MxMo: Vodka is your friend

Mixology Monday is billed as the monthly online cocktail party, where our host chooses a theme and we rock up a couple of hours late, stinking of cheap wine and muttering something about "consumption". This month, Felicia's Speakeasy is graciously listening to our ramblings about our favourite Doctor Who and the fact that vodka is your friend. In Scotland, of course, vodka is everyone's friend. It's been the biggest selling spirit in both on- and off-licence sales (that's bars and liquor stores) since 2008, while Diageo's Cameronbridge distillery produces several quadrillion litres of Smirnoff every year. As far as Scottish bartenders go, vodka should be our friend, because selling it pays our wages but it's not.

Vodka has a bad reputation because it's in an awful lot of terrible drinks, all the classics of the vodka-liqueur-fruit juice school. It's telling that the drink that broke vodka in the US - the Moscow Mule - doesn't foreground its base spirit. There is, however, one vodka cocktail that does. The vodka martini is the elephant in the room. It's probably the most famous vodka cocktail, but the prevailing attitude among those in the know is that it's a corrupted gin drink. However, it remains one of the most popular and enduring drinks of all time. The key thing to take from the martini is that vodka's prefered partners are subtler and less confrontational. Pairing it with bolder flavours, like those in heavily sweetened liqueurs, pushes it to the background.

The other lesson to take from the vodka martini is that vodka can work in repurposed recipes. The trick is not to overcompensate for the lack of immediate, accessible flavour in the spirit. The basic plan, therefore, is to steal a formula and there's few better than the original - spirit, sugar, bitters and water. This refitted Old-Fashioned uses 42 Below as the spirit because, being honest, they gave us a bottle to play about with at work. St. Germain operates as our sweetening agent, with a touch of Fee Brothers Grapefruit Bitters with a slow stir and a cranberry juice float for dilution.

Aura

60ml 42 Below Vodka
1 barspoon St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
2 dashes Fee Brothers Grapefruit Bitters
1 barspoon cranberry juice

Stir the first three ingredients with ice for at least 45 seconds. Strain into an ice-filled rocks glass. Float the cranberry juice and garnish with a twist of grapefruit zest.

Thirty: A walk in the clouds

New Zealand. The land of the long white cloud, famed throughout the world for its zeals and their newness, and if there's any justice in the world, 42 Below Vodka: the world's most awarded vodka, according to, uh, 42 Below Vodka and hosts of the annual Cocktail World Cup.

The Cocktail World Cup. An annual cocktail competition open to bartenders all over the world which may or may not involve shaking a cocktail while being thrown off a bridge.

In fairness, they tie you to the bridge first. Apparently.

Entries have been open for next year's CWC since early July and the ednbrg inbox is appropriately full of reminders from both 42 Below and their corporate overlords at Bacardi, given that they close at the end of the month. The competition follows the now standard write-in/regional/national/global format, but is seemingly a little less restrictive in terms of ingredients. A lot of competitions specify a maximum number of ingredients or restrict brand usage, but the CWC seems to only request that drinks are made with 42 Below or one of their flavoured vodkas. While the Manuka Honey, Kiwi and Passionfruit vodkas are all pretty awesome, I opted to use the Feijoa, mainly because I like making my life difficult.

Feijoa is a fruit that is firmly planted in the exotic category. It has been adopted as New Zealand's national fruit (originating from South America and named for a Portuguese explorer), looks something like a lime and tastes something like root beer. It's a divisive flavour, like Marmite or Vegemite or anything else that ends in -mite. As for the vodka, it's all eucalyptus and menthol on the nose, with rich herbal flavours and a smooth mouthfeel. If you've never tried it, it's probably worth doing at least once.

Anyway, this one's in the electronic post to the Vodka University.

A walk in the clouds

60ml 42 Below Feijoa
1 barspoon Acacia honey
15ml lemon juice
An eighth of a Galia melon, diced
A third of an avocado, diced
10ml sparkling water

Muddle the diced avocado with the sparkling water in the base of a shaker tin until it forms a smooth paste. Muddle the diced melon with the vodka, honey and lemon juice in the base of a mixing glass. Add this to the puréed avocado and shake with ice. Fine-strain into a chilled coupette and garnish with a melon ball on a cocktail stick with a spear of spring onion.

Adventures in space, time and vodka

Here's a thought.

Cocktails destroy good spirits.

It's not my thought. It belongs to a man named Börje Karlsson, one of the master blenders involved with a new Swedish vodka called Karlsson's Gold (rated B+ by Drinkhacker!), in an article in the Washington Post. It's an interesting thought, not least because it comes from a vodka producer and vodka, well vodka is a bit troublesome.

NO COCKTAILS?... by Metro Centric, licenced under Creative Commons.

Imagine we've got a time machine, and rather than using it to buy last week's winning lottery ticket, we travel back to somewhere near the sixteenth century, somewhere in Eastern Europe, where the bouncing baby vodka tradition has just started walking and saying its first unintelligble words. Assuming that no-one burns us as witches on account of our strange fashions and bizarre future talk, we'll find a spirit that has mostly slipped past its origin as a medicinal elixir and is gaining popularity among the masses, flavored with herbs, honey and berries, and among the aristocracy who compete to create the purest liquid from their state-of-the-art pot stills. Skip forward a few hundred years and we'll find this spirit embedded in the culture, adding punctuation to any event, from weddings to birthdays to funerals and everything in between. Vodka becomes the lifeblood of the community, used and abused by the powers that be as something approaching a rum ration for an entire empire through the middle part of the twentieth century.

We should take in a little context. Travelling back to 15-whatever, when Western Europe raises a glass, it's likely to be brandy. The Scots and the Irish have started doing remarkable things with malted barley, but they're probably a good fifty/hundred years off hiding their distilleries at the end of obscure valleys in the most innovative and insane tax dodge ever. The Dutch have, by now, discovered a wonderful little berry that can transform a distilled spirit, but they'll have to wait until the eighteenth century for it to blaze through English society and emerge, smouldering, on the other side as something we'd recognise as gin. Over the next five hundred years, the various spirits of Western Europe will have their successes and failures. Cognac will emerge as the upper classes' drink of choice, only to be decimated by a hungry bug in the second half of the nineteenth century. Taxation, rebellion, famine, war and slavery will a play their part in the respective fortunes of gin, whisky, rum and whiskey, and things will continue in much the same vein until just after the world explodes in rage, hatred and a splatter of atoms.

The second half of the twentieth century sees vodka slowly seeping out from behind the Iron Curtain. It is not an entirely unknown quantity, largely thanks to a man named Smirnov. The right to produce his vodka eventually land with Heublein Inc. in the USA and the rest is, as they say, history.

In 2004, vodka sales surpass those of gin in the UK. In 2007, vodka outsells Scotch whisky. In Scotland.

And so, the trouble with vodka. It's simple, really. Western Europe and America do not have a vodka-drinking tradition. The way in which these cultures drink evolved alongside the spirits that they created and traded and vodka has been slapped onto it like go-faster stripes on the space shuttle. That's not to say that vodka doesn't have a part to play in the community of spirits, it's rather that the integration has been a little forced. The definitive original vodka cocktail remains the Moscow Mule (anyone who's just said "Martini"? Taxis are out front) because, on the whole, it doesn't sit well with structure of mixing drinks that evolved from the era of Jerry Thomas.

Börje Karlsson makes a good point from outside my - our - experience of spirits and cocktails, even if I think he's being a touch hyperbolic. Realising that there's a separation between the various spirit-drinking traditions can only be a good thing, because the really interesting stuff happens in the space between.

In which we aim for a BSc in vodkaology

It's been a busy little while at ednbrg Towers, what with trying to locate those missing vowels and all. Monday, for example, saw the 42 Below Vodka University roll up to the Voodoo Rooms to launch the 2010 Cocktail World Cup. Thanks to loveable kiwis Jacob and Marty, I now know that New Zealand is home to over 40 million sheep and has been - since 1996 - one of the few countries where home distillation is legal. I also learned that some people, no matter how hard you try, are never going to like a Feijoa-flavored vodka.

I really wish I'd taken some photos of the presentation. First of all, there was vodka tasting which is rarely on my list of top five enjoyable activities. We covered Russian style vodkas (Russian Standard, in this case), Polish style vodka (Belvedere) and what they called a new world style vodka (Ketel One) - meaning Western Europe/America, I'd guess - before moving onto flavored vodka (Zubrowka) and the 42 Below range of Passionfruit, Feijoa, Manuka Honey and Kiwi. While this was going on, there was an animated backdrop projected onto a screen behind Jacob that, at points, showed a giant, laughing Boris Yeltsin head.

After the tasting, we were shown a couple of videos from previous Cocktail World Cups. 42 Below have been hosting the events in New Zealand since 2004, doing things like throwing competitors off a bridge with a bungee cord and a cocktail shaker. The World Cup was described as "the hardest, and most fun" comp ever.

The brand guys then proceeded to the bar to make a mixture of signature cocktails and drinks that had performed well at previous World Cups - including one that had been engineered to taste like a traditional warm, English ale.

All in all, it was a cracking afternoon. There are always downsides, though, and in this case, it was the fact that I had to go to work pretty sharpish after the session.

So. That was Monday.