Driving (quickly) from PHL to Tales 2010
May/100
I’ve basically committed myself to driving from Philadelphia to New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail 2010 at this point. I’ll be embarrassed if my car takes more than 20 hours to get there, and I’ll be pleased if it breaks 16 hours (meaning that the latter is our target).
Although I’ve some experience in this particular sort of rodeo, I’m no Alex Roy… especially including my not owning one, never mind several, BMW E90 M3s… or any car at all. I was happy to help flog a good friend’s ‘97 VW GTi from Long Island City to Detroit nearly a year ago, but I donated my very own ‘98 VW Jetta for the benefit of my local public radio station over a year ago, so I’m looking at the “rent a car for a week” market, and I’m seeing a lot of vehicles I don’t really want to drive for five minutes, let alone 1250 miles.
Said vehicles hit the opposite ends of the relevant bell curve: I’ve no more or less interest in a Pontiac G60 or a Ford Fusion than I do in Bentley Continental or a Lambo Murciélago: I’m going to hate every second of driving any of those over the roads that get me to NOLA in a timely manner, and, as many laughs as I’d get rolling along Rampart in a Lambo, the shiny ones aren’t worth the cost of my having to replace every single leaf spring in the damn thing.
Somewhere in there, there’s a middle ground. Surely, there exists someone in the vague Philadelphia neighborhood who will rent me a late ’90s BMW M3, Audi RS4/6, or at least a Japanese sedan of recent vintage with something resembling a manual shift.
(Please don’t make me lean on a friend to let me borrow his family’s mid-’60s Facel Vega II. Never mind the irony’s being rather too sharp, I probably can’t get my head around asking to borrow a car worth six figures.)
Help?
We finally put some content on the USBG PA web page.
May/100
It’s not much, just a map of members’ places of employment and a calendar of upcoming events, but it’s more than we had before:
Thoughts?
Manhattan Cocktail Classic 2010 schedule, in a useable form.
Apr/100
I think I’ll probably go ahead and introduce myself to Lesley Townsend and ask why she didn’t do something similar to this on the official site, but, so that I could figure out what I could attend without conflicts, I created a Google calendar for the currently-posted MCC events, which I’ll try to keep up to date as things get added between now and the Ides of May. Here it is:
Regrettably, I’m ignorant of the ways to go about offsetting the start date or the presentation method when embedding a Google calendar. You definitely want that in at least weekly, if not daily, view, and you want to bounce forward (or backward, although I’m not sure why you’d come to this later and need to do that) to 14 May or so.
San Francisco bars, part 1
Aug/090
I’ll skip the details, I’m here for a dayjob conference followed by a friend’s wedding. I just got in tonight, so I stayed close to the hotel. I visited:
Farmer Brown
The restaurant/bar attached to my hotel, which sources its food from local farms, preferring those run by non-white farmers. It actually has a pretty interesting cocktail program, and tonight’s bartender, Daniel, did a good job, but somebody needs to introduce them to the double-strain, or at least using a strainer at all.
Swig
Definitely a good selection, but they were mobbed by a very mixed (pick your metric: racial, gender, gender-preference, socio-economic: all apply) group while I was there. One part of that group was there for the live blues (which was very good), to which they were dancing, and the other part was stripey shirt boys clearly more irritated by the gender imbalance (heavily hetero male, meaning Them) than I (there to sample the cocktail menu) was. My Gin Gin Mule, listed on the menu with Martin Miller’s but poured with Tanqueray, was obviously rushed by the circumstances, so I’ll have to come back on a slower night.
Rye
I can’t say enough good things. Hannah’d previously given me the ingredients, but not the proportions, for their Dogpatch, and I tried it with what I thought made sense and found it too dark and heavy, but the genuine article is much better than my guestimate was. I dealt mostly with Lauren (who may or may not remember the Attention and Red Hook after I taught them to her), who seems a bit unsure of herself unnecessarily, didn’t catch the name of the senior bartender on duty, met Marco (formerly of Clock Bar, now consulting, so far as I could gather) and Erick (Bourbon & Branch and (?) Rickhouse), each on my side of the bar, each probably turning up for the Cocktail Classic, and had a pleasant chat. I’ll be back, especially as it’s stumbling distance from the hotel.
Name this drink!
Aug/095
A friend described something that Rye is doing with Averna, rosso vermouth, and (she remembers / presumes) rye as “brown and grown-up … the kind of thing drunk by crusty British professor types in the 1930s – you know, one glass of claret with dinner (roast beef), one glass of spirits afterward, and to bed at 9:30pm.” I got so far as the rye and the Averna, and knew I’d agree: too much brown, heavy stuff, not enough balance. So here’s what I’m actually having as my last drink before bed, which I like very much and would like to serve to other people, which probably means it needs a Name, on which I’m coming up blank:
2 oz rye (I used Old Overholt)
¾ oz Averna amaro
¾ oz Cinzano bianco (note: not dry, the sweet, white type of vermouth)
Stir in a mixing glass on ice, strain over cubes in a Collins, top with soda, garnish with a flamed orange peel (and discard the peel).
3 August 2009’s libations
Aug/090
(Continuing a leitmotif.)
Summer Herb Bouquet
I’ve had Aperol cocktails on the back of my mind since I was asked about them not terribly long ago. That, combined with leftover freshly-squeezed orange juice from this past weekend’s party and a curiosity to play with basil flowers as a garnish begot this. I think there’s too much Aperol in this recipe (drop it to ¾ oz, but that may require an adjustment of either the gin or the St. Germain, and I haven’t remade it yet), but it’s on the verge of being a lovely summer drink.
1½ oz Hayman’s Old Tom gin (if you don’t have Old Tom, use 1¼ oz of a plymouth-style—including Plymouth brand—gin and ¼ oz simple syrup)
½ oz fresh orange juice
½ oz St. Germain
2 dashes aromatic bitters (I used Bitter Truth, Angostura might actually be better)
2 leaves fresh basil (I used the cinnamon basil from my back yard, same for the flowers below, but I expect any variety will work, if slightly differently)
Shake all of the above on ice, double-strain (the second strainer should be mesh, not just a julep: it’s catching the herb bits) into a Collins glass filled with crushed ice, garnish with a couple of basil flowers.
Attention
As before, but this time with basil flowers as a garnish. (Guess why those were floating around…)
Old Fashioned
Jacob Briars and Sebastian Reaburn have a lot to say about the proper ways to make an Old Fashioned. This isn’t their way, it’s my way.
3 oz Rittenhouse 100 Rye
1 sugar cube
liberal dashes Angostura bitters
Drop the sugar cube in a mixing glass, soak it with Angostura bitters, add one barspoon room temperature to warm water, muddle the sugar cube into the bitters. Add the rye, fill the glass halfway with ice, and stir assertively but not aggressively for at least 90 seconds. Strain (use a julep, please) into an Old Fashioned glass with a couple of good ice cubes in it. Garnish with a lemon twist.
Toronto
I learned this at Deep Ellum (the bar in Boston with the US East Coast’s best Manhattan variation list, rather than the city in Texas for which the former is named), and I’m pretty sure what I do is closer to what I had there than Jamie Boudreau’s recipe of the same name, which has both too much sugar and too little Fernet for my palate.
3 oz Old Overholt Rye
1 oz Fernet-Branca
Stir on ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, garnish with a smacked mint leaf (I used spearmint from the back yard, but any old thing will do, the larger the leaf the better—I picked the one pictured here without light).
Buying Booze on Sunday in Ohio
Jul/090
Ohio, as do many states, has some holdover Blue Laws. It used to have a state monopoly on liqour and wine sales, as Pennsylvania still does, and certainly had the “not on Sundays” provision (still seen in New York’s service industry as “no hard alcohol before noon”, and various other states’ “before noon” policies). In Ohio, Sunday sales evolved somewhat (completely?) uniquely: there’s an ABV limit of 21%.
For most practical purposes, this means you can buy beer, but neither wine nor spirits, but several enterprising spirits vendors are chasing this market with diluted spirits. Here are several on a grocery store shelf. (There are also whiskeys and gins.)
TotC2009 notes: Drink Italy
Jul/090
Drink Italy was a perusal of spirits produced in Italy, presented by Francesco Lafranconi and Agostino Perrone with a guest appearance by Danny DeVito (yeah, that one). My notes on this are a bit fractured and brief, for several reasons: first, it was the last session of the day (I’m shocked they’re as legible as they are, really); second, both Francesco and Agostino have a rather heavy accent; third… well, you’ll see about Mr. DeVito. There were also 25 liquors to be tasted at the end of this session, which went about like you’d expect.
Francesco:
- a brief history of aperativo/vermouth that you ought to know already
- originally medicinal, of course – cordiole, “strengthening the heart”
- Greek & Roman era – fermentation not controlled – mulsum (wine & honey); conditioned wine with honey & spices in clay amphorae [cf, the bars in Pompei - thanks Claire W]
- elixers developed in monasteries, walled from the Barbarians
- picked up knowledge from the Arabs
- 1250 Marco Polo returns with Eastern knowledge
- Crusades as an excuse for claiming the spice route
- Republica Marinari (Milanese)
- Campare Gaspare as an apothecary
- for indigestion, 2 spoons Campari, 4 spoons “anything else”
- for children’s tapeworm, 2 spoons Campari
- vermouth:
- sweet/red/rosso – Italian
- dry – French
- some nice photos in the slideshow [link?] of the Campari factory in Milano
- amari are:
- alcohol
- flavoring (botanicals & spices)
- sweetener (well, maybe)
- demineralized water
- the hot techniques:
- distillation
- percolation
- cold techniques:
- maceration
- infusion
- keep liqueurs in cool, dark place to avoid UV exposure & oxydation
- amaro digestivo:
- Averna
- fernet (not just Fernet-Branca)
- Nonino
- Montenegro
- Ramazzotti
- …
- aperativo:
- Aperol
- Campari
- Cinzano (!)
- Cynar
- Biancasorti
- Sancia
- …
- cordiale go up to 192° proof
- liquore:
- Galliano
- Strega
- Carpano
- …
- Chartreuse just across the Alps from northern Italian producers (Galliano, Carpano, Cinzano(?)), can use the same botanicals
- Further north (Holland), they used more cumin, et cetera (via spice trail)
- Luxardo cherry liquor as alternet to Heering
- “L’ora del’aperativo’ common in Italy for everyone, small snack after work and before dinner, with a drink
- Carpano had the original vermouth recipe
- Disarono influenced by almonds from Arabia [but Katie Loeb calls BS on that, and I forgot to follow up until now]
- Dimmi from Milan
… and then, ladies and gentleman, we present Mr. Danny DeVito, to stagger up to the mic, lay into us about his limoncello (which isn’t bad, but was amply aided by the herb–basil? maybe?–with which it was garnished), and then blather on about the region in which it’s produced along with a video of the region and production of the same.
Agostino:
- Starting out with a drink, L’auntico martini:
- 10 mL L’auntico Galliano
- 50 mL London Dry gin
- 10 mL marsala or dry sherry
- 3 Celio(sp?) bitter (lemon bitters, essentially)
- Galliano
- shape of the bottle from Roman columns [Um, really?]
- color from gold rush [what?]
- named for Giuseppe Galliano (b. 1846)
- Arturo Vacconi created it, 1896
- manufactured by Maraschi e Quirici [not even checking Google on those] in Turin since 1888
- 4 separate distillates
- 25 herbs and spices, including lavender, sage, cardomon, cloves, [and I've written "see photos", which is a shame, since those don't exist any more, but I'm sure somebody took some]
- L’auntico Galliano
- it will replace the existing Galliano [so get a bottle and rebalance your Italian Heather now!]
- more vanilla notes to draw out the fruit flavors
- [some silly drink thrown together to showcase sponsors: it has all of L'auntico Galliano, DeVito's Limoncello, and Disarono in it. If after reading all that you still want the recipe, I apparently did note it down...]
- A serious note on the new/old Galliano: it is actually noticeably different, and I don’t dislike it… but I kind of wish they’d continue to produce both.
TotC2009 notes: Cocktails Born from the Seven Seas
Jul/090
Cocktails Born from the Seven Sea was a Robert Hess history lesson on how the sealanes carried spirits and mixed drink recipes around the world.
- Originally the 7 seas were those just around southern Europe and Arabia; pre-Columbus (Adriatic, Mediterranean, Caspian, Black, Red, Aegean, and Persian — thanks Louisia W-S)
- 13th century world was just Europe, Arabia, and China; countries (cf, VOC in Low Country Libations)
- silk route both overland and water, but nobody traveled the whole route, just legs, but moved textiles, spices, and culture along the routes
- 1274 – Marco Polo was (one of the) first to travel the whole route
- 1295 – returned to Europe (but the Chinese were reluctant to see him go)
- 1312 – wrote the story of his travels down, and was initially disbelieved
- 1280-1370 – Mongolion Empire made the land silk route possible, the route broke apart when it collapsed
- 1488 – Portugal finally passed Cape Horn to replace the land route
- 1492 – Spain went westward
- 1494 – Treaty of Torbesillas split the world between Portugal, getting Brazil & east, Span got the North American coast and west
- British Empire was later to world travel, battling with France and Holland
- 1578 – Great Britain sent ships out [where?], but failed
- 1584 – GB found Roanoke (but we know how that ends)
- 1624 – GB in the Caribean
- ca 1815 – British Empire the largest out there
- Tasting: the Voyager
- 2 oz Don Q gold rum (”top-selling rum in Puerto Rico”)
- ½ oz Benedictine
- ½ oz Falernum
- ½ oz lime juice
- 2 dashes Angostura
- served on the rocks, with a lime wedge
- tiki drinks started in the Caribbean because fruits, etc were plentiful there, but are modified punches
- 15th century, first [modern] distillations
- Brandy, first in the 12th century, became popular in the 14th
- Romans made wine (and probably distillates as well; we rediscovered both later), but they added garlic, salt water, honey, and other things, which indicates it wasn’t necessarily great
- punch was also designed to cover less than ideal flavors
- cachaça b/n 1530 and 1550, “sugar wine”, doled out to slaves as incentive to work
- appellation not so big a deal – just had fermented product, distilled it, it’s stronger
- consumed at a rate of 2 gallons / person / year in Brazil
- caipirinha is the diminuitive of caipira, which means “hill billy”
- See also Jared Brown & Anistatia Miller’s Soul of Brasil for a history of cachaça
- pisco:
- first wine grapes in Pisco, Peru in 1500
- distillation technique from European brandy
- early piscos were pomace wines
- 1641 – Spain banned exports of pisco from the colonies because it was cutting into the native Spanish wine market
- pisco is distilled at bottle strength (rather than diluted as most spirits), so it retains more flavor
- aged in clay casks, rather than wooden barrells
- originally pisco was the word for a bird, then for the people who lived in the area, then for the clay of the area, then for the spirit stored in that clay
- Chilean pisco claims origination; they were distilling, but differently
- originally the pisco in North America (especially San Francisco) came from Peru, but Chile took over the market; Peru’s just now getting back on its feet
- 1928 – first printed reference [or recipe?] to a pisco sour, Victo Morris in Lima
- Chileans leave the egg out of pisco sours
- Mescal:
- 200 AD at least for palque, fermented sap of agave
- distillation beagn mid 1500s (probably 1531)
- some evidence that distillation was introduced by Filipinos in Colima & Jalisco (most say it was introduced by the Conquistadors)
- the equipment more resembles Filipino’s than Spanish
- the Spanish were conquerors, but the Filipinos were traders
- Some margarita origination stories I didn’t note down; “margarita” = “daisy” (and is similar, as is the Cosmo)
- Rum:
- on ships to kill the contamination in the water
- began with the import of molasses (and slave triangle)
- gradually moved north from the islands
- the Mojito:
- preceded by El Draque, 1586, named for Sir Francis Drake
- Angel Martinez standardized the recipe in 1998
- gin:
- based on jenever from the Netherlands in 1595 [but see also Low Country Libations]
- British soldiers introduced to it in 1625
- British gin still foundings:
- 1793 Plymouth
- 1796 Gordon’s
- 1820 Beefeater
- 1830 Tanqueray
- 1751 – gin act limited and taxed production & sales
- Pink Gin – most likely invented by the Royal Navy in order to take Angostura for seasickness
- Gimlet, named for Thomas Gimlette; 1879 mandated consumation of limes and got it into the Merchant Shipping act (see also Lauchlin Rose production of preserved lime juice, in 1867)
- [From the QA, maybe?] There were some truly weird things during mid-millenium; yeast was unknown until Pasteur, so there was something called chicha – pineapple, apple, chewed to soften it, fermentation started with feces from guinea pigs, then add star anise to cover the odor
TotC2009 notes: Low Country Libations
Jul/092
Philip Duff (door74 owner) and Timo Janse (door74 head bartender, author of Shake It!, about non-alcoholic drinks for children) discuss Low Country Libations, especially ones we can’t get in the US (with which Philip repeatedly taunted the audience…)
- “Low Country” means, roughly, the Benelux – “We live in the crotch of Europe.” [I've no doubt that was Philip.]
- Philip might have missed a word: “Timo’s book is about non-alcoholic children. Er…”
- modern inventions [this seemed a bit more in context at the time]:
- penicillin
- walk on the moon
- the Internet
- women in bars
- Only session with NO sponsors [but I have to presume that Philip didn't buy all the Easter Egg bottles of Old Schiedam himself... they just weren't in the room.]
- “Der Naturen Bloeme” (1269) – first reference to distilling in Europe
- juniper – “He who has cramps, cook juniper in wine; it’s good against the pain.”
- … and early distilling was precisely juniper and wine
- late 1400s, “Making Burned Wine”
- botanicals: grains of Paradise, galangeel [what?], nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, ginger
- served has a [health] tonic
- 1497 – Brandewijn (sp?) in Amsterdam
- 1552 – Genieve – aqua vitae
- 1582 – Kornbrandewijn – “in aroma and taste is almost the same as brandy-wine
- 1602 – Dutch East India Co., or Verenigde Oost-Indisch Co. (VOC), upon whose conquests Dune was based:
- 50,000 employees
- functioned as a nation (conquered states, printed their own money)
- fueled a spending boom that got silly enough that people were paying ~10 million [whatevers] for a tulip bulb
- Indonesia (whence Batavia Arrack)
- rolled up in ships, offered to pay for spices/silks/goods, if the city refused to pay, they politely pointed at all the cannon on the ships
- Dutch Navy’s drink was Genever (a taste of Olde Schiedam came around here, and I’ll need to get to Europe to bring some back)
- Genever from satellite cities because distillers kept pigs, feeding them the mash, and “pigs are smelly”
- Olde Schiedam:
- a wine-based Genever
- single malt
- 2/3 barley & 1/3 rye
- Schiedam itself is a satellite city of Rotterdam
- [I have:] “Shippem = Schiedam”
- the only botanical is juniper
- 1621 – The Dutch West Indies Co., Geoctrajeerde W-Indische Co (GWIC), was chartered
- founded US (New Amsterdam)
- otherwise unsuccessful
- granted everything west of Capitain
- The Best selling regions for Genever outside Holland are Argentina & Guadalupe
- In the movie Ray there’s a reference to Bols Genever – not product placement, he really drank it every day
- West Africa also drinks a lot of Genever; a good gift for a chief for his daughter’s hand in marriage
- “So good it’d make a Bishop kick a hole in stained glass” [Philip, of a particular Genever, the name of which I expected to pull out of a photograph of the bottle, but since the camera and laptop were both burgled...]
- 1623 – Philip Massinger’s Duke of Milan first [literary] use of Genever
- 1827 – continuous still invented – per Philip, by Robert Stein, not by Angus Coffey
- 1860 – first continuous still operating in the Netherlands
- 1862 – [something's missing here:] Wondrich’s important quote on genever 5/6 to 1 relative to gin [Is this the thing about how Jerry Thomas's recipes actually work with genever? Too little context, because they launched into what describes different classes of genever]
- Rules of genever:
- Terms
- Oude (old) genever – aged or unaged whiskey with botanicals; taste shows that; softer, lower-proof (35%)
- Jonge (young) genever is vodka with a hint of malt
- The similarity of genever to gin is a myth; distilling with a Dutch King in England starts with lots of sugar (like genever), the process gets refined, ends up as grain neutral spirits
- Timo: “Kettle One is about equivalent to jonge jenever”… but KO jenever is $11 (and better than the vodka) rather than $35; better as in better flavor profile
- Jonge starts with Coluire [spelling? Hell, intelligible?] in the 1920s because of a shortage of grain post-war
- Timo [I think]: “You can’t sell vodka in Holland.”
- Made in one of:
- Holland
- Belgium
- Nord or Pas-de-Calais
- Nordheim-Westfalen, DE
- Niedersachsen, DE
- Must contain juniper, but it does not have to be a discernible flavor (gin, per ATF, must smell of juniper)
- content:
- jonge genever is
- 15% malt wine (whiskey)
- 70° proof
- max 10 grams sugar/L
- oude genever
- min. 15% malt wine
- max. 70° proof
- max 20 grams sugar/L
- if aged, min. 1 year, in a max 700 L barrel
- jonge genever is
- Terms
- Willem Kieft
- founded American whiskey by 1644 – first distiller in US
- he was the “utter bastard” (Philip, of course) running the US GWC
- recalled because of how much he abused the settlers
- … but he gave us Pennsylvania rye
- succeeded by Peter Stouson (sp?)
- 1637 – Pieter Blower invented rum in Barbados, also under GWC
- Simon Schama’s Embarrassment of Riches covers all this very Dutch ___ India Co business.
- a history of brandy (remember, from brandewijn):
- 1585 – fall of Antwerp
- 1604 – 50% of distillers in Charente (now Cognac) were Dutch
- 19 May 1972 on VOC
- [... and I got distracted by a tasting...]
- 1724 – bitter, herb-infused genever (roughly “equivalent to MD20/20″)
- New developments:
- yonge genever -> Ketel One vodka
- old genever -> Bols 1830
- [My notes here on, just half a Moleskine page, are a mess of spirit types and brand names; I'll go through Philip's slide show and fill this in when I can figure out what I was trying to keep up with.]
Inline in my notes, but separated here, are some of the spirits we tasted (that Philip will be glad to remind you that you can’t get in the US) and were not lost to the loss of the camera:
- Els la Vera – 4-5 grams of sugar/L, from Maastricht Lindbergh; similar to absinthe, malt cane(?); botanicals grow only in volcanic soil (replicated by Bols)
- hand-grated mandarin orange-infused Old Schiedam Mandayner(sp?)
- Dutch wine, Apostelhoeve (first written proof of which is 871)
- Rutte (aged) Paradyswijn
As with all of Philip’s presentations, this one is available on slideshare.net.