Lockdown recipe diary #9: Scofflaw

One of the unwritten rules of bartending is that it’s generally considered good practice not to discuss particularly divisive topics with your guests, like religion or politics. I think it’s a convention that’s intended to reduce the potential for disagreement in a place where alcohol can affect how people react to being disagreed with, and there’s a sense that the barkeep’s role within society isn’t to judge their guests even if they disagree with them.

But we’re all in lockdown, so I don’t feel any reason not to tell the Prime Minister of Great Britain and his chief adviser to fuck off.

Scofflaw

30 ml / 1 oz straight rye
30 ml / 1 oz dry vermouth
15 ml / 0.5 oz lemon juice
15 ml / 0.5 oz grenadine
1 dash orange bitters

Pour all the ingredients into a cocktail shaker and fill it with cubed ice.
Shake it for 10-15 seconds and fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
Garnish with a twist of lemon zest if you want.

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 #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 #2: Teller of Tales

One of the fun parts of my job has been working with really amazing people to do super fun things. One of those amazing people is Georgie Bell, Bacardi’s global scotch whisky ambassador (and Whisky magazine’s 2020 scotch whisky brand ambassador of the year), and one of the super fun things was working with Edinburgh Food Studio to create Craigellachie cocktails to accompany a dinner celebrating Burns’ Night back in January 2019.

View this post on Instagram

Teller of tales . . Craigellachie 13yo, Rubino vermouth, Amontillado sherry, Cherry Heering and a Raisin shrub creates the perfect libation for a mid January evening.

A post shared by The Last Word (@thelastwordsaloon) on Jan 10, 2020 at 8:16am PST

Teller of Tales

45 ml / 1.5 oz Craigellachie 13yo
15 ml / 0.5 oz amontillado sherry
15 ml / 0.5 oz Martini Riserva Rubino vermouth
7.5 ml / 0.25 oz Cherry Heering
10 ml / 0.33 oz raisin shrub

Pour all ingredients into a mixing glass. Fill with cubed ice and stir for ~20 seconds.
Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of lemon zest.

Craigellachie

There’s a great many distilleries that haven’t made a lot of their whisky available under their own name, and Craigellachie was one of them for most of its history.

The distillery was established in 1891 and the house style uses unpeated barley dried using an oil-fired heater, bringing a hint of a smoky, sulphurous note to the whisky.

Raisin shrub

150 g raisins
150 g water
300 g granulated cane sugar
150 g red wine vinegar
75 g balsamic vinegar

Combine raisins and water in a large airtight container and leave for at least 6 hours.
Add sugar and leave for at least 4 hours.
Add red wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar. Stir until sugar is fully dissolved.
Strain out solids and transfer to a clean bottle.
Keep refrigerated.

Yields ~400 ml.

One year and 10,000 miles later

Has it really been a year since the last World Gin Day?

No, seriously, don't -

Look, it's called a rhetorical question. Of course it's been a year since the last World Gin Day. This year, however, marks the first year that it's fallen - for me, at least - in winter.

This is because I'm currently in the Southern Hemisphere and things are weird here. I'm told it's winter, but seriously? It's 18° Celsius (64° Fahrenheit) and, as a native of Scotland, I'd call that positively toasty but I'm surrounded by people wearing scarves and more layers than the middle act of Inception.

People are drinking mulled wine. In June. This I cannot deal with.

I'm used to thinking about drinks for summer right about now, so it's been a fun challenge to think about something a little more seasonally appropriate for where I am. It helps that I work at a bar that is famed for its house-made ginger beer, because what could be more warming than the rich spiciness of ginger beer?

Besides actual hot drinks, yes.

The obvious choice is Audrey Saunders' Gin-Gin Mule, although the one we make at Grandma's could be called a version of it rather than a strictly authentic recreation - the original calls for a still ginger beer and the addition of soda water whereas our ginger beer is carbonated; we also like to thrown in a dash of Angostura Bitters because reasons. It's turned out to be one of the most popular drinks on our new menu - that shouldn't be surprising, given that it has been named as one of the 25 most influential drinks of the past century by Imbibe (US). Described by its creator as an "ambassador to gin," maybe - like its base spirit - that's worth celebrating all year round?

Yes, again with the rhetorical questions.

Gin-Gin Mule

45ml Tanqueray Gin
15ml lime juice
15ml sugar syrup
1 dash Angostura Bitters
8 mint leaves
Top with ginger beer

Shake the first five ingredients with ice and fine-strain* into an ice-filled sling/catalina glass. Garnish with a mint sprig and a piece of crystallised ginger.

 * Your mileage may vary when it comes to fine-straining drinks served over ice; in this particular instance I'd do it to remove any teensy, annoying bits of mint from the finished drink.