Workshop pt. 1: the what

Two things are rattling around my head as I write this. The first is Bacardi's 2008 Legacy Cocktail competition, with a shot at 10 month stint as a de-facto ambassador for both Bacardi and your own cocktail. The second is Wired's fairly awesome Storyboard blog, which followed a feature article for the magazine from conception to completion. The deadline for entries for the Legacy comp is October 16th 2008 - one week from now (a little under, if you're being picky) - and I'm going to use it as an opportunity to look at how I go about creating a new drink.There are, of course, rules to the competition. I'll cover them in more depth in the next part, but the key regulation is that the final drink must use Bacardi Superior Rum as its base ingredient. This is not unexpected. On the downside, Bacardi Superior - or Carta Blanca, call it what you will - has a bit of a reputation.

It's not that it's thought of as a bad rum (although I do remember hearing it described as a "rum-flavoured vodka" by a brand ambassador from a rival), it's more that there are other rums that are considered "better". There's a comparative tasting of white rums at Scottes' Rum Pages which uses it as a base against which the others are judged. It doesn't fare well.

All in all, the Bacardi surprised me by being better than expected. This certainly wasn’t a great rum - even calling it good would be a compliment. But it was better than I expected.

Honestly, I think the bad press that Carta Blanca gets isn't entirely deserved. I agree that there are more flavourful white rums out there, but for me, white rum isn't about big flavours. If you want complexity, leave it in the barrel and the hell away from the charcoal filters. Bacardi Superior, for better or worse, embodies the idea of a light, uncomplicated, charcoal-filtered spirit distilled from molasses. Whether it's the best embodiment of that idea is a discussion for a different day.

It's also irrelevant in this context. After all, the rules are the rules. Even if I hated Bacardi Superior, I'd be stuck with it, and the sentence "I'd much rather use Brand X instead, but hey, whatever," isn't one you want to say in a competition. On the upside, I had been lucky enough to do some training with Ian McLaren, Training and Mixology Manager at Bacardi UK (you can see his contribution to the first edition of the Legacy Cocktail book here). On what? Helpfully enough, we did an whole afternoon on Bacardi Superior.

There are things that everybody knows about Bacardi. The distillery was founded in 1862 by Don Facundo Bacardi Y Masso, formerly an importer of brandy and wine from Spain. Thirty years later, his rum was credited with saving the life of the Spanish king, and in October 1960, the company made its escape from Castro when troops raided the Edificio Bacardi - its headquarters in Havana - instead of the distillery where all the important stuff was. Then there's the thing that aren't so well known. For one, Bacardi Superior is barrel-aged for at least 12 months. And there's more: it's made from two distillates, each undergoing separate fermentation and distillation processes, and the colour removal that comes from charcoal filtration isn't or at least wasn't, initially, intentional.

The key to Bacardi's rums is that split-production process; the two distillates, known as the aguardiente and the redistilado are very different in character. The former is heavier, more pungent, coming off the still in the ballpark of 80% ABV. The latter is much lighter with some interesting floral and citrus notes, and is column-distilled five times. In something like the Bacardi 8 year old they combine to devastating effect, creating a rum that is still recognisably Cuban/Spanish in style but that also has some of the depth of flavour found in an English style rum. Unfortunately, the effect isn't as pronounced in the Carta Blanca, but maybe there's enough in there to work with.

Blatant post-project rationalization

So, having made a bottle of Grapefrucello, I'm now trying to find a use for it. Handily, I was holding a cocktail training session at work this afternoon and co-opted some of the staff into giving me a hand. Here's what we came up with:

Niccolò Martini
40ml 42 Below Passionfruit Vodka
20ml Grapefrucello
15ml Martini Extra Dry Vermouth
1 dash Campari

Stir all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with an orange zest twist.

Papa Ain't Comin' Home

25ml Appleton's V/X Rum
25ml Grapefrucello
20ml Lemon Juice
2 dashes Angostura Orange Bitters
1 dash egg white

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a lemon zest twist.

Copperbottom Fizz

25ml Tanqueray Gin
20ml Grapefrucello
10ml Pimm's No. 1
20ml Lemon Juice
10ml Cranberry Juice

Build with cubed ice in a highball glass. Garnish with a lemon wedge.

Mixology Monday: 19th Century Cocktails

Mixology Monday is a monthly celebration of mixological stuff, with each themed installment hosted somewhere within the drinkblogging community. This month's edition is on 19th Century Cocktails, and is being hosted at Bibulo.us. This is the ednbrg MxMo debut - here's hoping I don't screw this up...

The 19th Century marks the period when people started to define what a cocktail is and, having set those rules, starting to push those boundaries. Look at Jerry Thomas' guides for bartenders - there's a literal ton of recipes in there, all pushing, all striving for recognition. Some of them made it into the 20th Century, into popularity. Hell, some of them even made it into fame. Some of them didn't. This is the story of one of them.

Think of the 19th century as the mixed drink equivalent of the Big Brother house - packed full of competitors, each with an eye on the prize or whatever they can get their hands on. It's a dirty business, but some genuine stars made it out - the Manhattan, the Old-fashioned, the Sour, the Collins spring to mind. A couple almost made it, but not quite - the Martinez had to lose a bit of vermouth to get to the top table, for example. And then, there's everything else.

One of the drinks that didn't make it was the Daisy. Being honest, it wasn't going to. As David Wondrich points out, the recipe set out in the 1876 edition of Thomas' guide is basically the same as a Fizz with the addition of "3 or 4 dashes [of] orange cordial" and there's always the sticky little topic of what actually differentiates a Fizz from a Collins. Searching for its own niche in the cocktail world, the Daisy eventually settled into a fairly set recipe of spirit, lemon juice and grenadine, sometimes even eschewing the fizzy hat that had characterized its earliest incarnations.

Turning back the clock to that first instance of the Daisy isn't as challenging as I'd hoped or feared. For one, Wondrich has done all the hard work in Imbibe. But by this point, I've committed to the Daisy - I want to see if it's been done a great disservice by history. I wonder if we've let a gem slip into obscurity.

In order to make my Daisy authentic, I decided to look at the ingredients available to the 19th century bartender. Vodka is entirely absent from early cocktail guides, rye seems to be the popular choice for whiskey and there is, of course, the question of gin.

Gin as we know it is largely different to the gins used in the early years of the cocktail. London Dry Gin - the dominant style in today’s marketplace - was new, and largely unheard of outside of the UK. Instead, the majority of gin drinks call for either Old Tom gin (similar to London Dry, but sweetened) or Holland’s Gin: genever.

All of this led me to the opportunity to buy an obscure spirit, which isn’t something I’m ever going to pass on. A couple of days of searching Edinburgh’s various specialty off-licences finished with me taking possession of a bottle of Amsterdamsche Oude Genever. Genever is the forerunner of modern gin. It’s made by flavouring a base spirit with juniper and other herbs, like a London Dry Gin, but the difference lies in that spirit base - genever is based on maltwine, distilled from malted barley. This brings its own flavour to the table, as opposed of the neutral base of an Old Tom or London Dry. An Oude (old) genever must contain at least 15% maltwine, and no more than 20g of sugar per litre, whereas a Jonge (young) spirit can’t have more than 15% maltwine and 10g sugar per litre. The Amsterdamsche Oude has a slight colour to it, a very pale bronze, and surprisingly doesn’t taste a million miles away from a London Dry. There’s a nice current of maltiness under the juniper but, given Wondrich’s suggested substitute (8 parts Irish whiskey to 10 parts Plymouth Gin, with a touch of sugar), I was expecting the flavour to be more out there.

3 or 4 dashes Gum syrup 2 or 3 dashes orange cordial The juice of half a lemon 1 small wineglass of spirits

Fill glass half-full of shaved ice. Shake well and strain into a glass, and fill up with Seltzer water from a syphon.

Served long over ice, the Daisy is pretty disappointing. The orange cordial (I used Grand Marnier) barely comes through, but the malty base of the genever stands out. Juniper and citrus appear on the finish. For me, the most disappointing aspect was the mouthfeel - the texture was quite thin and watery, with very little fizz. I can't shake the feeling that the formula is missing something.

Second time around, I went even more old-fashioned, serving the same recipe straight up in a coupette. The texture's better, less watery but still lacking something. There's a greater degree of effervesence from the seltzer but it's still not what I'd call bubbly. In terms of flavour, there's no great difference from the long serve.

Sitting here in the 21st century, it's refreshing to look back at drinks that have passed out of the zeitgeist. A Gin Daisy is a cracking little drink, but it's missing something that a Collins or a Fizz have; that elusive mystery ingredient that elevates one recipe from the pack to the lead. In the case of the Daisy, it may be the inclusion of an ingredient that blew its chances - if the only difference between a Fizz and a Daisy is the orange component, and the orange component doesn't add anything meaningful to the drink, then it's simply easier to go with the formula that doesn't have it.

All of this is speculation. After all, who knows why some drinks make it and others don't? There's more to it than flavour alone, but part of me is glad that the lowly Daisy hasn't been totally forgotten. It's not a headliner but it's part of the history, another link in the DNA of cocktails.

So, I...uh, forgot the bacon

Not the most balanced shopping list I've ever written: 1 bottle Finlandia vodka 3 enormous grapefruits 1 air-tight container

Notably skipping the all-important meat, fish, dairy and vegetable components of an effective weekly shop, but fear not - there's a plan.

It's not even complicated. Strip the zests off the grapefruits, lob in the vodka, seal and in about two weeks, I'm going to add a couple of ounces of sugar syrup, et voilà I'll have a limoncello. Only grapefruitier. Grapefruitcello? Definitely not as catchy.

At least I didn't cut my ear off.

I had a bad experience with absinthe once. I was with a bunch of friends and we went to a flatparty somewhere in Manchester. We were greeted at the door by the lovely girl who lived there who offered us a tray of green shots. Apple Sourz? Don't mind if I do... I remember literally nothing else of the night.

In other news, US bartenders vs. the rest of the world in Simon Difford's Cabinet Room, battling for inclusion in La Fée's definitive guide to absinthe cocktails? Might be time to reacquaint myself with some green fairytales.

Absinthe Cocktail Grand Prix.