Bartender Geek

You know, historically, punches and then cocktails were based on a balance of sweet and sour, with a bit of bitters. The idea was to create drinks that were sweet, but not cloying.

And today, again, we are in an era that loves our sweet cocktails. To which I say, "Yippee!", because I loves me a good girly drink. . . but that's not the only direction that cocktails can go. Throughout much of the 20th Century, cocktails went savory. And that's also an interesting way to go, and one which needs much thought, and in which much cool stuff can go.

Of course, we're all familiar with savory drinks like the Bloody Mary. But the king of the savory drinks, bar none, has GOT to be the martini. I mean, can anyone think of a savory drink that could even compete?

But what is the flavor that is predominant in savory cocktails? Sweet cocktails are based on a balance of sweet and sour, usually, often cut with some bitter. (And it doesn't have to be a lot -- simply squeezing the peel of a lemon over a drink releases enough bitter aromatic oils to change the character of a drink drastically.) Of course, they can add in some salt -- a margarita is usually about the interplay between sweet, sour, and salt, rather than sweet, sour, and bitter. But what's the interplay in a savory cocktail?

I'd argue that savory cocktails are about the interplay between salt and umami. The primary taste in a martini, of the five basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami), is umami. White vermouth is basically umami; gin has a good smattering of it; green olives have a good chunk.

I think the reason people like "extra dry martinis" -- ones which limit, or even virtually eliminate, the vermouth -- is because they get overloaded with umami. It's an aggressive flavor, one which I quite like, but, like any flavor, "too much" is too much. It can start to strike one as "oily" or "greasy", even. I go heavy on the vermouth in my own martinis -- but that's because, remember, as sensitive as my NOSE is, I've got fewer taste-buds per inch than most of you, so, for me, I punch up those five basic tastes.

So what flavor goes with umami? I'd say that salt is the most complimentary flavor to umami, and I suspect people who drink "dirty martinis" would agree with me. Adding a bit of the brine the olives are stored in does add some olive flavor (again, mainly umami), but mainly adds salt.

So why not go directly for the salt? A pinch of salt actually does change the character of a martini quite a bit. I feel that it rounds out the edges, and I like it that way. Others may not, but it may be worth an experiment.

So, then we have sweet, sour, and bitter. Personally, I don't feel like playing with sweet and bitter with a martini -- I'm not saying it can't be done, just that I don't feel like doing it right now. But what about sour? Can anything be done with that?

I tried adding a drop of rice vinegar. And I quite liked the result.

So: here's an idea for a martini variation.

3 oz gin, say, Beefeater or Hendricks, for instance
1 oz white vermouth
1 dash of salt
1 dash of rice vinegar.
2 green olives stuffed with pimentos

Shake, or stir, as you see fit. Shaking will break up more ice, and slightly dilute the mix. That's not a bad thing. Stirring will leave less water in. That's also not a bad thing. You CAN taste the difference, but I'm going to commit a heresy here, and say that BOTH ways are good, even if they're different. Strain into a cocktail glass. Or whatever glass you have around.

I'd be interested to hear what other people think of the salt and/or rice vinegar ideas. I find them quite palatable myself, but I don't know if that would be universally true.

Okay. Let me make this clear. I believe that making good drinks well is a vital part of tending bar.

Yet, for those of you who are interested in tending bar, but fear that you just may not have the skills, I offer the following video.




Watch it first, then I'll put some discussion points under the cut.
( Read more... )

Fruit flies like brandy, and can fly through the open part of a speed pourer.

Now I get why a) most places I've worked have a "take the speed-pourers out and re-cap the bottles at the end of the night" policy, and b) the few that didn't have those speed pourers with the mesh on the end.

Fortunately, it was a bottle of the CHEAP kind of brandy that you only use for mixing.

I oversweetened my grenadine syrup.

I mention this mainly because it shows what a difference the art of bartending has undergone in just the past decade.

"Grenadine" is now an ingredient, something that you make at home, something that is supposed to have flavors in it other than "sweet".

Heck -- there are now even two main STYLES of grenadine -- hot-process, and cold-process. Basically, do you cook the pomegranite juice and sugar together to form a syrup, or do you take the juice and mix it with sugar cold?

Cold-process really only makes sense if you're squeezing your own juice, however. The stuff in the jar, at least the stuff I get, is "all natural pomegranite juice from concentrate" -- and the concentrate is already cooked somewhat, so there's no reason not to go ahead and continue to cook it. They're both good, but they're different. The cooked one tastes more like cooked fruit juice, and the cold one tastes more like fresh fruit juice.

And the stuff I made is fine. It's just too sweet for what I intend to use it for. So I'll either make a new batch, and use this for other drinks -- or maybe make grenadine ice cream or something -- or just get more pomegranite juice to balance it out.

After the "Creating the Right Cocktail Menu" panel, Lis went to a "Designing Smarter Bars" panel, which interested her from a user interface design perspective (among the takeaway messages she got: people fuck up architecture in pretty much every way that people fuck up computer programs, and for most of the same reasons -- and you don't have to get to a very high level of abstraction before the solutions start looking real similar, too). I didn't go to a panel, instead electing to go to a tasting that Plymouth Gin was holding. See, they're bringing a new product in the the United States in the next couple months: Plymouth Sloe Gin.

I'm cribbing this description from SOMEONE else at Tales, and I can't remember whom. It could have been one of the presenters at the tasting . . . "In the United States, sloe gin is a bottle you only find in dive bars -- and it's usually the scariest thing there. It's covered in dust somewhere in the back, and it tastes entirely artificial and like cough medicine only worse."

One step up from that, but still unbearably vile, is the stuff that the presenter's grandmother makes. She takes the cheapest gin in plastic gallon bottles that she can get from the supermarket, soaks sloe berries in it, and adds tons of sugar.

Then there's the stuff we had at the tasting.

I mentioned, on this blog sometime, what it was like when I first had the marasca sour cherries in syrup that Luxardo makes, didn't I? You know, the REAL Maraschino cherries?

It was the same experience, only more so. "Oh. NOW I see what the entirely artificial gross thing was attempting to be like, and entirely failing to do."

Imagine sloe gin. Except good.

Yeah, you can't do it, can you? I suspect that even you Brits will have trouble with this one, since most of you probably have the same kind of sloe gin that the presenter's grandmother makes.

For you, just know that the stuff in the States is even worse than that.

. . . .and that I kind of like it anyway. . . .

A week ago, about, I posted my notes for the first panel I attended at Tales. Then the rest of Tales happened, and I had other things to do than be on the computer. So I'm now, finally, getting around to typing up my notes from the rest of Tales, and sharing it with you.

I'm also fighting off a mild cold, but, fortunately, as a bartender, I know what to do about that: whiskey, lemon juice, honey, ginger syrup, and boiling water. If it doesn't make you feel better (and, usually, it will), it will at least make you mind being sick less.

Come to think of it, why doesn't anyone actually make a cold medication that is based on that? The main problem that that style of drink tends to have is not enough bitters to balance out the other flavors. But acetaminophen, psudoephedrine, and the rest are all bitter. It should be possible to balance the active ingredients with those other ingredients and have a cold medication that's worth drinking.

'Course, there's the "moral hazard" argument: make the cold medicine tasty, and people will just go out and get sick. . .

Anyway, right, the panel.

The second panel I went to was called "Researching Cocktails and Collecting Cocktail Books." If you think there was ANY way you could keep Lis OR me away from a panel with that title, well, then you don't know us very well.<( Onward to the notes I took! )

Current schwag count includes about twenty books, twenty nip bottles (50 ml) of alcohol, three bottles of bitters (more about that in a moment), three tee-shirts, a half-dozen cocktail shakers, a clock/tip jar, a couple jiggers and seven speed pourers, a vegetable peeler (from the "garnishes" panel), about a half dozen glasses of various sorts -- martini, shot, whatever, spices of all sorts, a jar of hibiscus flowers in syrup, and who knows what-all else.

We have to get this stuff home. Not entirely clear yet how that's going to happen, except that we're not flying back carry-on-only.

For decades, the only company making bitters on anything even approaching a wide scale was Angustora. Peychaud's was still, technically, making some, but it wasn't sold outside of New Orleans, and not that much in the city, either. Fee Brothers had an orange bitters, but almost nobody knew about it.

Now, of course, there are other companies -- Bitter Truth, Bittermans, and a few others, and they're much, much more available.

So, I was at a panel on bitters, and struck up a conversation with the guy next to me. Turns out his name is Joe Fee. He's a youngish guy, really tall, and geeky-cute. He also has a company called Fee Brothers. Yeah, Fee Brothers, which has been around since 1864, is still owned by a Fee.

I really like him. And not just because he handed me a bottle of a product they don't have out yet -- rhubarb bitters. Also a bottle of their limited edition whiskey barrel bitters.

Anyway, before another panel, I was just chatting to the person next to me about that, and the person sitting behind me overheard, and she was a representative from Angustora. So she gave me a bottle of a new product THEY'RE rolling out -- they're finally coming out with an orange bitters of their own. So I got three bottles of bitters more than I used to.

Lis and I are going to a professional conference for me. It's a chance for me to learn more bartending skills, learn about the new products coming on line, and, most importantly, network. She's re-formatted my resume into a brochure; I'll probably post a copy of the PDF when we get back.

The conference is called "Tales of the Cocktail", and is hosted by the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans.

Remember: This Are Serious Conference. I Are Serious Bartender. We are NOT doing this in order to hang out with cool geeky bartenders who are all into historical re-creation drinks, creative flavors, molecular mixology, and other cool things, while drinking yummy alcoholic drinks in one of North America's greatest cities.

Well, okay. We are not ONLY doing this to . . .

I'll tell you all about it when we get back.

It is illegal in the United States to operate a private still for the manufacture of distilled spirits. In order to operate a still, you need to have a permit, a bond, a separate building that is not a house in order to do it in, to pay excise tax (separate from any taxes on SELLING the stuff) and all sorts of other things.

The Department of the Treasury is responsible for the enforcement of this, which is why "revinooers" are the natural enemy of "moonshiners". The collection of taxes on the stuff is AMONG their duties. But the reasons it is illegal are not limited to simple taxation reasons. They also have to do with general safety.

See, when you are distilling, you produce ethyl alcohol, which is the stuff you drink. But you ALSO produce methyl alcohol, aka "wood alcohol," which is a poison which can cause eye damage. And you produce propanol, which can cause brain damage. It takes some know-how to know how to extract the ethyl alcohol without the other two.

(Actually, that's where the word "spirit" comes from. Methyl distills at a lower temperature. It's the "head" of the distillation, and comes off first. Propanol distills at a higher temperature, is the "tail" of the distillation, and comes off last. The "spirit," the ethyl, comes in the middle.)

So, given that improper manufacture of this stuff can cause health problems or even death, the government has a reason to want to restrict its manufacture to people who actually know how to do it.

And there's another reason, as well, a reason which police nowadays have to deal with in crystal meth manufacture, as well. The production of alcohol, like the production of crystal meth, involves the creation of large amounts of highly volatile gasses. By cracking down on the manufacture of these things, through things like tracking who buys Sudafed, the police have largely stopped the small-scale manufacture of crystal meth, in apartments in cities. The same amount of crystal meth is being made, but it's being made offshore, or, at least, in more deserted areas.

This is a good thing. The crystal meth can still kill people, but at least the meth lab exploding won't kill as many innocent bystanders, and won't leave as many people homeless.

The Treasury department does the same thing. If you're going to operate an illegal still, it's going to have to be somewhere farther away from people. And that means, if -- and when -- it blows up, it's not going to kill folks, or burn down houses.

Now, I do have a freedom-loving rebellious streak in me that wants to know why I CAN'T do these things if I want to. But, I have to admit, the answer, "Because you'll start fires that will harm not only you, but also other people," is a pretty good answer.

That's why distilling is illegal.

But there's another way to concentrate alcohol, one which ISN'T illegal, DOESN'T form compounds that cause brain damage and blindness, and WON'T blow up. It's called "jacking", and it almost certainly predates the invention of distilling.

Alcohol, of course, vaporizes at a lower temperature than water, which is the fact upon which distilling depends -- you can raise a mixture to a temperature that alcohol boils off, and collects somewhere else, but not so high that the water also boils.

But it also FREEZES at a lower temperature than water.

Which means that you can bring the temperature of a mixture containing water and alcohol to a LOWER temperature, such that the water freezes, but the alcohol doesn't. And then you can pull out chunks of water ice, concentrating the alcohol in the remaining mixture.

This is most likely how the earliest brandies were made -- wait for winter, and let the weather concentrate your booze for you. And this process is generally called "jacking".

"Applejack" was originally a cider which went through this process, but modern liquors which go by that name are distilled apple brandies.

I want to make some original-style applejack, and see how it differs.

Instead, it ended up looking like, and having the exact texture of, lemon meringue pie. Except that it tastes like a margarita.

I just have to make sure that it's repeatable.

Okay. Here's what I did, partially for you, and partially for my own memory.

1 oz Jose Quervo Tradicianal
1/2 oz Cointreau
Juice of 2 limes
Juice of 1 lemon
1 oz raw blue agave syrup, dark. (That's a syrup made from agave nectar; it's a sweetener. You can get it at Whole Foods, next to the honey.)
1 egg white
1 pinch of powdered agar agar

Shake in cocktail shaker, hard, to foam the white.

Pour into large ramekin (your ramekin may vary -- we've got two ramekin sizes, and this is the larger one.)

When I did this, the foam stayed on top.

Put in microwave, and nuke for two minutes. (Your microwave may vary. You probably want to do it for a shorter period of time. Our microwave is low-powered.)

Take out, and let cool to room temperature.

Right now, after a couple hours of cooling, it's perfect. It may get too solid later, so, for the record, it's probably about 2 and a half hours after I nuked it, and it's really good.