Infusion #6: Limoncello

Summer's cosmically here, and you should sip some chilled limoncello to welcome it properly.

Limoncello is an Italian lemon liqueur which is prolific in Italy and, if you've been so fortunate to have visited the place, that would already be clear to you. Anecdotal evidence has told me that just about every serious meal in Italy is followed by a small chilled glass of limoncello, and it's almost offensive if you refuse it. It's generally served neat and chilled, though you can really take it any way you like it, and you can even mix with it.

The bad news is that limoncello, for some reason, isn't very easy to find in stores. The good news is that it is easy as hell to make. The better news is that once you've mastered making limoncello, you've unlocked an easy way to make tons of kinds of your own liqueurs at home.

Making your own limoncello follows a beautiful and modular process that's easily adapted:

Step 1) Fill a vessel (preferably glass... empty booze bottles work) with an amount of vodka.

Step 2) Place into the same vessel an amount of lemon zest.

Step 3) Let vessel sit for an amount of time.

Step 4) Strain the zest out of the vodka, and add some amount of sugar.

(All ingredient and time amounts are nebulous because it's all to taste. A higher and lower spirit/flavorant balance will require more or less time for a proper infusion, respectively.  You should at least be using about 1 lemon's worth of zest for each cup of vodka.  The infusion should probably sit undisturbed for at least a week before straining.)

As I've been quoted saying in articles before, this is a GIGO situation: infusing crappy vodka with lemon peels doesn't improve how the vodka tastes. You don't need to use Grey Goose, but a middle shelf alternative should be fine.

Tradition dictates your lemon zest should be completely devoid of pith, which is bitter. But if you like a bitter note to your limoncello, you won't hear me complain. You can avoid pith in a variety of ways. I like to peel the lemons with a vegetable peeler, and then use the flexible tip of a sharp knife to shave most of the pith off from the back (I'm not a perfectionist). But if you want no pith at all, I would say the easiest way is to use a micro-plane to zest the fruit very lightly. Whether your zest is in long wide strips or fine flecks, it doesn't matter.

After letting the mixture sit, strain out the solids using a coffee filter. To this infused spirit you can add sugar. Since sugar does not dissolve well in alcohol, you should firstly make a syrup by dissolving the sugar into water, and then add the syrup to the spirit. You can make a simple syrup or a rich simple syrup, depending on how much additional water you'd like to add to your spirit to sweeten it, thereby lowering its proof.

Once you add your sweetener, you're ready to drink.  Chilled in the freezer and served neat is traditional, but I'll take it any way.

What's a good limoncello cocktail?  I might first direct you to my own Southern Soprano...

The directions above are an easy guideline which you can use in more generic ways than it seems.  All you need is 1) a solvent, 2) a flavorant, and 3) a sweetener.  In the case of limoncello, those 3 variables end up looking like: vodka, lemon peel, and sugar

I'll leave you with a list of variations that I myself have tried with varying degrees of success, some of whose names are made up and some of whose are not...

Meyer limoncello: vodka, Meyer lemon peel, sugar
Limonmielo: vodka, lemon peel, honey
Limettacello: vodka, lime peel, sugar - my personal favorite
Pompelmocello: vodka, grapefruit peel, sugar
Pomelocello: vodka, pomelo peel, sugar
Uglicello: vodka, Uglifruit peel, sugar
Gimoncello: gin, lemon peel, sugar
Mojitocello: white rum, lime peel & mint, sugar

Original Remixes for Housewarming

We had a housewarming party a few weeks ago and I finally had the opportunity to mix drinks for my friends using my relatively lush home inventory. (If you weren't invited, I'm sorry. We had a guest list that already challenged the capacity of the apartment. We wanted to invite even more.) Incidentally, this experience confirmed that I don't have what it takes to be a good bartender, and I'm ok with that.

We had a small suggested drink list for the occasion which included the Saratoga(this version), the Cuba Libre(this version), the Monkey Gland(this version), and two originals which I've posted below.

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ORIGINAL REMIXES

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The Madras is one of those easy training-wheel drinks both in terms of taste and ease of construction. Seemingly everyone knows how to make one and yet no one knows where it comes from. I can't find any historical information on the damn thing, so if anyone knows of it, please enlighten me.

The drink is simply orange juice, cranberry juice, and vodka. Admittedly, it's a strange combination, but the drink really works, managing to invoke an overall "tropical" crowd-pleasing flavor. I urge you to stay away from the versions that call for several times more cranberry than orange.

It was a matter of time before I figured that replacing the vodka with rum would be a capital idea. I suggest an aged rum that's in the funky Jamaican style. I'd go with a Smith & Cross or Appleton Estate, and I sometimes get away with Cockspur 5-Star. I've been making this one for years. No fancy names here: just the facts.

Aged Rum Madras

.75 oz aged rum

1.5 oz orange juice

1.5 oz cranberry cocktail

1 dash simple syrup

 Shake all ingredients in a shaker with ice, and pour into an Old Fashioned glass. Garnish with lime wheel.

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This is one that we created specifically for the housewarming. It uses the aforementioned Cockspur aged rum along with Godiva Chocolate Vodka. The vodka is a curious ingredient... not really a replacement for creme de cacao, though it is slightly sweetened. The end result of our tinkering with it is a really classy drink that we call the Hwalisa.


Hwalisa

1 oz aged rum(Cockspur 5-Star or Appleton V/X)
.75 oz triple sec
.5 oz Godiva chocolate vodka
1 dash orange bitters




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

The Cask: Final

It was a good run, but the small little barrel has just sung its swan song. Almost 3 years ago, I began this very blog using my experiences with this small Copper Fox distillery cask as a flagship topic, if you will. In 2009, at-home aging was a topic scarcely written about online, and having valued unorthodox topics as a cornerstone for this site as I still do today, I took the cask project as a fitting starting line. Here in 2012, aging liquor at home is now a bit more popular online, though most of it concerns aging pre-mixed cocktails, not raw spirits, as I've mostly done. I chose this cocktail aging fad as my barrel's final batch.

Why final? Well look at the thing! Image quality aside, here is its before and after below.


Spilling and seepage have weathered it into a gnarly sticky mass. Over a half dozen batches of liquid have been aged in this vessel, a number that I feel is much above the average commercial spirit barrel's lifespan. I have no qualms with retiring this cask and purchasing another, should I feel the need to continue aging. (And I do!)

Scarcely 45 days ago I decided that the barrel was ready to work again, having rested from its last ghastly voyage. If you'll recall, I brashly tried to age a light fruity Sauvignon Blanc in it. After aging it much too long (if it could have been aged well at all), my resulting product resembled a vinegary vermouth more than a table wine. Apologetic to the cask, I left it in open air to fully dry. A month after that, I gave it a few flushes of nice hot water in order to extract any sour flavors before we continued.

And now we continue. Into the barrel's final gulp was, technically speaking, a variation of an Improved Scotch Cocktail, a glass of which would have been composed of a few fingers of Scotch whisky, a heavy dash of sugar syrup, a heavy dash of absinthe, a heavy dash of Maraschino liqueur, and a heavy dash of bitters.

A few notes on the ingredients. I had originally planned to use a young (and cheap) single malt Scotch, but was persuaded against it. I ended up using Johnny Walker Red Label, since popular consensus is that its age is somewhere near 8 years. Since the small barrel ages contents so quickly, I decided to let the input whisky err on the younger side.

I opted for a new American Maraschino liqueur: Leopold Bros. It's one of their newer products and is absolutely wonderful. As someone who finds the traditional Luxardo a bit overpowering, Leopold's restraint is very welcome. Go buy some now.

Instead of using aromatic bitters which is traditional for the Improved Cocktail, I used my own homemade coffee bitters, which I always felt went well with Scotch.

And now, a note on sugar. Most of the cocktails that you've probably seen aged in barrels are along the lines of Manhattans and Negronis. While there's a bit of sugar in each of those, I wasn't sure I had heard of any aged cocktails that contained simple syrup, or even a heavy liqueur for that matter, and I wondered if there was a good reason as to why not. My cocktail mix ended up being only about 1/15th sugar, and since I knew this was my barrel's last hurrah, I went for it.

In the end, the sugar wasn't a problem. I let the mix sit in the barrel about a month and a half, just to get a bit of age on the ingredients, namely the whisky.

My biggest surprise in the end was how bitter the mixture became. The aging seemed to magnify the bitters' bitterness several times over. In order to calm it back down, I actually doctored the final aged mix with an additional bit of each of the cocktail's other ingredients except the bitters. The final concoction is a bit more bitter than I'd like, but I don't want to tinker with it any more in fear of upsetting its already endangered balance.

The coffee and vanilla in the bitters bring out a bit of chocolate from the whiskey. The liqueur and the syrup offer just a bit of sweetness to counteract the formidable bitterness here. Like it normally does in the Improved Cocktail, the absinthe provides a bright and aromatic highlight to the mix, which definitely needs it in this case. And luckily for me, the barely detectable white wine tones from the barrel's last batch adds sweetness to this one, if anything. But to be quite honest, I'm not sure the cocktail is better now than before it went into the barrel, though I'm definitely enjoying trying to understand its transformation. This has been a success.

And so, this barrel is done aging things. I'm not done with it completely, however, and if you're wondering what I mean, you'll have to wait and see.

As I end my home-aging journey, a friend of mine starts hers. She is Courtney Randall of Cocktail Quest. Her interests lie in aging cocktails, not spirits alone, though she realizes that it's a smart move to soften the barrel's charred innards first by aging a spirit before subtler cocktails are poured in. In a move after my heart, she chose Wray & Nephew's White Overproof Rum.

Courtney managed to articulate one of my favorite things about aging at home, something I've thought about for years but never was able to say it so well, so I will provide her words here (mangled by myself):

"With a newly empty barrel [after aging the rum], surely it was time to batch up two liters of cocktail. But... I started to reconsider. Perhaps one more spirit round wouldn't be a bad idea; two unique barrel-aged spirits must be better than one.

You see, when a spirit is placed in a barrel, a certain amount will disappear. But it doesn't just evaporate. The wood soaks some of it up like a sponge, and the barrel is forever changed. Whatever goes in next will be affected. For example, if you barrel age a white whiskey, and then fill the barrel with gin, some of the barrel-aged whiskey flavors will be incorporated into the gin's flavor profile. But the barrel's flavor is not constant. Each time you change the contents, the barrel will take on the new flavors and yet lose some of its own."

Well put, Courtney!

If you've enjoyed reading about my hijinks with aging at home, do yourself a favor and follow hers in suit.

As I said, while my barrel is done aging contents, I'm not fully done with it just yet. Stay tuned for further hijinks, and thanks to all you readers.

Ephemeral Noms

I've begun another blog.

A hopeless consumer, I've always been enchanted with getting my hands on limited edition flavors of snacks and drinks that pop up intermittently in your grocery and convenience stores. After 20 years of such hawking, I consider myself an expert on the junk food landscape. Here's the full story. I figured it might be fun to document the curious iterations that I come across and that perhaps I might be so lucky as to gain a few readers, especially those from whom I can learn on this subject.

Did you know for their 100th Anniversary Oreo is offering a special edition that's flavored like birthday cake? Did you know that Pepsi just started producing a half-calorie version? What about the fact that you can buy marshmallow treats that use the Fruity Pebble cereal instead of Rice Krispies?

All of this you can learn and more at Ephemeral Noms.

Egotistical Cocktails, Part 2

It's time for another egotistical cocktail, an original cocktail which you yourself have created that may not differ greatly from one or more already-established recipes, but one that you newly name anyway.

In response to my last one, Rowen of the Fogged In Lounge said this:

"There are variations [of the Improved Cocktail] that are more strikingly different than others. Had you used one of Cruzan’s milder rums, one might be more tempted to call it an Improved Santa Cruz Rum Cocktail. But Blackstrap is unusual enough that [the] interchangeable quality of the Improved template seems secondary [to the unique flavor of the rum]."

At first I didn't understand what he meant, but now I do. My understanding was deepened when I stumbled across an old post from Darcy O'Neil, one of the old guard booze bloggers. His post outlines some basic guidelines on when a new cocktail deserves a new name or not. Luckily, my creations fall within his guidelines, though I shall still call them egotistical.

This is one that I cooked up years ago accidentally while trying to use up a bottle of tonic water before the fizz ran out. Since that day, I've found myself making them more and more... it really might be one of the best drinks I've come up with.

Technically, this could be called a rye & tonic with lemon bitters, but instead I'll call it...

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ORIGINAL REMIX

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Danger

2 oz rye whiskey
3 oz tonic water
1 dash lemon bitters

Build over ice in an old fashioned glass. No garnish.

Rose's Lime Cordial, Remixed

In the wake of all the hate concerning Rose's Lime Cordial, I thought I'd deliver a few original drinks using the stuff that I've been making for the past year or so. I'm doing my part to even out the internet's love/hate balance for the cordial.

Rose's isn't the most versatile ingredient, but it's really damn interesting when paired with certain ingredients that compliment it. These are both Gimlet variations.

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ORIGINAL REMIX

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Gimlet & Tonic

1.5 oz London dry gin
.5 oz Rose's Lime Cordial
3 oz tonic water

Build in an old fashioned glass over ice. No garnish.





This is simply a Gimlet on the rocks with tonic to top.

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Grimlet

1.5 oz London dry gin
.5 oz Rose's Lime Cordial
.25 oz Green Chartreuse

Stir with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass. No garnish.

This is simply a Gimlet with a few dashes of Chartreuse.

Rewriting History

I'm not really a big fan of Pimm's No. 1, and I never have been. Because of this, I devised my own Pimm's replacement. It's much better than the original Pimm's, I assure you. Pimm's is an out-dated product, anyway. No one drinks it anymore, right?


Pimm's cup

1.5 oz London Dry gin
.25 oz sweet vermouth
1 dash triple sec
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 dash tonic water

Pour into a tall glass, fill with ice, and top with ginger ale. Garnish with a slice of lemon and/or piece of cucumber.


Now, a question: Did what I just write irritate you?

It should. Let us count the ways: (to clarify, what I wrote above is not my opinion)

1) What I made here isn't a Pimm's Cup. Why? Because regardless of the actual name of the drink, it specifically calls for Pimm's No. 1. My (perceived superior) approximation of Pimm's No. 1 is a different ingredient, and therefore the drink above is really only a variation.

2) My "homemade Pimm's" flavor deviates from the original more than your average brand-swapping of spirits in most drinks. The resulting flavor of my Pimm's Cup is very different than the original Pimm's Cup, and so both drinks should really not bear the same name.

3) My distaste for Pimm's No. 1 gives me no right to change the Pimm's Cup without changing its name, especially if I'm serving it at a commercial bar or issuing the recipe to readers. I owe it to my patrons/fans for my drink titles to accurately describe what they're getting, and I owe it to the annals of cocktail history to do my best to serve drinks as they were originally intended, and if I don't, then I should document/notate it as such.


Right?



If you agreed, then you should have no problem switching "Pimm's No. 1" with "Rose's Lime Cordial" and "Pimm's Cup" with "Gimlet" in what I wrote above. Replacing the Rose's with lime juice and sugar gives you a delicious drink, but you should not call it a Gimlet.

Just recently this discussion has flared up again when Michael Dietsch purposefully visited/flamebaited the subject and Doug Winship did it inadvertently.

Right now, a popular trend is to make your own lime cordial. However, pre-mixed lime juice and sugar in a bottle is not a cordial. (One of the more interesting lime cordial recipes is here, which uses agar to make the mix crystal clear. The clarification process changes the lime flavor into a more subdued note.)

Even if you do make your own lime cordial, still use caution in what you call a Gimlet. Regardless of how delicious you think your own cordial is, if it tastes nothing like Rose's, then perhaps your drink is a Gimlet variation. The Gimlet cocktail calls for Rose's Lime Cordial, not simply a lime cordial, just like how a Pimm's Cup calls for Pimm's No. 1, just simply a fruit cup.

If you find that Rose's has no place in your house or on your menu, then academically, it makes more sense to remove the Gimlet from your repertoire than to remove Rose's from your Gimlet.