The Alexander Ratio, Remixed

The cold weather can drive one's taste buds to yearn for warm flavors. Well, I don't know of any flavor warmer than cinnamon, and I don't know of a hotter liquor than Goldschlager.

Almost a year and a half ago I wrote of the ironclad Alexander cocktail type. What? You haven't been experimenting with it like I asked? WELL DO IT NOW. I'll wait.

This here is a drink that myself and the adorable DJ HawaiianSkirt have been working on for a while now. It's still not perfect, because even cream can't tame the alcoholy kick of the Goldschlager, but damn if this isn't tasty. The Cognac provides just enough of a counterpoint to the Goldschlager such that it's not simply a "Goldschlager milkshake".

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ORIGINAL REMIX

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Hugo Bar Cocktail

1 oz table cream
1 oz Goldschlager
1 oz flavorful brandy, or Cognac

Shake ingredients in a shaker full of ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish in some way with your favorite cinnamon candy. (jelly beans pictured here)

Review: Woodchuck Winter & the Amber Stonewall

A popular alternative to beer in the United States is hard apple cider. Simply put, hard cider is beer that's been made with apple juice as a source of fermentation instead of beer's barley mash, but don't be fooled... cider isn't simply an alternative to beer, but a great drink in it's own right. (For a way to make a simple cider at home, check out my review of Spike Your Juice.)

As I understand it, cider is a much more popular drink in the UK than it is in the US. Truth be told, cider is rarely drunk by American beer drinkers as an alternative, but instead usually drunk by small cadres of cider fans. There are various kinds of cider around certain regions of the US, but Woodchuck is a brand that you’ll find almost nationwide. Luckily for us Americans, it’s a great brand, and they make great products.

Woodchuck's flagship is their Amber variety, a simple cider made from red apples. It's sweet and delicious. They make a Granny Smith cider, and one called 802 Dark & Dry, which is mixed with caramelized sugar. They also have Raspberry and Pear ciders, though consumer be warned: these are simply flavored apple ciders, not ciders of a different fruit.

Recently I learned that Woodchuck makes limited release seasonal ciders. While most websites pertaining to beer and spirits are dreadfully out-of-date when it comes to documenting their products, woodchuck.com is different. It tells me (albeit in marketing-speak) that they sell barrel-aged Winter, honeyed Spring, blueberry Summer, spiced Fall, and even Private Reserve Pumpkin cider!

But depending on where you live, they may be quite difficult to find. Even wine and beer authorities in my area such as Ace Beverage and Total Wine were unable to handily make a special order for me. But, for some reason, Harris Teeter has always had a superior Woodchuck selection, and that is where I haphazardly found a pack of Woodchuck Winter.

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The Review
Woodchuck Winter

From the website:
"Somewhere between a delicate snowflake drifting down to your tongue and a hard-packed snowball to the teeth, the power of this winter Cider is a balanced culmination of Premium French and Traditional American Oak, giving the cider great complexity and broad characteristics that neither style could produce on its own."

I don't mean to give anything away, but I really had to compare side-by-side the Winter cider to Woodchuck's Amber cider in order to be able to discern some of the former's characteristics.

In the Glass

Like any cider, when poured into the glass, the Winter developed nowhere near the head that beer fans are used to. Once settled, the cider's color is a few shades darker than the Amber.

Smell

The smell of the Winter is delightfully apply, as expected, though its aroma is less powerful than the Amber.

Taste

This is the point where I realized that I needed to bring in the Amber cider for comparison and start over. The flavor of the Winter cider seemed undetectably different than the Amber, if perhaps a little less sweet. Disappointed, I cracked open some cold Amber and took a few sips. When I revisited the Winter, the differences finally arose.

The flavor is definitely less sweet, probably more on par with the Woodchuck 802 Dark & Dry. I finally taste the woodiness of the cider's extra aging... it's a very faint dry flavor much like the characteristics I taste in my own Cask-series spirits. I'm also able to detect a little bit of vanilla in the mix.

But alas, after a few sips, I can no longer taste the unique character of Winter. But when I switch back to Amber for a few sips and return to Winter once more, I can taste it again.

Conclusion

I guess I see what Woodchuck is doing here. They make a varietal of their cider whose flavor doesn't appreciably stray from their "core" ciders. That way, their loyal fans are able to drink their varietals without having to adapt their tastes or think too hard. But when someone like myself can barely taste the difference between your core and varietal ciders, then you have a problem.

I dearly wish that beverage and spirit companies would take more chances in issuing unique variations of their products. It really comes down to money versus innovation: you can either ensure that a new product is close enough to the old to keep consumption the same on average, or you can take a leap that may fall on its ass, but it may also advance the industry.

Perhaps I'm being a little harsh or hyperbolic, but I'm quite disappointed with Woodchuck Winter. I wouldn't go out of my way again to obtain it. I'd buy it again only to impress my cider-drinking friends at a party. I'd recommend it only to those who could obtain it easily. As for the other Woodchuck limited releases, I'd still love to try them, but knowing how nebulous it is to get my hands on them, I don't know if I ever will.

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While we're on the subject of cider, let me share with you a great drink: the Stonewall cocktail.

You won't find too much information on the Stonewall for some reason, but some quick research makes it clear that the drink consists of whiskey and apple cider, hot or cold. I've found that Woodchuck Amber and bourbon make a fine Stonewall, and its flavors really hit the spot in fall or winter, for whatever reason. The bourbon manages to bring out the yeastiness of the cider, and the cider manages to highlight the pungent corn flavors of the bourbon. Do yourself a favor and pick up a pack of Woodchuck for this year's New Year celebration, and do yourself a second favor by making an Amber Stonewall.

Amber Stonewall

2oz Woodchuck Amber hard cider
1oz bourbon

Pour ingredients into a tumbler filled with ice. Optional cinnamon stick for a stirrer/garnish.

Review: Spike Your Juice

One of my favorite blogs is the Drinkhacker. Primarily a booze review blog, it constantly reviews anything alcoholic with a discerning palate and thoughtful notes. My favorite is when some of the more rare or unusual products are reviewed.

A while back, I saw that the Drinkhacker had reviewed a curious product called Spike Your Juice. I was so excited by it that I emailed their Customer Service on the product's website to see if they would send me a free sample to review, and they did. Because of their kindness and their great product, I will be ordering more soon with my own hard-earned money.

Spike Your Juice is a small kit that contains all you need in order to begin making your own cider or wine at home. The kit comes with a bubbler airlock that will fit on most large commercial 64oz juice bottles, six packets of yeast, and a bunch of quaint labels to put on your homemade hooch once it's done.

The process to make your own booze with this kit is simple and fun. You take a bottle of your favorite kind of juice, pour in a packet of yeast, plug the bottle with your bubbler airlock filled slightly with water, and wait! The yeast immediately begin consuming the sugar in the juice and begin emitting alcohol and carbon dioxide as waste... delicious, delicious waste. Within 8 hours you can see many tiny bubbles rising to your juice's surface while your airlock lets out excess gas and keeps out bacteria. If you didn't have an airlock, your capped bottle would explode in a matter of hours.

As a side note, it turns out the the Spike Your Juice yeast packets are in fact yeast and a bit of sugar mixed in. It may be the added sugar or that it's a particularly fast kind of brewing yeast, but the effects of the yeast's consumption can be seen hours quicker than if you used a simple run-of-the-mill yeast from your grocery store... I experimented and confirmed it.

The fermenting will stop when either 1) you put the bottle in the fridge to chill and kill the yeast (but cap it loosely if your airlock doesn't fit in the fridge!), 2) you drink it, 3) there is no sugar left for the yeast to consume, or 4) when the alcohol-by-volume of the juice reaches about 14%, which is an environment that naturally kills off the yeast. But watch out, if you let it ferment much past 48 hours, most of the juice's sugar will be consumed by the yeast, and your juice/hooch will no longer be very sweet.

This stuff is great fun. The first thing I fermented was Welch's Concord Grape juice, a product on Spike Your Juice's recommended juice list(pictured right). After 48 hours, the juice was carbonated, still sweet, and slightly boozy. The yeast lend a pungent flavor to the juice, which is tolerable, but not ideal. I found that running the juice through a coffee filter can remove most of the yeast (taste)... also another way to slow down the fermentation.

After I tested a recommended juice, I set out to try it on my own favorites... and I learned a valuable lesson: carefully check your juice's ingredients list before you try to ferment. It goes without saying that yeast will only consume natural sugar and not artificial sweetener, but another aspect to consider is preservatives. I wanted nothing more than Hawaiian Punch wine, but it is not to be; after the yeast floated in the punch for a day, I realized that (with the help of my friend who's a doctoral biology student) the culprit is the punch's Potassium Sorbate, a preservative which is specifically used for killing yeasts and molds. Whoops.

So far I've fermented grape juice, apple juice, cranberry cocktail, fruit punch, (bottled, non-refridgerated) orange juice, and a big jug of apple cider. I brought the fermented cider to Thanksgiving, and it was a hit (pictured below).

Herein lies, in my opinion, Spike Your Juice's best application: parties. The life of your fermented juice will be short; like soda, the hooch's carbonation quickly dissapates, and further, the yeast's consumption doesn't stop on a dime. What tastes delicious and sweet today might be dry and sugarless tomorrow, even if you put it in the fridge. Further still, Spike Your Juice recommends throwing away your juice's cap once you begin to ferment it, because you can essentially never safely cap the bottle again without it exploding, which doesn't exactly encourage you to keep it long before drinking it. All this volatile nature means rapid juice drinking is best, and that is best done among friends or family.

I highly recommend this product. It's cheap($10), simple, educational, and a lot of fun. You can turn your favorite juice into a wine or cider and enjoy it in a different and novel way.

Experiment responsibly!

theSpeakista reviews the DJ's experiments

There is a chap named Keith who lives in New York City, and he runs a booze blog called theSpeakista. You should read his blog, because it details the coming-of-age of a novice cocktailian, and if you like drinking Manhattans in Manhattan bars, then you should really read his blog, because that is a subject in which he's quickly becoming an authority.


And now you have yet another reason to read it, because he has recently crafted a in-depth and detailed review of both my home-aged Composite Grape Spirit and my homemade Coffee Bitters, of which I sent him samples.

Thanks for the kind words and the thoughtful analysis, Keith. I'm dedicating my next Manhattan to you, sir.

MxMo: Forgotten Cocktails

This month's Mixology Monday is hosted by Rock and Rye, and the theme is "Forgotten Cocktails". Contextually, Dennis of Rock And Rye is referring to cocktail recipes that may be of old age and, even better, underrated!

I have just the candidate, and as one of my favorite cocktails, I've been waiting to post it for quite a while.

The mythology behind the Oriental cocktail is that the recipe was loosed upon the world when an American engineer shared it with a Filipino doctor as repayment for his having saved his life from some tropical disease, as first mentioned in the Savoy. I personally find cocktail histories to be untrustworthy and dull, and so I'll stop here. Let's get on with the drinking.

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Oriental

1.5 oz rye whiskey
.75 oz orange curacao*
.75 oz sweet vermouth**
.5 oz lime juice

Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a cocktail glass. No garnish.

*Triple sec, if you must
**Try to use a sweet vermouth that isn't overpowering. I find that certain brands, such as Martini & Rossi, are veritable herbal assaults on the tongue, and just a bit too much. If your vermouth is too strong, it will upset the balance in the drink.

What separates this from many other obscure vintage cocktails is the flavor. Erik at the Underhill-Lounge remarks that it has a "very modern" taste, and he's right. As I've mentioned before, whiskey and lime is a fairly uncommon combination, which is what might lend to the drink's modern flavor. Furthermore, as Erik also points out, the amount of sweet and sour in the drink is high, such that the whiskey isn't exactly singing the lead.

It's the struggle between each ingredient in this recipe that makes it so interesting. Nothing is accenting and complementing the other here; instead, it's like a flavor free for all, where each is vying for your attention. It's an unusual dynamic for a cocktail, but it proves that it can be done, and in an entertaining way.

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A variation on this recipe is the James Joyce which replaces the rye whiskey with Irish whiskey, constructed by the legendary Gary Regan.


James Joyce

1.5 oz Irish whiskey
.75 oz curacao/triple sec
.75 sweet vermouth
.5 oz lime juice

Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a maraschino cherry.

Chuck Taggart declares this drink to be superior and more complex than the Oriental, but I don't agree. (Probably because I used the balmy Jameson as my whiskey.) For me, this variation throws the Oriental's balance a little out of whack, as the subtler whiskey recedes to let the fruit and the sweetness take over. Regardless, it's still a fascinating drink, but in a different way.

Lastly, I have my own variation, which I daresay is my favorite version so far. One simply replaces the Oriental's rye with bourbon...

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ORIGINAL REMIX

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Sentimental

1.5 oz bourbon
.75 oz curacao
.75 oz sweet vermouth
.5 oz lime juice

Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a cocktail glass. No garnish.

This drink tips the recipe's balance ever so slightly into the "sweet" direction, thanks to the bourbon, but I feel it's not too much. If you use something on the sweeter side, like Knobb Creek or Woodford Reserve, you'll find a deep spiciness appear in the drink causing you to praise whatever god you worship (or lack thereof).

Homemade Coffee Bitters

One of the things I try to do on this blog is not be redundant toward subjects that have already been touched upon by people smarter than I. For example, I began this blog with the beginning of my Cask series, an experiment with at-home spirit aging, something about which had been scarcely written. Also, the reviews on this site are of products for which there are scant reviews already. My original remixes tend to be fairly unorthodox, and not simply echoes of what you'll see in a book or another booze blog. Ultimately, I'm not going to pretend that I'm more clever than I really am, and so I choose only to write about things which might sound interesting coming from me in particular.

So, when I finally decided that it was time for me to try my hand at making my own bitters, I knew that I didn't want to simply start with the most-popular aromatic-type bitters. Aromatic bitters are typically made with a plethora of roots, spices, and herbs. Instead of simply finding some zany twist to some popular type of bitters, I instead sought to create a type of bitters that I always wished existed (or rather, wished was easier to obtain): coffee bitters.

How does one make bitters? Fairly simply: you infuse a bunch of crap in alcohol (not unlike some of my infusion experiments), but instead of stopping the infusion when the flavor is modest and palatable, you let it infuse for days, weeks, or months. And then sometimes, you remove the flavoring material, and infuse the alcohol again with more material. What you're going for is a result that is undrinkable, literally. In the end, what you want is something that is generally high in percentage of alcohol, overwhelmingly strong in flavor, and intensely bitter. Even though these attributes are usually negative, none of them are negative when you apply your finished product one dash at a time.

Someone who's been doing some pretty interesting stuff lately with bitters is CaptainMcBoozy. He's given me advice on making bitters, but I find that he and I stand separately on what appear to be two different schools on bitters fabrication. The Captain likes flying by the seat of his pants, throwing all his ingredients in one jar of alcohol, and infusing it until it's done. I myself am much more pessimistic about my chances of success, and so I subscribe to how Jamie Boudreau does it: infuse each flavor separately into its own tincture, and experiment with blending the tinctures in different proportions until you have it right. Otherwise, you greatly risk destroying your bitters; a pinch too much of any one ingredient can make it taste completely wrong.

Jacob Grier made some coffee bitters of his own, but my recipe took a very different flavor approach.

So for my coffee bitters, my process was fairly simple:

1) get 3 jars/bottles

2) put coffee grounds (I used Starbucks Summer Blend) in the first bottle, cinnamon sticks in the second bottle, and wormwood in the third bottle*

3) pour a mixture of vodka and grain alcohol in the bottles, enough to cover the contents completely

4) wait at least 2 weeks

5) strain each bottle (using a coffee filter, pictured right), and re-infuse them with new contents if you find that their flavor is not yet strong enough for your liking

6) store the tinctures separately, mix them in various combinations until you find one that tastes good (drunk with another spirit, not necessarily tasted alone)

7) mix more in those ideal proportions, and bottle it

Captain McBoozy recommends using Everclear as his solvent of choice. In order to save money, I use a mixture of vodka (80 proof) and grain alcohol (190 proof) that balances out to about 140 proof. A higher proof solvent with give you more "chemical surface area" (as I once read it so eloquently put) to capture the solute's flavors, and more specifically, its alcohol-soluble compounds. A simple vodka wouldn't do quite the same thing.

Where the hell do you get bitters bottles? Well, I don't know, really. The bitters-style cap that's meant for dashing is not something easily obtained. My solution is one that works fairly well: I go to www.specialitybottle.com, which is an absolutely fabulous site. There, you can buy just about any type of bottle you want(some of mine are pictured above). While they don't have dasher bottles, they do have dropper bottles and spray bottles, both of which, I find, apply bitters in an acceptable way (though you have to get a feel for how much to use using these new methods).

*Wormwood isn't easy to find. There are websites that sell herbs which you can order from, but I was lucky enough to find it in a local hispanic market. Trawl your local ethnic markets, and if they have an herb/spice/root section, be sure to look for it. It also may be useful to learn what your desired thing is called in a target language. I knew that wormwood was ajenjo in spanish, and I found it.

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The coffee bitters ended up quite good. They ended up being a combination of tinctures of coffee, cinnamon, and wormwood, with a little vanilla extract in there as well. I could have tried to make my own vanilla tincture, but vanilla beans are very expensive, and I expect it would have cost me about 20 dollars to get any respectable amount of it infused.

The bitters taste most strongly of a burnt and smokey flavor, which let the moderate coffee flavor sit in back, fairly muted. The spiciness of the cinnamon works well with the smokiness, and the vanilla is there to soften everything. The wormwood provides little to no flavor, and instead serves to make everything more bitter, though this concoction is on the less-bitter side (compared to a commercial bitters). These bitters of mine may not actually be quite bitter enough. I'll just have to try harder next time.

What can these bitters do? Well, I find that these are best in a Scotch Old Fashioned(pictured above), for some reason. Perhaps the smokiness of the bitters plays well in scotch. The coffee bitters also go well in rum and rye whiskey. Both Rob Roys and rye Manhattans play nice with them.

I encourage you to try something like this. All you need is some high proof vodka, some spices/herbs/roots/whatever, some bottles, and some time! Combine your favorite flavors, and you can make your very own personal bitters!

Review: Evan Williams Honey Reserve

A while back I reviewed a new Seagram product called "7 Dark Honey", a whiskey liqueur that is flavored with honey. The product mostly missed the mark: its whiskey base was the underwhelming Seagram's 7, its aroma and flavor were dominated by alcohol, it tasted just as much of a generic (brown) sugar as it did honey, and its character was completely lost when mixed with anything else. This failure was particularly salient when compared to its competitor, Wild Turkey's American Honey liqueur. American Honey was bourbon based, and its honey flavor was prominent and enjoyable.

Well, I spoke too soon. Shortly after the review(s), I stumbled across Evan Williams' entry into the product segment.

I'm a huge Evan Williams fan. For about $15, their normal black label bourbon is one of the best liquor values I know. The price makes you feel fine while mixing it away, but it's certainly refined enough to enjoy alone in a glass, which I do often.

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The Review
Evan Williams Honey Reserve

Most of the Evan Williams bourbon flavor doesn't come through, despite its bourbon base, though if you pass up trying this product, you'll regret it severely.

In the Glass

I daresay that Honey Reserve is thicker than its competitors. Its viscosity is luxurious. But with that, its color is so light that you'd swear it uses a base other than whiskey.

Smell

The aroma of Honey Reserve immediately hits you, and it's fruity... mostly of lemon. Whereas the 7 Dark Honey's aroma is nonexistent and the American Honey smells faintly of bourbon, the Evan Williams immediately makes its aroma known. Aside from lemon, I'm detecting a brown sugar aroma, much like its competitors.

Taste

Strangely enough, the overwhelming flavor in this stuff is of fruit. It's got an overall fruitiness that is constant, and soon enough you realize that most of it is lemon. The sweetness coats your tongue, like this others; this one is mostly of honey, but there's some brown sugar in there too. After a while, you can begin to notice faint hints of vanilla, and even the sweetness of corn from the whiskey. The swallow brings more fruitiness and brown sugar.

Mixing

This stuff is heavenly over a few ice cubes... you'll find yourself struggling to stray from either doing that or mixing it with bourbon in various proportions. I think I successfully mixed this stuff into a Manhattan and it was good, but that was a long time ago. You can make it into an Old Fashioned by simply putting some bitters in it and throwing on a good twist of lemon.

I set out to do something much more radical with it, just for giggles. I came up with something of a Martini variation, but it doesn't taste like it. Let's call it the...

Laced Straight

2 oz gin

.5 oz Evan Williams Honey Reserve

.5 oz dry vermouth

Stir with ice, and strain. Garnish with lemon twist.

This thing is great. The honey manages to keep the gin's botanicals in check, and there's a resulting nuttiness in the mix. It's sweeter than most clear gin drinks you'll ever have, which is a little disconcerting.

Conclusion

This is by far the best American honey whiskey product on the market. It takes a slightly different tack from its competitors by embracing a lemony fruitiness to accompany the wheat and the honey, but the risk paid off.

The moment I tasted Honey Reserve for the first time, I knew it was the best in its class. Weeks later, my suspicions were confirmed when I saw it behind the bar at the exceptional PS7 in Washington, DC.

Oh, and by the way, its price is smack dab in the middle of its two competitors. I'm not sure what more to tell you, other than to go buy some now.

Bonus: Here's what the Drink Hacker said about the stuff, and here is a piece done by Bourbon Blog on how one restaurant uses it to make a cocktail along with BBQ sauce.