ginger juice

2 oz of lemon juice

3 oz of simple syrup

10 oz of warm water

   This is the basic ratio you’ll need to follow. Jeffrey Morgenthaler has his recipe, which is where I got the original ratio from, as well as some indispensable tips on it’s making.  Experiment away with what flavour suits you.  I generally double the ginger, decrease the citrus to get mine, but I like it a bit on the spicy side.  When it comes to the lemon, you can use anything along with it.  A few months back I made a batch of Orange Bitters and had five pounds of Seville oranges, flayed, in my fridge.   Seville oranges aren’t very nice to eat but great in cooking, they’re the traditional orange used in marmalade.  When making a batch of GB I put some of their juice in with the lemon and came out with a very nice effect.  This recipe is very adaptable to any situation.  

   One very important note: learn from my experience and measure the sugar carefully.  Play around with all the other ratios, but too much sugar will very likely cause your bottles to explode about twenty-four hours in.  A nasty thing to wake up to.  Of course, this warning is only needed if you’re going to be bottle conditioning with yeast.  

   Once you’ve mixed the GB, you have two options.  You can go the easy route and put it in a soda siphon and charge it instantly.  You may want to bugger about with the sugar, as it may be too sweet because there’s no yeast to chow down on it.

The second option, and the one I use, is to bottle condition.  Firstly you need bottles similar to the ones pictured above (courtesy of my buddy Phil and his family’s brewery).   Any “Grolsch” type bottle with swing cap should do.  You’ll want the mix a bit warm to activate the yeast.  Put in the tip of a tea spoon’s amount of yeast, close the lid and give the bottle a light shake.

   Now we wait.  Put the bottles in a warm room.  I stick a space heater into a closet to raise the ambient temperature to a bit over 20 celsius.  Any lower and the yeast will stay dormant.  Leave the bottle to sit in the warm for fourty-eight hours,  no more, no less.  A few hours less and you won’t get the carbonation, a few hours more and the yeast starts to convert the sugars to booze.  You’ll end up with a very dry bottle of crap.   Once the bottle are ready, put them in the fridge then drink up once their chilled.  

A note about yeast: I use wine yeast, champagne yeast has been recommended but I have yet to get my hands on any.  I’d love to try it out if anyone can give any clues for brewers supplies in Hogtown.  Wine yeast usually goes for about a dollar a pack and will last for several bottlings.

Finally, take out the bottle of Gosling’s rum form the cupboard. It’s been waiting so patiently for it’s mate for so long. Over ice, pour a generous portion of this black nectar and top off with a little ginger beer to taste, about equal portion if you likes your rum. Any rum will do, but it takes rum made on the English Caribbean islands to match the spice and not get over powered.
Imbibe graciously and enjoy the weather raging overhead as you watch the waves crash on the beach, or, as it were, stop caring that the closest thing to a beach near you is a slight sickly looking puddle and the fact that the hole in your boot is no substitution for bare feet on sand.

Guerilla Bartending

Last night I did a small favour for a friend.  At this  large loft-esque apartment with patio there were about a hundred guests.   Alec and his roommate Farzad set out the turntables connected to a mac and belted out some brilliant tunes, most of which sounded early R&B, gospel and funk.  Something like Nina Simone, but brought into the modern era with some fresh remixes added.  Brilliant.

For the evening’s festivities I threw in four cocktails on offer.  The Pegu Club, The Calvados Cocktail, Satan’s Whiskers (all from T. Haigh’s book, “Vintage Cocktails & Spirits”) and rounded off with Jaimie Boudreau’s Rosewater Rickey.  Plenty of other classics came to be made, of course, but those were the main ones.  Christ I had fun.  It was a good opportunity to screw around with recipes I wanted to practice, and practice I did.

Boudreau’s was an immediate hit with the pyrotechnics and the bourbon cherries.

In a mixing glass I put two cherries, added a spritz of bitters from the mister then brulée’d them for a good ten seconds.  

I then added gin, rose water, lime juice and simple syrup.  Shook like a dervish, strained over ice and topped with soda.   The feedback on it was brilliant and it seemed to have turned a number of people who previously hated gin onto the beautiful spirit. Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

Second most popular was the Calvados Cocktail.  I chose this because of the glut of orange bitters I had in the house.  The recipe calls for 3/4 ounces of bitters and me with a litre of the stuff could accomodate.  Thankfully, my bitters are a little more delicate than others so they didn’t overpower the subtleties of the of the Calvados, the Cointreau and the orange juice.

The Pegu Club recieved a little less fan fare than the dramatic Rickey, but nonetheless a delicious simple drink.  Essentially a gin sidecar with Angostura bitters, it was originally served at the Pegu Club in Rangoon circa the 1920′s.

 I was a little uneasy about pushing Satan’s Whisker’s, a mistake in hindsight, I think.  With equal parts gin, red vermouth, white vermouth, orange juice; a dash of orange bitters and Cointreau I thought  it perhaps a little esoteric.  On re-reading the recipe I’m thinking I was too quick to judge the drinks popularity.  The five I made received happy looks, in truth.   I didn’t make them until I had become a little more familiar with their palate.  

Gin was certainly the theme of the evening.  Mojito, Caipirissimas, Caipiroskas, Sazeracs, Manhattans, Margaritas were made as well.  I made one version of a Cosmopolitan on the fly without cranberry.  I crushed some fresh cherries in the shaker, vodka and Cointreau, dash of orange bitters and lime and finished with an orange twist.  I think it worked quite well, and ended up making quite a few. 

The bar was a great set up with an ancient record player unit serving as the “wood”, and the kitchen counter and sinks serving as my back bar, well stocked by the host, I might add.   There were a number of instances in the evening that found me chuckling at scooping ice from a small stock pot with a shaker tin.  

I havn’t had so much fun tending bar in a long time.  That sentiment may have come from the glass of Cava I had on the go, along with a couple of Bourbon sours.  I don’t  partake while I’m working, but this was more casual and it wasn’t really working, after all.

I could eat a peach… Or let it sit in bourbon for a month.

Two days ago I got my hands on some very overripe organic peaches.  Rather than eat them I stuffed them in a mason jar and filled it with bourbon.  Why, you ask?

Peach bitters!

Today I spent some time wandering around Kensington Market looking for things witches buy.  I found them all, with the unsurprising exception of cinchona bark.  For that the search continues.

I’m preparing a new jar with wormwood and gentian as the bittering agent.  In my tickle trunk I have also cherry bark, lavender, dried hibiscus, lemon grass, fennel pollen, cinnamon, cardamom and staranise.  Those will go into another jar as the aromatizing agents.   While the peaches are in bourbon, I’m using vodka for the herbs.  

Details and pics to follow, at some point, I’m sure.  It’ll take about a month.

 

P.S.  Don’t breath in deeply with your nose in the jar of wormwood.  It’s been five minutes and I still have this odd taste in my mouth.  Metallic, like a battery.

Old Fashioned

A couple days ago I started curing cherries in bourbon.  I had some syrup saved that I had poached overripe peaches in.  In the liquid was star anise, cardamom and a vanilla bean.  At a bit of a loss for what I’d use it for, I added it to the curing liquid.  Only a few days in and it seems to work nicely with the bourbon, adding a delicious element to the cherries.

I couldn’t wait to try them though.  Thankfully, the flavour had seeped into the cherries enough for my impatience to use.  I thought I’d make an Old Fashioned, albeit a little different from the original, i.e I used grapefruit rind in place of orange.  To be honest, I’m not completely sure that the traditional recipe calls for orange. 

The old fashioned is as basic a cocktail as you can get.  It follows the original definition of cocktail to a T: Spirit, bitters, sugar, water.  More often than not ordering one will get you a whisk(e)y O.F. (usually rye or bourbon).  The drink is not spirit specific, however, and can be made with just about anything from gin to Amarula (personally, I think the latter would be vile).

To start

Take an Old Fashioned glass (aka, rocks glass) and add the grapefruit zest, lemon zest and cherry.  Gently press the rinds with a muddler to release the oils in the skin.  Then, crush the cherry.

Fill about half the glass with ice, add bitters and half the portion of spirit for the drink.  The recipe usually calls for Angostura bitters, but I added my own orange bitters for a lark.  I used Beam, though my personal choice would be Makers Mark.  Add simple syrup (or raw sugar if you like it the hard way) to taste.  Be thrifty.  Then stir for about fifteen seconds.

 

Fill the remainder of the glass with ice and add the remainder of the spirit.  Stir again and adjust bitters and sugar if so desired. The key to a successful O.F. is balance.  Balance in sweet, bitter and dilution.   You’ll know when it’s just so; it will be harmonious on your tongue. Stir for another fifteen seconds or so.   

The final step is to tart the drink up.  Fill with a bit extra ice if dilution thinned it out too much. I tossed a cherry on top with a grapefruit segment to boot.  Delicious.  When it comes to the garnish, don’t be stingy and let your imagination take over.  It used to be that O.F.s were so loaded with fruit that they could be mistaken for Carmen Miranda on a hot day.  

Sip well and drink while it’s still smiling.

Voilà

 

The grapefruit brought a delicate aroma and flavour to the drink.  Anything with more body than Beam would have overpowered the flavour.  Perhaps gin, or rum?  The orange bitters came through with the cardamom flavour hanging in the back.  The cherries are delicious, I can’t wait to taste them after a week or two. All in all, a success.

 

The recipe

2oz Bourbon

6 dashes of Angostura bitters

4dashes of Orange bitters

1/4 ounce of simple syrup

zest of lemon and grapefruit

Bourbon cherry

 

Cheers.

 

Thanks to Brett for the photos.

A nip like no other

For the first posting on whisky it would seem appropriate to talk about one that is near and dear to me. Brora distillery is one of those that is now confined to the annals of history.

The distillery was opened by the infamous Marquis de Stafford as Clynelish and received its licence in 1824.  It was built near the village of Brora, 59 miles north of Inverness.  It changed hands a few times before the 60′s and in ’67 a second Clynelish distillery was opened accross the road.  In ’69 the old distillery closed for a short while before being rebranded as Brora in ’75.

Unfortunately, life was short lived for this unique distillery; producing the peatiest of highland malts earned it the rubric “Lagavulin of the North” and it stopped production in 1983.  For good, it seems.

Clynelish, in the meantime continues to produce a heady malt, albeit with somewhat less punch than it’s uncle, Brora.  Though Brora was never really bottled as a single malt, it was snatched up by a number of independent bottlers to be aged.  Later, when single malts became more commonplace this whisky found its niche and was bottled alone.  I believe that Diageo has some stock as well and is releasing it, but I have only seen independent bottlers.

About a year ago I took notes on my third tasting of the thirty year old expression.  It still stands as the most dramatic tasting I have experienced.  

I found it to be vaguely reminiscent of Talisker, very peppery and earthy on the nose with heavy smoke and rich malt underlying in the nose.

At %55.7 A.B.V.  the initial taste hit hard and lambasted the tongue.  It sent shivers through my skull and down my spine.  It was like an angel had pissed on my tongue.  

The first sensation I experienced was sweet smoke.  It caused my mouth to dry for a second, then flood itself in response.  Seaweedy iodine and bitterness followed for me. 

The mouthfeel was oily and perhaps meaty.  It lolled about on the tongue like an old man strolling in a field on the first day of spring,   stopping every now and again to take in the new aromas on the air.

With a touch of water (and it was a thrifty touch), the alcohol and smoke were tamed to bring out the sweetness of the malt.   It became much more complex.

This whisky was perhaps the most well balanced malt I have tasted, certainly for my own palate.  It finished elegantly and left me gasping for more.  Unfortunately, at about 50+ a nip I was unable to indulge.

Brora can certainly be an expensive malt to buy.  The thirty year old was priced at around $450 CAD and will no doubt rise in price. If  you do happen to find a bottle in any expression, I encourage its purchase.  It is worth every penny.

Oh, show me the way to the next whisky bar!

Whisky.  Here, specifically Malt Whisky or Single Malt Scotch, is something different.  It is romantic, ideal and utopian.  At its base are distillate and flavour, but there is more.  Oh, so much more.

In whisky you taste the water that flowed over river beds in days gone by.  You feel the hopes and dreams of the hands that laid it to sleep.  It is the history of the land itself.  

In Talisker you can feel the volcanic surge of rock that created the minerals that the water feeding the washbacks give, in Edradour it is the rolling hills of Badenoch and the seasons that come and go.  On Islay it is the seaside where the casks sit, soaking in the deep exhalation of the kelp beds on the coast.  In Wick, it is the storms, the sea, the land itself.

Slowly, slowly, it evolves as it grows older, wiser.  It takes on the flavour, scent and memories of seasons and oak.  It breathes in the atmosphere as the pressure changes and weather rages.

As it sits on the salty coast it courses with salt blood.

As it sits in the heather it thinks only of the coming summer, then the time of blooming bells.

It sends fierce fires and calming voices.

Every sip is a meditation for me.  I am standing still with the mountain’s conversation lolling gently in the air and accross the ground.

And on my lips, as the taste fades away, it is the most delicate sunset as the Haar sweeps in from the west.

My first taste of whisky was Oban. The 14 year old from the west highland.  I was young and it was harsh to me.  I had to work at it.  After all, all good things take time and effort.  My most memorable real first drink was Clynelish, a small treasure my father had found.  I remember even in my teen years my father had a good collection and a great passion for malts.  Of course, him being a pilot and visiting the UK often lead to interesting choice for the time in Canada.  

It wasn’t until I lived in Scotland that I was exposed to so many different expression of the same product.  Bunnahabhain, Edradour, Deanston, Glen Scotia, Te Bheag (still the best blend I’ve had.  Could be the memories attatched), Auchentoshan, Rosebank, and the list goes on and on and on.  It was there I developed my palate and later at the Shebeen in Vancouver with Josee Tremblay and Jess Hillier and the Heathers that it really came to be used and developed.  

Of course, the trips to five distilleries helped as well.  As well as numerous well intentioned bars…

In lieu of a ’59 Bollinger to Christen…

This space has been created in the hope of courting an exchange of ideas here in Toronto; specifically in the areas of dining and imbibing and the restaurant industry as a whole (perhaps a little ambitious). Oh, and semicolons. I have just discovered them and don’t care if they’re misused. They are the height of decadence.

I freely admit that there is a sincere lack of “strategic planning”, the only goal is to promote discussion and the free exchange of ideas. Please contribute gratuitously.

Mostly, this is a love letter to spirits and cocktails as well as food.   That doesn’t mean I won’t hang out with my friend beer as well.  Sometimes I may even call up grapes  for a chin wag (the only HNIC pun I will use.  Promise.).    Being poly-amorous is the name of this game.  

Finally, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, in the words of Mr. Embury, “Here’s How!”

Gin.

I love Gin.  I really do, so I thought it appropriate to begin with this.  Gin is not my first love, but my most recent.  My first love is malt whisky, but I turn to gin because she is not as jealous as her barley counterpart.  Gin is also the underdog.  Once the king of spirits and the foundation of so many drinks, it has fallen from it’s place to the usurper vodka. 

   Please, don’t get me wrong.  I have nothing against vodka, I only think that gin can do everything that vodka can do, and better.  Gin is interesting and contains many depths.  It has so many differences between brands and styles that call for different expressions of the product (Juniper green is not best suited to a Tom Collins, for instance).  That the most common use of it has been broken down to G&T’s and Martini’s is sad and speaks to the misuse of this great spirit.

     Gin is my default choice when I’m standing at the bar a minute after the bartender has begun to lose his patience while waiting for my decision. Humming and hawing, my mind wanders to the uplifting juniper, coriander, citrus oil infused beauty.  Martini’s, Flips, Rickeys, Sours, Slings and what have you, all please while I contemplate deeper flavours to delight my senses with afterwards.  

    Right now I’m drinking Plymouth sour with a dash of orange bitters.  Touch of egg white and turbinado sugar.  Delicious.