Lockdown recipe diary #8: Mexican Firing Squad Special Milk Punch

Clarified milk punches are kind of the new hotness over the past few years, even though there’s records of the technique being used dating back to at least 1711. It’s a relatively simple way of making clear drinks that have a wide range of flavours that you don’t often find in liquids that aren’t opaque.

For all that’s is theoretically simple, there are a few different steps that require a fair bit of attention and I remember finding a lot of conflicting information when I first started experimenting with the form - I wouldn’t describe it as difficult but it is a process that’s quite involved. Over time, I’ve found a work flow that seems pretty solid for how I work.

The basic idea is that adding milk into a cocktail recipe causes the milk to split and form curds. Those curds clump together, trapping all the particles that make a liquid translucent, and can then be filtered out pretty easily.

The first step is finding a recipe. I wanted to do a tequila drink because a) tequila is great, b) I managed not to post anything relevant around Cinco de Mayo, and c) tequila is great. Given that I also have a bit of raspberry syrup kicking around after last week’s post, using that would be ideal.

One recipe that caught my eye was the Mexican “Firing Squad" Special from Charles H. Baker’s The Gentleman’s Companion:

Mexican “Firing Squad” Special

Build in a Collins glass filled with shaved ice:

4 oz tequila blanco
1.5 oz lime juice
2 tsps grenadine, to taste
2 dashes Angostura bitters

Garnish with a slice of orange.
Garnish with a slice of pineapple.
Garnish with a red cherry.

On paper, there’s one element that really stands out - the four ounces of tequila. In metric, that’s 120 ml or near enough five shots for the UK drinker which is, uh, a lot for a single drink. It’s a lot for two drinks.

It’s possible that the fact the drink is served long goes some way to taking the edge off the booze but I’m going to rework things a little. The original recipe has eight parts of tequila to three parts of lime juice to 2/3 of a part of grenadine; for my purposes, I’m revising it to 5:2:1 and swapping in raspberry syrup for the grenadine, so the recipe now looks a little like:

75 ml / 2.5 oz tequila
30 ml / 1 oz lime juice
15 ml / 0.5 oz raspberry syrup
2 dashes Angostura bitters

With a recipe sorted, we’re ready to start messing about with milk and stuff.

One of the first things to note about clarifying a milk punch is that it’s a technique that doesn’t lend itself to single serves - you’ll want to batch up a few serves at once, as getting from having your initial non-clarified drink to the final product takes a bit of time and repeating the process is, frankly, pretty dull. I started by pouring enough to make two serves into a mixing jug.

The next stage is the milk. I’m using full fat cow’s milk here - when using dairy, I’ve found everything goes a bit easier with full fat compared to semi-skimmed or skimmed. If you’re keen to keep things vegan, almond milk works as does oat milk if you want to avoid nuts.

I’ve heard and seen many people say that they recommend boiling the milk before doing anything but I can’t say I’ve found any benefit to doing that outside of wasting time and energy.

I’ve found using four parts of cocktail to one part of milk does everything I need it to. On this drink, I have just over 240 ml of pre-batched cocktail (the left-hand photo), so I measured 60 ml of milk into another jug (middle photo) and slowly poured the cocktail into the milk (right-hand photo). I’ve found better results pouring the cocktail into the milk rather the other way around but I’ve heard other folk claim the reverse.

I’ve found that the process of forming the curds is pretty quick but it’s worth leaving things for 10-15 minutes (longer if you’re doing higher volumes of liquid) to be on the safe side. If you’re not seeing the curds form, a little extra acidity will probably do the trick.

After that, we’re onto filtration and you shouldn’t need anything fancier than a coffee filter. Slowly fill it up and let it do its thing, refilling as needed until all the liquid is clarified. If it’s not totally transparent, you can run it over the curds in the coffee filter for a second time - they’ll work as a pretty effective physical filter in addition to the coffee filter.

Once everything's filtered and clear, you’re done - pour everything into a clean, labelled bottle until you want to serve it. There’s a bit of dilution that comes from adding the milk so I prefer chilling a clarified milk punch in the fridge and simply serving it over ice but giving it a bit of stir first won’t hurt it.

Lockdown recipe diary #7: Windrose

This is, I think, the most recent recipe I’ve posted so far - it’s a drink I created for the menu at the Last Word in 2019. I remember thinking that I wanted to do something like an equal parts recipe (along the lines of a Corpse Reviver #2 spec, or a Paper Plane), mostly because while the whisky I was using wasn’t inexpensive and that formula allows you to block in less pricey ingredients.

Price wasn’t the only motivating factor - the whisky is also pretty lively and more than capable of coming through against other flavours. On paper, I was aiming for something like:

1 part whisky
1 part citrus
1 part fortified wine / aperitif
1 part sweetener

I was set on making a sour-type drink but I wasn’t particularly interested in doing anything too outlandish here so that would be a straight choice between lemon and lime juice. I settled on ginger wine for the fortified/aperitif slot pretty quickly for more or less the same reasons I’d used it in the Alloway (which I posted about two weeks ago, but had put together something like two years before), and I initially left the sweetener slot open to see what worked. I had that down to a choice between an orange curaçao and a carob liqueur we’d made for the Lucky Liquor Co.

The curaçao was fine but the carob liqueur made the drink a bit more interesting without distracting too much from the other flavours, but I definitely remember the first version of this didn’t work exactly as I’d have liked. It was a little too heavy and needed some lighter, brighter notes so I decided to tweak the formula a little and bring in a little apple brandy, and ended up with:

Windrose

15 ml / 0.5 oz single malt whisky (Bramble Whisky Co. Glenglassaugh 6 yo)
15 ml / 0.5 oz apple brandy (Somerset 3yo cider brandy)
20 ml / 0.66 oz ginger wine

20 ml / 0.66 oz carob liqueur
20 ml / 0.66 oz lemon juice

Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker, fill it with cubed ice and shake for 10-15 seconds. Fine-strain into a chilled coupe/martini or Nick & Nora glass, and garnish with an apple fan.

It’s often the case that there’s a difference between what you want to do and what works best in the glass and the Windrose is obviously no longer an equal parts recipe. There’s three parts of spirit (split between the whisky and the apple brandy) to two parts of each of the other elements but I think it’s a better drink for having broken with my original intention.

Lockdown recipe diary #6: Clover Club & Knickerbocker

As we go into week *checks watch* a million of the lockdown, there are many articles on the web offering handy tips for the home bartender to raise their at-home cocktail game, and frankly, that’s too good of a bandwagon for me to let it roll down the hill without flailing after it.

Handily, I have one thing that’s going to change your life and all you need going to need are raspberries*.

* uh, and sugar and water. To be fair, a jar and a set of scales will def help.

Raspberry syrup is a pretty staple ingredient in many classic recipes but I think it’s often overlooked. It’s a shame because it’s a) delicious and b) so easy to make.

Raspberry syrup

150 g raspberries
150 g water
300 g granulated cane sugar

Put the raspberries, water and sugar in a large, airtight container.
Leave in a cool, dry place for at least six hours.
Shake vigorously until sugar is fully dissolved.
Strain out any solids, and transfer to a clean bottle.
Keep refrigerated between uses. Yields ~375 ml.

Homemade ingredients can be a little intimidating for the home bartender and it’s definitely true that getting a thing to taste right so it works as you need it to can sometimes be tricky but this recipe is pretty bombproof and it’s a handy thing to have around if you, for example, wanted to make two of my actual all-time favourite cocktails - the Clover Club and the Knickerbocker.

There are a great many Clover Club recipes out there that are just gin, lemon, raspberry syrup and egg white, and there are a few older recipes that include some vermouth - usually dry or a mix of dry and sweet vermouth.

I’m here to tell you not to skip the vermouth.

Clover Club

45 ml / 1.5 oz gin
15 ml / 0.5 oz dry vermouth
15 ml / 0.5 oz raspberry syrup
20 ml / 0.66 oz lemon juice
Half an egg white

Pour all the ingredients into a cocktail shaker.
Shake briefly without ice, then fill the shaker with ice and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass (or the cheap-ass wine glass that was in your flat when you moved in seven years ago I guess).

As with many vintage recipes, there are heaps of versions of the Knickerbocker in books going back to Jerry Thomas in 1862.

Simon Difford has a nice overview of the variations - apparently, if we’re being technical, you’d need to serve it on ice to call it a Knickerbocker; the straight-up serve would be a Knickerbocker Special if anyone needs a specific hill to die on.

Knickerbocker

45 ml / 1.5 oz rum
15 ml / 0.5 oz curaçao
15 ml / 0.5 oz raspberry syrup
20 ml / 0.66 oz lemon juice

Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker.
Fill the shaker with cubed ice and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Fine strain into that one nice glass you have, and garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

A quick note on rum - something aged but nothing too old is where you want to go. Anything between four and eight years old will be grand. It does feel like a recipe that tends towards more pungent, English style rums than the lighter, drier Spanish styles but the only aged rum I had on hand was small amount from a Bacardí blending workshop and y’know what? It worked fine.

Lockdown recipe diary #5: Alloway, Lochfield & Middlecroft

While looking through some of the recipes I’d previously posted here, I noticed that a lot of them from before this recent hiatus were entries for cocktail competitions and most of what I’ve been posting in the past few weeks haven’t been. There’s a simple reason for this - I don’t do that many cocktail competitions any more - but the thinking behind that is a little less clear.

At a certain point in my career, I would enter just about every competition I heard about. Sometimes I did pretty well and mostly I didn’t but I got to travel a lot (to….uh, London, mostly), meet lots of fun people, all while picking up useful stuff.

I often tell bartenders I work with that the only thing that really gets you good at creating recipes is creating recipes and competitions are useful because they force you to do something new, and even if you don’t do well, you’ll probably learn something that will help you in some way. It might be a mistake you’ve made that you learn from, a new technique you pick up, some feedback from a judge, or someone else does something cool and you flat out rob the idea.

Notbad Basketball GIF from Notbad GIFs

(A solid 70% of me watching a cocktail comp is that GIF.)

It’s also true that competing carries cost - not just in terms of money and nuts-and-bolts stuff like ingredients and kit and glassware - but also in time. Creating original recipes to a specific brief isn’t usually instantaneous and once that’s done, over time, the idea of taking five or six hours out of a day to actually compete became a less and less attractive way of spending my free time. By the time I moved to Australia in 2013, I’d reached the point where I’d generally only enter a competition if I found the brief more interesting than simply creating a recipe or if I could find a way to make my presentations more interesting than just creating a recipe.

One of the competitions where I found the opportunity to do that was the Chivas Masters in 2017. The brief called for three drinks:

1. the classic way - “inspired by a classic cocktail from New York, with a nod to Scotland,” made with Chivas Regal 12yo, 18yo or Chivas Extra

2. the local way - “inspired by your local cocktail scene,” made with Chivas 12yo

3. the Japanese way - “inspired by the land of the rising sun,” made with Chivas Regal 12yo, 18yo or Chivas Extra

Rather than just presenting three separate drinks, I found it helpful to have a common thread running through all three (besides the whisky, obvs) and that common thread ended up being a shared ingredient - ginger.

I think it was ‘the Japanese way’ that got me there (I mean, I guess? This all happened three years ago). As a noted consumer of bad supermarket sushi, I’m pretty sure I wanted to find a way to use gari - pickled ginger - somewhere in that drink, and I ended up making my own to use as a garnish while using the pickle brine as an ingredient in the drink.

From there, my ‘classic way’ drink was a simple twist on a Bobbie Burns, using ginger wine instead of vermouth. Ginger wine is widely available in the UK, it’s usually really cheap and, as far as we’re concerned, it’s pretty much only a thing for a Whisky Mac (Scotch and ginger wine) which is very much a drink that no-one ever orders. I think it’s an underused cocktail ingredient - it’s a fortified wine but it brings a very different vibe than a vermouth or an Italian-style aperitif would.

For the ‘local way’ serve, I didn’t want to do too much to the ginger but I’ve generally found blending root ginger into water gives a more vibrant flavour than muddling it directly into the drink.

Alloway - ‘the classic way’

50 ml Chivas Regal 18yo
15 ml Stone’s ginger wine
5 ml Benedictine
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 spray Absinthe (from an atomiser)

Pour the first four ingredients into a mixing glass. Fill with cubed ice and stir for 15-20 seconds.
Using an atomiser, spray the inside of chilled cocktail glass with Absinthe.
Strain the cocktail into the Absinthe-rinsed glass, and garnish with a twist of orange zest.

Lochfield - ‘the local way’

50 ml Chivas Regal 12yo
10 ml ginger juice
15 ml lemon juice
15 ml rosemary syrup
10 ml egg white

Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker. Shake briefly without ice.
Fill the shaker with cubed ice and shake for 10-15 seconds.
Fine-strain into a chilled coupe glass and garnish with a rosemary sprig.

Middlecroft - ‘the Japanese way’

50 ml Chivas Extra
10 ml pickled ginger brine
10 ml sencha tea syrup
1 spray peated single malt whisky (from an atomiser)

Pour the first three ingredients into a mixing glass. Fill with cubed ice and stir for 15-20 seconds.
Using an atomiser, spray the inside of chilled cocktail glass with a peated single malt whisky.
Strain the cocktail into the whisky-rinsed glass, and garnish with a twist of orange zest.

---

Ginger juice
100 g root ginger
100 g water

Wash, peel and dice the ginger. Put the ginger and water in a blender and blend until ginger is fully broken up. Strain out the solids and transfer to a clean bottle.

Rosemary syrup
2 sprigs rosemary
350 g granulated cane sugar
350 g water

Blanch the rosemary sprigs for 3 seconds in boiling water then transfer them to an ice bath. Remove from the ice and reserve. Combine the water and sugar in a pan and bring to the boil on a medium heat. Add the rosemary sprigs and simmer on medium heat for 5 minutes. Leave to cool. Once cool, remove the rosemary sprigs and transfer to a clean bottle. Yields ~500 ml.

Sencha tea syrup
5 g loose leaf sencha tea
350 g water
350 g granulated cane sugar

Heat water to 80 degrees Celsius and add the tea. Leave to infuse for 3 minutes. Once infused, strain out solids and transfer to a pan. Add the sugar and bring to the boil. Simmer on low heat for 2 minutes, then remove from heat and leave to cool. Once cool, transfer to a clean bottle. Yields ~ 500 ml.

Pickled ginger brine
You can buy gari in jars in an Asian supermarket; if you do, just use the brine from the jar. If you want to make your own, this recipe is the one I used.

Lockdown recipe diary #4: Picolino

This story starts, as so many do, with three people at an airport.

View this post on Instagram

bringing our a game #nosleeptilbrooklyn #whyis5amevenathing #airportvibes @bramble_bar

A post shared by J Hughes (@oldtownalchemy) on Jun 10, 2018 at 9:23pm PDT

In truth, the story starts a few months before that morning in June 2018. We’d agreed some budget with Hendrick’s gin to do at least one event outside of the UK and that ended up being a quick stop at Bar Convent Brooklyn followed by a head-to-head bar takeover against a team of German bartenders at Williams & Graham and Occidental in Denver to mark World Cucumber Day.

Obviously, if you’re putting together a menu with a bunch of gin drinks on it, you’ll want to do a martini of some description and, if that menu is for World Cucumber Day, it makes sense that you do some kind of a cucumber martini.

Reader, I shall not disappoint you.

(In this regard, anyway.)

Picolino

50 ml / 1.66 oz Hendrick’s gin
20 ml / 0.66 oz cucumber honey vermouth
10 ml / 0.33 oz yellow Chartreuse
1 dash Peychaud’s bitters

Pour everything into a mixing glass and fill it with cubed ice.
Stir for 15-20 seconds, and strain the contents into a chilled Nick & Nora glass.
Garnish with a cucumber ribbon on a cocktail stick.

Cucumber honey vermouth

1 litre Noilly Prat dry vermouth
1 cucumber
50 g honey
2.5 g powdered citric acid

Peel the cucumber. Cut the skin into strips and dice the flesh.
Place the cucumber skin and diced cucumber flesh in a large air tight container and add the vermouth.
Leave for infuse for two hours.
Strain out solids and add the honey and citric acid, and stir until both are fully dissolved.
Transfer into a clean bottle and keep refrigerated when not in use.

If you’ve ever spent any amount of time with bartenders, you’ll know that keeping them in line only marginally easier than herding actual cats so I’d like to record my thanks to our amazing hosts from Hendrick’s and William Grant & Sons - particularly Sasha Filimonov, Ally Martin, Sebastian Derbomez and Coco Prochorowski - and to the crew at Occidental and Williams & Graham who are total bosses.