MxMo: Pain in the ass

Mixology Monday is four years old, and as four year olds go, it's been well-behaved and mostly hygenic. This week, the world of drinkblogging descends on McSologogy with tales of pain in the ass drinks... 859,000. Remember that.

Eight hundred and fifty-nine thousand. Big number. Sure, there are bigger ones, but 859,000 is the sort of number that seems really, really big while still seeming within in the realms of realistic possibility.

859,000 is, coincidentally, the number of results you get if you put "how to make a mojito" into Google.

The mojito is currently the most popular cocktail in Britain. In one year, we sold over 2,600 in three bars. No other 'classic cocktail' (one that we haven't created) broke 600. It's a storied drink with a rich heritage and connections to piracy's golden age and generally convoluted and remarkable history of rum.

It's an utter pain.

First, there's crushed ice which is all well and good if you happen to have some mechanical means of crushing ice. If not, the mojito is an easy and effective way to develop RSI. Second, there's the length of time it takes to make one. It's not up to Ramos Gin Fizz timings, but if you're making batches of six, seven, eight, you want something with a 10 second prep time, not a minute-and-a-half. Third, there's the question of mint which has its own foibles when it comes to prep and storage. And if you run out, no-one's interested in a daiquiri. Fourth - and this is where that 859,000 comes in - everyone's an expert. Remember that mojito you ordered one time in that bar in Cuba? It was the best ever - the drink that your bartender's getting cramp crushing ice for probably won't come close.

Think about it - the mojito should be the bartender's ideal of a pain in the ass but it isn't. Why? Because it tastes really good.

Mojito

Take a highball glass, and add a handful of mint leaves. Add some sugar - however you like it (syrup, brown, white, whatever. It's really not that important) - and lime juice - about 15ml should do. Add some crushed ice and a large measure of your choice of rum and mix thoroughly with a barspoon. Fill with crushed ice and top with soda/sparkling water. Garnish with a mint spring.

MxMo: Vermouth

Every month, the online drinkblogging community gets together for a couple of drinks and a bit of a chat, maybe some of those little nibbles if we're really lucky. The resulting flurry of posts goes by the name of Mixology Monday and the theme for this month's party - hosted by Cocktailians - is vermouth. Vermouth represents one of the key innovations in the development of the cocktail. The process of fortifying and aromatizing wine may prefigure the invention of the cocktail, but its incorporation into the new tradition of mixed drinks emerging in the saloons of 1800s America gave rise to classics that are still popular today - a practiced bon viveur needs no introduction to the Manhattan or the Martini. But as the decades have flowed slowly past, vermouth has fallen from grace under the disdainful gaze of such iconic drinkers as Winston Churchill and for one simple fact.

Old people drink vermouth.

In the UK, 90% of vermouth* - particularly dry vermouth (a certain Italian brand of extra dry vermouth if you want to be absolutely specific) - is served long with lemonade over ice to middle-aged women who only go out three times a year: Christmas, New Year and their birthday. This serve has the unfortunate effect of making vermouth seem old and fussy and not fun, which is something of a tragedy because there's so much complexity and variety within the category.

* This statistic is based purely on anecdotal evidence and is probably entirely untrue.

Of course, if you're reading this then there's a good chance that you're already a fan of the virtues of vermouth - at least in its dry and sweet forms. There is also, however, the forgotten child of the family: white, or bianco. It tends to sit somewhere between the two, exhibiting many of the lighter flavours of extra dry variants combined with the sweetness of a rosso.

For all its qualities, vermouth still lacks the cachet that other liquors carry. It's rarely seen as the main ingredient in a cocktail or as a respectable drink in its own right. Spirits and liqueurs often go through peaks and troughs of popularity, but vermouth seems to have been in a hole for an awful long time. Opportunities - like this month's MxMo - to start the long climb up are always welcome.

White Ladder

50ml Cinzano Bianco
15ml St. Germain
10ml La Fée Parisienne Absinthe
15ml lemon juice
1 dash Fee Brothers Aztec Chocolate Bitters
1 whole egg

Combine all ingredients in a shaker and dry-shake briefly. Add ice and shake. Fine-strain into a chilled martini glass. Express a lemon zest over the top and discard.

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.