Easy Christmas Bitters Made at Home

Here is your chance to easily make your first bitters at home, if you haven't already.

Several times now I've written about making your own home-made bitters. The jist of the process is soaking a variety of herbs, spices, roots, etc. in alcohol to create a strong and bitter concoction which tastes delicious when added to spirits a dash at a time.

Well, I just realized a really easy way to make them: mulling spices. I'm talking about the packets of spices that you can find anywhere in supermarkets at this time of year. Occasionally you'll find a dissolvable powder that claims to be mulling spices, but I'm talking about the roughly chopped stuff that resembles (and can be used as) potpourri. The mix usually contains cinnamon, orange zest, cloves, allspice, and occasionally nutmeg.

What you have here is a pre-fabricated mix of a variety of spices begging to be soaked in alcohol. Simply pour the spices into a bottle or jar of vodka/grain alcohol. As we've learned, one wants to let the source soak in the booze for as long as possible... a week or two should suffice. When it's done, one only need strain the mixture through cheesecloth or coffee filter.


This soak will yield you a very potent tincture. All you need is to add some sort of bittering agent to your mulling spices in order to turn your resulting tincture into bitters. Derek Brown gives a short list of bittering agents here. You can also browse this list compiled by Darcy O'Neil to find a few more bittering options.

I added a few pieces of star anise to my mulling spices, along with some wormwood. Ten days later, I have my Christmas(y) bitters. A dash or two of the stuff to any drink gives it a nice merry touch. It's great in a rye Manhattan, and even better in a brandy Old Fashioned.


If you've never made bitters at home before, here is your golden chance to start. You can probably find some mulling spices on your way home. Look at the lists I provided to find a bittering agent you can procure. If you start now, you could have your easy Christmas bitters before Christmas.

Go to PKNY

In the first visit to New York City of my adult life, I of course all but bee-lined it to PKNY, what people are already call one of the best tiki bars in the world.


The Shirt (myself) and the Skirt moseyed into the joint in the early evening of a Sunday night. We found that we were the only customers, and so we mused about all things tiki and otherwise with the bar's head bartender Valentin Gonzalez and a quickly-advancing minion of his, Kigan, who, I declare right now, will one day have a big name within tiki circles.

Considering the lack of thought needed to decide for myself that PKNY was on top of the list of places to visit in NYC, I found that it took a similar amount of thought to decide that my first drink would be a 1935 Zombie. PKNY serves several versions of the Zombie, with each one attempting to duplicate the minor recipe variations that came about through the years since its creation. The Skirt ordered PKNY's famous Pina Colada, which has been meticulously developed to be the highest quality Pina Colada that anyone's probably ever had. (Pictured below.)


We ordered other drinks, of course. They made a few off-the-cuff creations and were even able to work around my peculiar food allergies. We found ourselves the only patrons in the place for a good two hours, and so we simply drank and were merry with our tropical hosts. At the end of it, on the way out, the Skirt took a photo of me in front of the inconspicuous entrance... a photo I swear I can't even remember being taken. That's the danger when high proof booze is so freaking interesting to drink.

Go to PKNY. The breadth of their menu is the most impressive I've seen in a bar. They buy as few products as possible for their inventory, and they hand-craft the rest. Their recipes are more authentic than any bar I've been to. Their staff is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their work. Their rum selection impresses even the well-educated rum enthusiast. Their decor is authentic, right down to their tiki mugs and the long straws meant for the communal Scorpion Bowls. Their drinks are incredible, and are a lesson in tiki drinks, and in cocktails in general.

Go to PKNY.

Infusion #6: A Food Network Monstrosity

I love television. A great deal of my time watching TV is centered on the Food Network. I love the cuisine and personalities on the Food Network, but I’ve learned to disrespect most of the alcoholic beverage recipes that I see on the channel. Most of them contain some sort of soft drink (Sandra Lee is running out of ways to mix vodka and lemon-lime soda) and the rest are usually sweetened beyond balance and into the realm of mass commercial appeal.

But a few weeks ago I found my face even more contorted in astonishment than usual while I was watching Claire Robinson’s “5 Ingredient Fix”. Her show is a pretty good one: each prepared dish contains only five ingredients, and I’m generally pleased by her recipes, though I feel she dumbs her techniques down a bit.

Anyway, Ms. Robinson was infusing vodka. Normally I wouldn’t pay much notice, but this time she was infusing with squash. The recipe is for “Spicy Pumpkin Vodka”. I decided that it was so crazy that I had to do it myself.


The recipe is simple: one infuses 3 cups of vodka with 2 cups of pumpkin or kabocha squash, 2 vanilla beans, a stick of (cassia) cinnamon, and 3 pieces of candied ginger.

To prepare the squash, you lightly roast it in order to purge a bit of moisture and to get the flesh sweet, then cut it into small chunks in order to increase the surface area for the infusion. I used pumpkin, as I could not find any kabocha squash.

This infusion calls for an infusing time of 3 days.

At the end of the infusion, I was quite surprised with the result. I thought that the thick, dense flesh of the pumpkin would impart very little flavor to the vodka, but I was very wrong.

While the nose of the stuff is vanilla and alcohol only, the sip offers something more intriguing. The warmness of the cinnamon and the sweetness of the pumpkin combine immediately with sharp spiciness of the ginger to create a flavor very much like gingerbread, a flavor I’ve seldom come across in the spirit world. The cinnamon comes back mid-palate with the vanilla rounding it out. The swallow brings vegetal pumpkin and ginger notes that border on maltiness as it goes down.


Ms. Robinson insists that you chill this vodka and consume as a shot, but I found that doing so dulls all of the flavor into mediocrity. Sipping this at room temperature is quite enjoyable, and I bet it'd be great if you put a half ounce or so into a Manhattan.

This is a good little recipe, but it's not cheap to make. Depending on how cheap you can find your pumpkin or your ginger, and especially using 2 whole vanilla beans for 3 cups of vodka, the end product's value isn't high. Also, the yielded infusion is even less liquid than you’d think, since the pumpkin does a good job of soaking quite a bit up. But it’s a fun experiment nonetheless. Go out and make some now, just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas parties. You can still find pumpkins and kabocha in the markets – I promise.

Egotistical cocktails, Part 1

If the Old Fashioned was the spark of life that would eventually become the modern cocktail, then the Improved Cocktail was the amoeba. Jerry Thomas himself first documented it as more exotic ingredients become more readily available for use in mixing drinks in the late 19th Century.

The Old Fashioned cocktail, as we've said, is a way to season your spirit and to make it a bit more palatable. The Improved Cocktail builds upon that recipe to enhance the complexity just a bit. This time around, all you need to add to your Old Fashioned to make it Improved is a bit of Absinthe and Maraschino liqueur.

Improved Cocktail

2 oz spirit
1 dash simple syrup
1 dash aromatic bitters
1 dash Maraschino
1 dash absinthe

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon twist.

It doesn't sound like much, but Thomas knew what he was doing when he codified this thing into the printing press. I'll reiterate that I'm not fanboy of Maraschino or absinthe either, for that matter, and yet the Improved Cocktail impresses me every time I make it.

Much like the Old Fashioned, you can swap the spirit for whatever you like (and the bitters and garnish, accordingly) and it will usually work. My favorite Improved Cocktail is made with my beloved Cruzan Black Strap rum. There's something about the pungency of the rum's molasses flavors that stand up to the strong absinthe and Maraschino like no other spirit I've had so far(except for maybe Scotch whisky). I also tend to like my Improved Cocktails on the rocks.

I wrote about humility a while back, and why I wasn't giving my own name to a cocktail that I thought didn't deserve one. Since then, I've gotten encouragement to shed humility by going ahead and naming cocktails that I've made, even if doing so seemed a bit exorbitant.

So technically you could call this an Improved Black Strap Cocktail on the rocks, but instead it will be...

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ORIGINAL REMIX

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Oklahoma

1.5-2 oz Cruzan Black Strap rum
heavy dash simple syrup
heavy dash aromatic bitters
heavy dash Maraschino
heavy dash absinthe

Build over ice in small tumbler. Garnish with orange twist.

Dick Farm Dunn

For the last while I've been very interested in fruity wine varietals like Sauvignon Blanc and Zinfandel. One of the thing that keeps me coming back to Zinfandels is their fiery dry character that's in addition to their fruitiness. I've spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with a drink that helps highlight both the fruit and the spicy dryness of the wine, and I think I've finally got it.

Without going too much into it, I think this drink, which is lively and sweet but also brash and a bit biting in dryness, perfectly fits the man which it honors, if I understand everything correctly. If you don't have a real grenadine made from pomegranates, just use simple syrup.

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ORIGINAL REMIX

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Dick Farm Dunn

3oz Zinfandel
2 dashes grenadine
2 dashes triple sec
6 dashes aromatic bitters

Build in a wine goblet with cracked ice and stir.

RIP Ryan Dunn

Infusion #5: Umeshu, Part I

A small project I’ve been meaning to tackle for years now is the ability to make one’s own plum wine at home… more specifically, umeshu. Technically, umeshu isn’t a wine at all (though it’s called so), but in fact a liqueur.

Umeshu might be the simplest infusion yet done on this site, though its simplicity in preparation demands patience for the infusing. Umeshu is created by soaking whole green plums in soju.

Green plums aren't just unripe plums (though they can be). Because this is an east Asian recipe, what can be assumed required is one of several varieties of Korean plum, most of which ripen to a light green color. Their taste is sweet, though perhaps not as sweet as some of the darker species that you can find. I myself don't have direct access to unripe Asian plums, but what I did find recently in my local store was less-than-ripe green pluots. I know that they're not nearly the same as for what traditional umeshu calls, but I'm going for it.

Soju is a Korean spirit that you'll find more and more nowadays, if you make an effort. It's a mid-proof mostly neutral spirit that is traditionally made from rice, though modern versions can be made from grain and sweet potatoes as well. Most soju also has just a bit of sugar added at the end of production, so the result is a slightly sweet liquor that is about 40 proof (on average) and very subtle in flavor. By the way, soju is not to be confused (which it commonly is), with shochu or baijiu, their Japanese and Chinese counterparts which tend to be more commonly made from rice only and are also higher proof.

The method of infusion couldn't be simpler: wash the fruits and soak them whole in soju for at least a few months. This method concerns me a bit. From my limited experience with infusing whole fruits in liquor, I find that the flesh of the fruits, shielded from the alcohol directly by their in-tact skin, tend to decompose a bit from the inside out. Similar experiments of mine have resulted in ammoniated aromas from the mixtures. But every description I've read of umeshu insists that it's smooth and inviting, so perhaps my fears are unfounded.


I'm making a small batch divided into two jars. Traditional recipes have you include sugar to soak in the liquor with the plums, but I'll just add simple syrup to the final infused product, as I often do.

If any of you know why this experiment will fail or what I'm doing wrong, feel free to tell me. See you in a few months!

A Malibu Old Fashioned, If I Must...

Just a little while ago I wrote about the not-so-prolific ways in which you could get creative with making your own custom Old Fashioned cockails. I had been preaching this strategy long before I wrote about it, and one of my more wiley past suggestions has unfortunately reared its ugly head.

Dagreb, a fellow blogger, dug up an old suggestion of mine and foolishly decided to bring it to life. He claims that I suggested the idea of making an Old Fashioned out of Malibu rum. As I defended myself in the comments of his post about it, I told him that I either was very drunk (up to you to decide how likely) or that I suggested only adding bitters to the rum, since the sweet liqueur-like Malibu needed no additional sugar. Intoxicated (literally?) by the idea of coconut and pineapple combined, Dagreb whipped up a Malibu Old Fashioned anyway with pineapple syrup and aromatic bitters. The results were, not surprisingly, too sweet and undrinkable.

Allow me to provide a solution!

Malibu has recently released a new product: Malibu Black. This is far from the first "Black" titled version of a spirit to be released, but it's approach is a bit different. While Malibu is an unaged rum at low proof that's sweet like a liqueur, Malibu Black is almost a full proof, less sweet rum which uses aged rum as a base. Malibu black still has the candy-like coconut flavor (love it or hate it), but is a lot more sophisticated, and versatile, might I add. I essentially see no reason to ever buy normal Malibu again. Black's lesser sweetness makes it finally possible to mix it with cola without overly saccharine results, as Malibu suggests. If you haven't had coconut cola yet, you're really missing out.

I thought this the golden opportunity to make a Malibu Old Fashioned that didn't suck. I still treated Malibu Black like Malibu, in terms of its sweetness and heft, but the end result is that it's not undrinkable.

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Malibu Black Old Fashioned

2oz Malibu Black
2-3 dashes lime bitters (substitute lemon or orange bitters)

Build on ice and garnish with a lime twist (substitute lemon or orange twist).