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:

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