The Institute for Alcoholic Experimentation

While helping to judge the recent Craft Distilling Expo Gin of the Year, it was my great pleasure to meet Ben Capdevielle and Holly Robinson of Captive Spirits Distilling, part of the wave of “craft”, “boutique” or “artisan” distilling that is sweeping the US at the moment. Based in Ballard, near Seattle, they make Big Gin, both in its standard form and in a version that has been aged in ex-bourbon barrels.

Theirs is not a happy-go-lucky tale of casting around for something to do and hitting on the idea of making a gin on a whim.* Ben is actually a third-generation distiller—his grandfather was a distiller for Templeton Rye** during Prohibition—and the pair spent four years visiting distilleries and experimenting with botanicals and distillation variables before finally launching their product in 2012. “We are using the traditional method of making gin,” Holly explains, “and creating a small scale, boutique brand just using two 100-gallon pot stills. We are exclusively a gin company, instead of making a variety of spirits like most of the budding brands. We have a few other gin-centric products that will trickle out in the next few years…”

Holly and Ben (second and third from the left) at the Craft Distilling Expo Gin
of the Year judging

As the name suggests the idea was to make a bold, unashamedly gin-flavoured gin. “We took this away from all the big players in the gin game,” Holly says. “Consumers are used to drinking Beefeater, Bombay, etc—we wanted something that ginners could identify with, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.” The botanicals are indeed mostly conventional—juniper, coriander, bitter orange peel, angelica, cassia, cardamom, orris—plus grains of paradise (not unusual either, being present in Bombay Sapphire) and Tasmanian pepper berries. The spirit base is made from corn. “This was the most neutral base we found to impart the botanicals,” Holly says.

Uncork a bottle of Big Gin and it is certainly big, with a strong waft of juniper. But it is more complex than that, with orange peel, dried fruit and a pronounced floral note like crystallised violets, perhaps from the angelica. There is also a herbal stemmy quality and a hint of ginger. It is big, bright and rich.

A Last Word made with Big Gin

On the palate it is powerful but remarkably smooth and sweetish, given that it is a hefty 47% ABV. Perhaps the corn-spirit base lends this sweetness. The flavour follows on from the nose, with that floral note to the fore and a slight peppery-bitter finish. It easily works in a Martini or gin and tonic, basically making its own rules. It is well-suited to a Negroni, clearly making its presence felt, whereas more delicate gins can sometimes get lost in the present of the Campari and vermouth.

Another muscular cocktail to test a gin is the Last Word, traditionally equal parts gin, Green Chartreuse, lime juice and maraschino: it has a balance between the sweetness of the liqueurs and the tartness of the lime, but these elements and the herbal blast from the Charteuse can drown the gin. I have to say that even Big Gin struggled here. But I noticed that on Simon Difford’s website he is now advocating a 3:1:1:1 ratio (the 3 being the gin). With Tarquin’s Cornish Gin I find that it does really need these proportions before you can really taste the gin in the mix, but Big Gin reaches that point at only 2:1:1:1.***

An Aviation made with Big Gin

I felt that Big Gin was less successful, however, in an Aviation, being perhaps too powerful for the subtle flavours of the maraschino and crème de violette (of which there is only about a teaspoon, otherwise the colour of the cocktail veers from the pale lilac-blue meant to represent the sky, from which the drink gets its name: try something like 50ml gin, 12.5ml lemon juice, 12.5ml maraschino, 5ml crème de violette).

You can get a sense of the big, savoury qualities of Big Gin from the recommended cocktails on the Captive Spirits website. The Out-of-Towner involves making a fennel syrup (plus gin, lemon juice and triple sec), and two of the recipes use elderflower liqueur (such as St Germain). The Morning Paper tops gin and elderflower with sparkling wine and a splash of grapefruit juice, and there is definitely a continuum between the gin botanicals and the sweetly pungent qualities of elderflower.

Although Captive are determinedly not planning to make a whiskey, they are interested in pushing their gin in different directions, such as the bourbon barrel aged example now on the market. “All the worlds best spirits are aged in bourbon barrels,” Holly explains. “With Big Gin being so flavorful, we thought it could stand up well and one could still actually taste the gin. Thankfully, we were correct.”

A Martinez made with Bourbon Barreled Big Gin

Ageing gin is all the rage it seems, but at a tasting of several of them earlier this year I did feel that none of the examples seemed particularly successful, with the wood notes somehow quarrelling with the essential gin flavour. But there is certainly a tradition: Seagrams have always rested their gin in charred new oak barrels to smooth off the rough edges of the spirit.

The barrel-aged version of Big Gin came as a revelation to me, however. Perhaps there is something about the prominent orange notes in the gin which marries well with the wood flavours, or maybe there is something about these particular barrels (which presumably have had bourbon in them for a long time, damping down the sawmill quality of fresh wood). On the nose the sharp juniper of the base gin is softened but still present, while a warmth and sherried sweetness are added, plus an enhancement of the dried fruit flavours I noticed before and a pleasant woody, almost mossy, mustiness. On the palate there is excellent integration of the aromatic gin elements and the tannic, vanilla wood flavours, plus clear notes of bourbon, emphasising the orange peel.

On a whim I try to make a sort of sweet Martini using Regal Rogue Bianco and the result shows remarkable balance and harmony from two strongly-flavoured ingredients, a little like a Martinez with orange and herbal notes all blending well. I try making a Martinez, using 2 shots gin, ½ a shot each of dry and sweet vermouth and a dash of maraschino, the result is sublime. Likewise in a Negroni it works as well as the normal Big Gin but with an extra dimension that fits naturally, as in a Manhattan or Boulvardier**** (which it virtually is). It really is a revelation.

A Spring Fling made with Bourbon Barreled Big Gin

There is a recommended cocktail, the Spring Fling, that once again uses elderflower liqueur, this time with the barrel-aged gin plus dry vermouth and some celery bitters. It’s an extraordinary tour de force, with the elderflower merging with the big herbal flavours of the gin, followed by a sweetness emerging and woody notes, then a fiery warmth. You also get a sense of sun-kissed Mediterranean aromatic herbs, like thyme or oregano. The prescribed garnish is grapefruit zest, but I only had lemon to hand and its aroma floats over the other flavours, balancing without muddying.

If you like gin then you should try Big Gin. It’s nice to come across a product that is not trying to make a “gin” for people who really want vodka, nor is it trying push the flavour in outré directions for reasons of gimmickry alone. But at the same time Big Gin is distinct. And it is big.

In the UK you can buy Big Gin through Master of Malt for £39.96 and the bourbon barrel aged version for £44.85.

* Talking to Holly you realise that the process of starting up a distillery is more of a bureaucratic slog than most of us realise, especially in the US. “There is a lot of red tape, but mostly several different levels of permitting, each of which cannot commence without the previous—it's a domino game. First Federal, than State, then City, then Fire, etc… Every state/city has different ideas of what/how things should be done. That’s the confusing part. Once that is all waded through, it’s a slow start to getting product out the door.” To help with all of this the couple got a third partner, old friend Todd Leabman, to help with the paperwork and accounting.

** The good folk of Templeton, Iowa, apparently carried on distilling whiskey throughout Prohibition and Al Capone is said to have like it so much he would send a driver all the way there from New York to stock up.

*** It an interesting experiment, because if you start with the punchy sweet-and-sour traditional recipe and just add more gin, it’s easy to think, “Oh, no, this is getting too dry.” But if you come back to it later and try it you do realise it as a good, subtler cocktail. All the lime and Charteuse are very much there, but now you can taste the details of the gin too. Hurrah.

**** 1½ shots bourbon or rye whiskey, 1 shot Campari, 1 shot sweet vermouth, so a sort of mash-up between a Negroni and a Manhattan. It was invented by New Yorker Harry McElhone after he emigrated to Paris, fleeing Prohibition, and set up Harry’s New York Bar. He created it for ex-pat Erskine Gwynne in honour of his Parisian magazine The Boulvardier.

Tequila is a bit of an enigma, but its star is certainly on the rise at the moment. It doesn’t seem to have been drunk much outside of Mexico until Americans discovered it in the 1920s during their runs across the border to avoid Prohibition. Then it surged again in the 1940s when US alcohol production was earmarked for industrial purposes for the war effort. According to Dale Degroff, it has only really been available in the UK for 40 years but he believes that the Margarita could well now be the most popular cocktail here—I have certainly heard that it has that status in the US.

When talking to tequila brand ambassadors you still hear that their biggest hurdle is getting punters to think of the spirit as something to savour rather than something to knock back. But I’m sure that is changing now, perhaps due in large part to the efforts of Patron to create the concept of the high-end tequila. Last year I sat in on a session with Matthias Lataille from Olmeca’s high-end, 100% blue agave brand Olmeca Altos, and it was clearly a welcome revelation to many there how much could be had from this spirit if one simply sipped it from a nosing glass rather than chugging it from a shot glass.

Then in the summer I was intrigued by the Pierde Almas range of single varietal mezcals, celebrating not just the effect of different agave species and different terroir, but also the batch-to-batch variations of artisanal products like this.

Tomas Estes

Most recently I chatted with Tomas Estes, the man behind Café Pacifico and La Perla restaurants here in London. The Mexican National Chamber of Tequila has crowned him Ambassador of Tequila to the European Union, and not only has he also now opened El Nivel, a dedicated agave spirits bar above La Perla, but he also has his own tequila brand, Ocho, which takes the celebration of variety one step further—not only do his bottles all state the precise field from which the family-grown agaves were harvested, but they declare the vintage as well.

The tequila is made for Estes by Carlos Camarena. The name Ocho, meaning “eight”, has a highly involved explanation: (i) the finished product is from the eighth test batch; (ii) it takes an average of eight years for the agaves used to ripen; (iii) it takes about eight kilos of agave to make one litre of Ocho; (iv) it takes eight days from when the agaves reach the distillery to when the blanco tequila is finished; (v) Camarena has eight brothers and sisters; (vi) the Camarenas are in their eight decade of tequila making. I was rather disappointed that the person behind all this only managed to find six reasons for the name Ocho, although in fact I later learn that the reposado version is rested in wood for eight weeks and eight days. Damn, just one more reason and we’d have eight…

Margarita with Ocho

My sample has a label across the cap identifying it as the 2014 vintage from Rancho La Magueyera, which you can find on a map on the Ocho website. I line it up against three other blanco tequilas I have to hand, Patron, Olmeca Altos and Tierra Noble. The Patron is fresh, fruity and soft, ultimately the least strongly flavoured of the lot.* The Olmeca Altos has a more pronounced agave flavour, a “blue”, petrolly note; the palate is drier and more flavourful than Patron, with a hint of blue cheese, but it is softer and smoother than the Tierra Noble, with an almost waxy character. Tierra Noble is more pungent, with a noticeably smoky element to the nose. (The agaves are cooked slowly prior to crushing, to release the sugars; more artisanal tequilas use agaves cooked in traditional brick or stone ovens and the degree to which they are exposed to smoke can be controlled.)

Paloma with Ocho

Coming after all that, Ocho is striking. Not only is it the most strongly agave-flavoured of the lot, perfumed and pungent, but it is dry and sharp on the tongue. In fact I could almost have believed that what I was drinking had lime juice mixed in already. This is no accident, as the literature does emphasise that Ocho is all about extracting and presenting as much actual agave flavour as possible. Nosing the aroma carefully, you’re struck first by dry herbal notes, then darker elements like coffee and chocolate, honey and cooked apple, and something a bit like wet plaster. It is initially sharp on the tongue, giving way to flavours of pears and a fading sweetness. (At El Nivel I had the opportunity to taste the 2013 batch, from Rancho Los Fresnos: it had a similar nose but a noticeably softer palate.)

The literature does stress that the best way to enjoy Ocho is sipped from a brandy balloon or similar glass, noting how its character changes in the glass with exposure to air. (I find that the attack softens and a floral note like violets starts to appear.) But they also list some cocktails, a mixture of old and new.

El Diablo with Ocho

As it happens we are theming our Candlelight Club party this weekend around Prohibition-era Mexico and the burgeoning party culture to cater for American visitors looking to drink and gamble with impunity, so I try out some of the cocktails we are looking at.

Margarita Well, it would be rude not to. It’s a classic combination of tequila, triple sec and lime juice, with an optional ring of salt on the rim of the glass. The exact proportions vary, with Dale Degroff giving 1½ parts tequila to 1 part Cointreau and ¾ part lime juice, while Simon Difford matches 2 parts tequila to just ½ a part each of lime and triple sec. I tend to use 2:1:1, though it depends on how dry you like it. Certainly a dry, strongly flavoured tequila like Ocho easily makes its presence felt in these proportions, poking through as mineral and earthy against the fruity citrus.

Paloma This is apparently how tequila is mostly drunk in Mexico, with lime and grapefruit soda, such as Squirt or Fresca. The closest you can find in the UK is Ting, and the Ocho site’s recipe adds 20ml fresh grapefruit juice to 50ml tequila and the juice of a lime, topped up with grapefruit soda. I can see the appeal, though I don’t think that Ting is ever likely to be my favourite mixer (and it doesn’t taste a great deal like grapefruit to me). The extra fresh grapefruit juice makes all the difference, though you may want to add some agave syrup as it is all quite tart (I tried Martini Fiero—see below—with delightful results).

El Diablo A 1940s recipe from California, this is built in a highball on the rocks using 50ml tequila, 20ml crème de cassis and 25ml lime juice, stirred together and topped with ginger beer. (In the past it would have been ginger ale but ginger beer is more flavoursome.) It’s not subtle but it is not simplistic either: you can taste all the ingredients, and I do think that tequila and ginger go well together, with the blackcurrant flavour slotting neatly in there as well. Bold and moreish.

Mexican 88 with Ocho

Mexican 88 Basically a French 75 using tequila instead of gin. This recipe is from Ocho’s website and specifies 30ml tequila, 20ml lemon juice, 10ml agave syrup, all topped up with Champagne. I guess it depends on the size of your glass, but I found this too heavy on the lemon and syrup. Another 10ml tequila helped, along with a bit more fizz, and then it balances nicely, with the earthiness of the tequila sitting quite effectively underneath the fizzy tartness of the Champagne/sparkling wine.

Screaming Viking made with Ocho, Cederlunds Torr
and Martini Fiero

Screaming Viking This one was created by Brian Silva, in response to an episode of Cheers in which the plot revolves around a cocktail of this name, which turns out to be imaginary. Various people have produced their own real-world versions, and Brian’s playfully uses Swedish Punsch to explain the “Viking” element of the name. Swedish Punsch dates back to the days of the Swedish East India Company, and is a liqueur made from arrack, a smoky rum-like Javanese spirit distilled from sugar cane and rice. The recipe mixes 35ml tequila with 25ml Punsch and the juice of half a lime, shaken, poured over ice and “coloured” with Martini Fiero, a very orangey vermouth made from blood oranges. (I used Cederlunds Torr Caloric Punch; the recipe also specifies a dash of agave syrup, but I didn’t find that necessary.) Made with Ocho, the tequila is to the fore, but with a solid sweet–sour balance from the liqueur and the lime. But it’s not a bouncy, fruity number. The presence of the vermouth and the arrack give this drink dry and bitter subtleties that seem to be a Silva trademark. It’s a grown-up drink, and very much to my own taste.

An Ocho Old Fashioned with Angostura Bitters and
agave syrup

And finally the Tequila Old Fashioned. It seems to be inevitable that any spirit that wants to be taken seriously presents itself in this simple, and therefore exposed, format. Traditionally made just with bourbon or rye whiskey, sugar, bitters and a little water, served on the rocks with a lemon peel garnish, this can also be an agreeable vehicle for rums, such as the sublime Botran Solera 1893, and complex gins (especially aged ones such as Big Gin Bourbon Barreled). Even with the blanco, Ocho owns this cocktail, its pungency marrying with sharp-sweet aromatic Angostura bitters and the lemon peel like an extension of the tequila’s character. I use agave syrup instead of sugar and such is the dryness of the spirit that this drink can take quite a bit without seeming too sweet. All in all, a good way to contemplate the personality of this, or indeed any other, tequila.

* Which I suspect is a deliberate strategy, given the way it is marketed as a super-premium product in the same way that certain vodkas are. Here the emphasis is all on brand associations, and you don’t want to throw a spanner in the works by producing something with too strong a flavour!

In October I reviewed the KÖLD line of premixed cocktails, the latest in the cavalcade of attempts to offer instant mixology for people who lack the equipment, ingredients or inclination to make their own cocktails at home.

The trick with such things is how to preserve the more perishable ingredients in the mix—the impressive Handmade Cocktail Company range from Master of Malt simply focuses on old fashioned cocktails (including the Old Fashioned) that lack fruit juices and are high enough in alcohol to be self-preserving. KÖLD sold their mixes in foil pouches, which made me suspect they had been heat-treated after sealing.

Queuing in the small Marks & Spencer branch on Charing Cross station the other day I was confronted by some tins containing the chain’s own attempt at premixes. I scooped up a couple for sampling, a Mojito and a Cosmopolitan.

For those who don’t know, M&S occupies a space in most British people’s hearts as a reliable place to buy underpants, work shirts and the like, but they also do food, pitched as fairly high end, and even have some branches selling nothing but food. The travel outlet at Charing Cross has quite a high bias towards booze, clearly catering for commuters who can’t get through the train ride back to suburbia without a single-serving mini-bottle of Pinot Grigio to dull the pain.*

The Mojito hits you with a mint flavour that has a mouthwash artificiality. It’s not too bad, with detectable lime notes, but a tad thin with a slightly bitter finish. A little like bitter lemon, in fact. But that chemical mint is what dominates. It also seems to coat your teeth. The KÖLD Mojito likewise struggled with the artificiality of its mint flavour: clearly it is not possible to get a fresh mint taste in a premix, but the nation must be crying out for tinned Mojitos as this particular cocktail keeps cropping up.

The Cosmo has a terrifying colour, followed by a bubblegum fruity smell that fills the room. But it’s not actually that bad, with a reasonable balance between sweet and sour and the triple sec (or rather “orange distillate”, as it says on the ingredients list) detectable. I’m not sure I’m really getting cranberry juice, though the label claims it is in there (from concentrate).

As usual with premixes, both these cocktails are unnaturally low in alcohol for what they claim to be (8% in each case, the same as the KÖLD range), but this is apparently because the target market would otherwise be drinking alcopops of the same ABV. I didn’t try spiking them with extra spirit this time, though I’m sure it would have been an improvement. The Mojito did go down the sink, but I did actually end up finishing the Cosmo, which must tell you something.

* I can’t see this range on the M&S website, although I have now discovered that they also sell a different range of classier premixes in 50cl bottles. I seem to recall that there was also a Bloody Mary and a Harvey Wallbanger in the range, along with a G&T about which I have read bad things.

This is my first and last post of the year. 2014 seems to have slipped away at the IAE south coast branch; not quite as bad as "The Lost Weekend", though. Now, if I was going to write about anything, it would be Maplay.

This is from the US and is made by fermenting and distilling maple syrup, which is then aged. An interesting point for readers is that this is genuine moonshine, i.e. it is illicitly distilled (at least in its country of origin). As such, it has no official bottle, but a picture of spirit can be found below.

On its own (room temperature)
Nose: Bright, with some dry, woody notes to start, before moving onto rich and intense maple and nut flavours, as well as hints of vanilla, butterscotch, and cream brule.

Taste: There's a pleasant texture to the spirit, with the alcohol upfront and then a gently unfolding patchwork of sweet confectionery and spice notes, very similar to the nose with the addition of stone fruit and a touch of chocolate and plum jam. The finish is long and lingering, with lots of dry, nutty maple and pecan notes.

Frozen
Beautifully viscous, with an intriguing dry - almost grainy - woody start. This is followed by the flavour of very dark chocolate (think 95%), then sweeter notes of roasted cashews and pecans, as well as a subtle maple element that is rather delicious. There is also a slight herbal, fruity note throughout, somewhat reminiscent of vermouth.

Manhattan
This is an intriguing drink, which has elements of both a dry and a sweet Manhattan backed up by the complexity of the spirit, which is easily equal to most whiskey versions. Rich spice, vanilla, and cassia are accompanied by hints of cinder toffee, toasted nuts, and that dry, maple element. If you like Manhattans, this is one to try.

Negroni
A soft and smooth drink with the characteristic bitterness of the drink at the end. The Maplay gives some of the dryness and spice that you would expect from a gin, but also adds a complex sweetness and complements the sweet vermouth very nicely.

Old Fashioned
Simply superb. This is easily my favourite way to enjoy the spirit. I've been a fan of substituting sugar for maple syrup in whisky Old Fashioneds for a while, but this just takes it one step further. Simple, yet luxurious; the bitters, water, and sugar seem to tease out a whole array of flavours from the Maplay - all of the notes previously referred to come through in a chorus.

In Conclusion
As you can guess, I really like the Maplay and it is a shame that, for the moment, it remains unavailable. It is a fascinating spirit with a legion of potential fans out there ready to discover it. My favourite drink was the Old Fashioned.

My version of the Claridge Cocktail

I was talking to a relative before Christmas and she mentioned how her mother-in-law (my wife’s aunt) regularly enjoyed a Claridge cocktail. Naturally my ears pricked up, partly because not many people these days have a home cocktail habit, but also because I was not familiar with the drink in question.

I was duly sent the recipe:

2 shots gin
2 shots dry vermouth
1 shot apricot brandy
1 shot Cointreau

“Shake with ice and serve, nowhere near a naked flame. Ma-in-law used to enjoy two cocktail cherries with this, which I think served as one of her ‘five a day’.”*

Now, obviously this is quite a lot of alcohol, but I’ll assume that this recipe was for two drinks! In any case these proportions are the classic recipe. I found it in the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), the 1930 reprint of Cocktails by “Jimmy” Late of Ciro’s and the Café Royal Cocktail Book (1937). I didn’t find it in either version of Jerry Thomas’s work, nor in O.H. Byron’s Modern Bartender’s Guide (1884), suggesting it was a production of the Golden Age of cocktails.

So many modern cocktail recipes involve peculiar infusions, homemade tinctures or pre-smoked garnishes, and I have a fondness for recipes like this one that just make use of the commercial booze products that were available at the time. (And of course there would have been far less to choose from then—so many supposedly distinct cocktails from the era seem to be subtle variations on each other, with the same ingredients but slightly different proportions.**)

Ada Coleman of the American Bar at the Savoy:
had nothing to do with the Claridge Cocktail

To look at, this is essentially a wet Dry Martini with added triple sec and apricot brandy. But if you’re expecting anything like a Dry Martini you are in for a shock, as this much liqueur does make it quite a sweet drink. I immediately find myself tinkering with the proportions to suit my palate, and I end up with this:

2 shots gin (I tried both Plymouth and Tarquin’s Cornish Gin)
1 shot dry vermouth (I used Noilly Prat)
¼ shot (about 6–7ml) apricot brandy (I used Briottet)
¼ shot (about 6–7ml) Cointreau

Garnishwise, I’m not a huge fan of the maraschino cherry, and I found that a lemon peel garnish works well with the fruit flavours.

Even with these reduced proportions the liqueurs make themselves felt, both in terms of the aroma and flavour of the fruit and in the sweetness, but for me this has a better and more sophisticated balance between the dryness of the gin and vermouth and the sweetness of the liqueurs. It’s an interesting interplay, with different ingredients seeming to work on different parts of the tongue at the same time, and the savoury elements of the vermouth having an almost salty quality. If you are a fan of really dry cocktails then you are never going to get this to work for you, as the orange and apricot flavours would disappear altogether if you reduce the levels of liqueur much below this.

Barflies and Cocktails (1927) has the clue

Interestingly, I later consulted Larousse Cocktails (2005) by Fernando Castellon and found that not only did he list this drink but his proportions are almost identical to mine, so clearly I am not mad (although in fact he specifies just 1 tsp, 5ml, each for triple sec and apricot brandy).

However, none of the books in which I find the recipe gives any indication as to its provenance. The name suggests a connection with the prestigious London hotel Claridge’s, which was at the height of its fame in the Roaring Twenties and is famous for its Art Deco interiors. Indeed there is a theory that Ada Coleman, who famously went on to become head bartender at the Savoy from 1903 to 1926 (an unusual achievement for a woman at the time) created the drink while she was previously at Claridge’s. It is not on the hotel’s menu today but I contact them to find out if they have any archive details about it.

“The information that we have is that it is accredited to ‘Leon’, bartender at the Claridge Hotel, Champs Elyseé, Paris, in Barflies and Cocktails, 1927,” says Andreas Cortes, Assistant Manager at Claridge’s Bar today. “This disproves the theory that Ada Coleman created it whilst at Claridge’s, London, or the Savoy.”*** Barflies and Cocktails, by Harry MacElhone (of Harry’s Bar in Paris) is a volume I do not have, but I swiftly acquire a copy of the version reissued by Cocktail Kingdom, and it is as Andreas says: no connection with London’s Art Deco palace.

By strange coincidence, at the weekend I visit the relevant relatives and stay over with the parents-in-law in question. As we arrive on their doorstep in the early evening on Saturday night they say, “Oh, you caught us just having a cocktail.” It is indeed a brace of Claridges. “I’ll make you one if you like.”

The Claridges prepared for us by my wife’s uncle

I watch my wife’s uncle produce a pair of sizeable beverages: the pair of them are in their late eighties, and they consume their own drinks in oversized cocktail glasses printed with images of lipsticks and other glamorous things, which look as if they have been in service since the 1980s, in a room where even the cushions are embroidered with flappers sipping Martinis. Huge respect for the lifestyle. He doesn’t use a measure but I notice that his recipe is different again—pretty much equal parts of all four ingredients. It’s sweeter than I would like, but it still works in that you can taste all the ingredients.

This is the joy of mixology in the home: there is so much to discover in the pursuit of your own personal tastes—and the chance of creating something new!

* An explanation for non-UK readers: the British government has recommended that we all consume five “portions” of fruit or vegetables a day, for health reasons. There are tables available defining what counts as a “portion”. I’ve also heard that the Science really suggested that we should have nine portions, but the Powers That Be decided that this was a hopeless cause in the British Isles and five was a more realistic target.

** Although it can be disappointing to read the recipe for a “new” cocktail and find that has the same ingredients as one you already know, just slightly different proportions, I guess it helps customers to get the drink they want without having to give (or know) technical specifications. Perhaps these things arose because one bartender made the drink in particular way that people got to like so they gave it its own name. In any case, it is interesting to think that the three different versions of the Claridge described in this article would probably have had three different names back in the 1920s!

*** I’m not clear on the chronology here: I’m not aware that anyone knows when Leon was at the Claridge (I contacted the hotel and they replied that Leon used to work there in the 1930s, but it must have been earlier than this given the date of the book), but Ada was at Claridge’s from 1899 till she moved to the Savoy.

Fernet-Branca is one of those cocktail ingredients from the dawn of time, when there wasn’t too much to choose from. Many younger people may never have heard of it, and those who have often roll their eyes and dismiss it as rocket fuel, but to the best of my knowledge it was never out of production and does seem to be experiencing a cautious revival. It was specified in one of the cocktail recipes prepared for us by Brian Silva at the Excelsior Club events that we did last year, which is what got me thinking about it.

Fernet is a style of bitter infusion that was peddled as a tonic and cure-all in early advertisements; the name comes from Dr Fernet, an imaginary Swedish Man of Science originally billed as co-creator, who was claimed to have lived to more than 100 thanks to the restorative powers of his tincture. Fernet is traditionally drunk as a digestif. Apparently they are keen on it in Argentina (where they drink it with cola), and in the US it’s particularly popular in San Francisco, which accounts for 25% of the country’s consumption.* Fernet-Branca (which I have to admit is the only Fernet I have encountered, though there are other brands) was created in 1845 in Milan by Bernardino Branca and went on to be produced by Fratelli Branca at their distillery. I had idly assumed that it was an aromatised wine, so I was surprised to see that it is actually 39% ABV and thus has more in common with something like Gammel Dansk that vermouth. In fact some see it as an alternative to Angostura Bitters, and indeed the label proudly calls it “The international bitters”.

Of course the recipe, as is traditional with these things, is a secret, known only by the firm’s president, Niccolò Branca, who personally measures out the ingredients. But the back label calls it “an infusion from a unique blend of selected blossoms and rare aromatic herbs, carefully aged in the historic Branca cellars”. (Specifically, aged for 12 months in wood, according to the Fernet-Branca website.) The site lists myrrh, linden, galangal, chamomile, cinnamon, saffron, iris, gentian, aloe, zedoary, colombo and bitter orange, but it is said that there are fully 27 (or alternatively 40) ingredients, among which rhubarb and red cinchona bark might also number. Rumour has it that production of Fernet-Branca accounts for 75% of the world’s saffron consumption.

A Hanky Panky cocktail

Fernet-Branca is a brown colour (from caramel colouring, I believe) and has a strongly aromatic nose with woody spice underneath. There is mint and also coffee, chocolate, balsam, menthol, sandalwood, sesame seeds… This is carried over on to the tongue but if you expect sweetness (perhaps from the aroma’s similarity to cough medicine) then you are in for a shock as it is quite dry and bitter.

I gather that Fernet-Branca has been gaining popularity as a cocktail ingredient again, as punters become more interested in classic cocktails, drier and more bitter than the long, sweet, fruity cocktails of the 1980s. In a way it doesn’t surprise me that they like it in Argentina, as my taste of classic Argentine cocktails made it clear that the national palate likes a bitter element. Perhaps the best known cocktail containing it in this country is the Hanky Panky, probably the most famous creation of Ada Coleman (see my last post) during her long tenure at the Savoy’s American Bar. The story goes that she created it for Noel Coward’s mentor Sir Charles Hawtrey when he came in one day announcing he was tired and needed something with a bit of pep. He took one sip and announced, “By Jove! That is the real hanky-panky” (an expression which apparently meant sorcery, rather than sexual naughtiness as it did in the US).

Hanky Panky
1½ shots gin
1½ shots red vermouth
2 dashes Fernet-Branca
Shake with ice, strain and garnish with a twist of orange peel

The vermouth and the Fernet merge in an aromatic continuum, with the gin joining in too, depending on how powerful the high juniper presence is in the gin you choose, and it is worth playing around with the quantity of the Fernet to suit your palate. It’s a bracing drink, a perfect pick-me-up or aperitif to stimulate the tastebuds. But the high proportion of vermouth does mean that your bottle needs to be in good condition, not old, oxidised and turning brown.

As it happens, the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) contains both the Hanky Panky and also the “Fernet Branca Cocktail”, which has exactly the same ingredients but in fiercer proportions: 2 parts gin to 1 part red vermouth to 1 part Fernet-Branca. The book adds, “One of the best ‘morning after’ cocktails ever invented. Fernet-Branca, an Italian vegetable extract, is a marvellous headache cure. (No advt.)” This is a recurring theme—Fernet-Branca’s puissance as a cure of hangover, nausea, cramps, poor digestion, etc, etc.

Meanwhile, Cocktails: How to Mix Them (1922) by Robert Vermeire has a “Fernet Cocktail” that is equal parts Fernet-Branca and either Cognac or rye whiskey, plus a dash of Angostura and two dashes of sugar syrup. I was convinced that I had encountered something similar as a “Corpse Reviver No.1”, but when I looked, most recipes I found under this name were a combination of equal parts Cognac, Calvados and red vermouth. However, eventually in Larousse Cocktails (2005)—which is admittedly often out there on its own—I find a “Corpse Reviver” consisting of 3 parts cognac to 1 part each Fernet-Branca and white crème de menthe. This sounds like it is going to be rather sickly, but in fact it is well balanced, with the liqueur’s sweetness balanced out by the bitter Fernet, creating something like a brandy Old Fashioned with a refreshing minty aromatic pep.

Under Vermeire’s Fernet Cocktail recipe he notes, “This cocktail is much appreciated by the Canadians of Toronto.” There must be something in this as there is also a well-known Fernet cocktail called a Toronto.

A Toronto Cocktail, serve on the rocks, though it is sometimes
shaken and strained into a cocktail glass

Toronto Cocktail
2 shots Canadian whiskey
¼ shot Fernet-Branca
¼ shot sugar syrup
(Some recipes add a couple of dashes of Angostura)
Stir with ice, strain and garnish with a strip of orange peel

Although I can find no mention of the origins of this drink, it is pretty primordial in what it is doing—it is a cocktail in the original sense of a spirit augmented by sugar, bitters and/or water—and is essentially the same as Vermeire’s Fernet Cocktail, just with different proportions. It is also similar to the Boulevardier, which uses Campari instead of Fernet for bitterness and red vermouth for sweetness. You also find the Toronto made with American rye whiskey, and sometimes with more Fernet-Branca in the mix (though I’ve not seen it with as much Fernet as Vermeire’s version). To drink, it is much like an Old Fashioned, with the combination of Fernet and whiskey (I used Canadian Club) evoking a chocolate/caramel flavour. I think it highlights the appeal of Fernet-Branca in a cocktail, creating a drink that is both comforting and invigorating at the same time.

Amusingly, on the blog of James Boudreau, a bartender from Montreal, he says that he had to leave Canada before he encountered the Toronto cocktail, as Fernet-Branca was not available in his home country. So it may be that the drink was not created in Toronto, but was so named simply because it used Canadian whiskey. But does this mean that Vermeire was misled when he said that the drink was popular in Toronto, or perhaps that Fernet-Branca used to be available there in the 1920s but had fallen out of fashion by Boudreau’s time?

Meanwhile Brian Silva’s recipe for us was a twist on the (currently hugely fashionable) Negroni:

Negroni Aprés
2 shots gin
1 shot Aperol
½ shot Fernet-Branca
½ shot Amer Picon
Soda (optional)
Add all the ingredients to an iced cocktail shaker. Stir for one minute.
Strain into an iced rocks glass

The name is a reference to Brian’s view of this an a digestif version of a cocktail that is normally an aperitif. I’m not so sure about that myself—the bright, aromatic, bitter-sweet flavours from three different amaros (plus an emphasis on bitter orange flavours) still seem to me to be classic get-the-juices-flowing territory.

Another more modern cocktail that we served recently is one I found on Simon Difford’s website. It goes by the name of Staffordshire Delight which is a pretty awful name, but it is a great drink:

A Staffordshire Delight cocktail

Staffordshire Delight
2 shots golden rum
1½ shots pineapple juice
½ shot Fernet-Branca
½ shot lime juice
½ shot orgeat (almond syrup)
Dash of Angostura Bitters
Shake everything together and strain into an ice-filled glass

This is a complex drink. It can be hard to get the balance right, but it is worth persevering. You clearly get the minty aromatic freshness of the Fernet, its bitterness balanced by the orgeat, the almond notes of which slip into the middle ground, with the rum giving power and the pineapple a silky texture.

Finally, there is another combination that I have encountered more than once, a blend of equal parts Fernet-Branca, lime juice and ginger syrup or liqueur; one recipe added an equal part gin to this (a Fernet Reviver) and another instead an equal part red vermouth (an Eva Peron). On paper you can see how this works, an equal balance of strong sweet, sour and bitter elements—and ginger is a traditional cure for nausea, so we are back in touch with Fernet’s curative background. In practice, however, the Fernet does dominate, although you can taste the other ingredients. It’s certainly warming, with the ginger adding its fire to the Fernet, and the gin version is inevitably drier than the vermouth one. But I have to say that I certainly don’t get the feeling that this drink is doing me any good…

* I gather it is the tipple of choice for bartenders, as an eye-opener when starting a shift—on the grounds that no one will miss the purloined liquor, owing to the dark bottle and the general unpopularity of the contents…

I was intrigued to be sent a pack of samples from an outfit called Rueverte, an online spirits retailer based in Germany but clearly aiming for a worldwide reach. As the name suggests, they began as an outlet for absinthe, and in fact the co-founder is the great absinthe guru David Nathan-Maister, but have now branched out, with sub-sites at absinthes.com, digestif.com and bitters.com. The impression is that they prefer to handpick lesser-known gems rather than attempting to cover all the obvious bases—their Cognac section only has one brand, Tesseron, and none of the well-known names in this high-profile category.

My sample pack is one of their “Explore Sets”, containing three 50ml phials, in this case of three different blends from Armagnac house Goudoulin, enabling you to do your own comparative tasting. (Master of Malt do something similar here in the UK.) The bottles are square in shape and fit snugly in the dense foam insert of the presentation packaging, protecting them in transit.

The Armagnac section of Digestif.com is better represented than Cognac, with six brands to choose from, though only one (Darroze) of which I had previously been aware. Despite being less well known than Cognac, Armagnac is apparently the oldest type of brandy in France (700 years old in 2010). Its chief defining characteristic is that it is made in certain regions in Gascony, specifically Bas-Armagnac, Haut-Armagnac and Armagnac Tenareze, each with its own soil type that influences the white grapes that go into the spirit. Cognac is mostly Ugni Blanc grapes, plus Folle Blanche and Colombard while Armagnac typically adds Bacco too (and in fact the official Armagnac authorisation body allows some ten different varieties). Whereas Cognac is distilled twice in batches in a pot still, the traditional Armagnac still is a column design enabling continuous distillation.

I was under the impression that the invention of column distillation (where the vapour rises up a column containing metal plates that encourage the undesirable heavier components to condense out and fall back down) allowed for a purer spirit. But it seems the 19th-century Verdier design traditional in Armagnac is much less efficient that the Coffey still, producing a “rustic” distillate at the relatively low strength of 52%, compared to the Coffey’s 96%, meaning that Armagnac retains more, and more varied, flavours. Years in the barrel naturally erode this down to bottling strength, meaning that it is seldom diluted, again helping to retain a breadth of flavour. (Cognac, by contrast, emerges from its second distillation at 70%.)

The Armagnac column still (from the Goudoulin website)

In each case the spirits are then aged in oak barrels—in Cognac it is Limousin or Tronçais oak which softens the spirit, while in Armagnac it has to be black Monlezun oak which imparts more colour and vanilla/toffee notes. Both types of spirit are often blended. In a three-star or VS blend, the youngest spirit must be at least two years old; in a réserve three years old, in a VSOP four years old, a Napoléon or XO six years old and an Hors D’Age (optimistically “beyond age”) ten years old. Armagnacs are more likely to have specific vintages or age statements.

The house of J. Goudoulin was named after Madame Jeanne Ménal Goudoulin, who married into the business in 1908, but lost her husband in 1925 to injuries sustained during the First World War. She learned to manage the growing collection of spirits laid down by the house and from 1935 formed J. Goudoulin, running it for the next 30 years. Her nephew Christian Faure took over, selling it in 2009 to Michel Miclo of the family firm G. Miclo (who make some fine eaux de vie).

The emphasis here does seem to be on building up a stock of old spirits to sell and to blend. Goudoulin has an impressive portfolio of single vintages (Rueverte offer a 1938 and I’ve seen a 1914 for sale elsewhere) as well as blends where the youngest spirit is as old as 60 years. My sample set offers the eight-year-old blend, the Hors D’Age and the 20-year-old blend.

(Left to right) 8-year-old, Hors D'Age and 20-year-old

The eight-year-old immediately strikes you with notes of pear and marzipan on the nose, perhaps with a slight bitterness at the end. This is followed by plain chocolate, coffee and toffee. The palate is dry and spicy, but with a pronounced and wholly unexpected floral element, like rose and violet chocolate creams, or perhaps Turkish delight. There is pear tart too. I really am struck by the complexity here, combined with an absence of the fiery fumes that Cognac often seems to lead with. It evolves in the glass but even after half an hour or more it still has a striking combination of fruit, flowers and dry chocolate on the tongue. I realise it reminds me of the flavour of a cigar too, with something of tannic but aromatic cedar wood about it.

I try the Hors D’Age next, as I am assured it (or rather the youngest spirit in the blend) is ten years old. The pear, marzipan and chocolate elements are still clearly there, but now there is a strong aroma of apricots too. The palate is less obviously different, perhaps with those floral notes less pronounced and a bit more chocolate; maybe a bit less dry, though still not sweet. Toffee and caramel emerge and an underlying aromatic wood character.

Finally we come to the 20-year old. I notice less of a clear change from the Hors D’Age, though I think there is less of the apricot and a bit of cooked apple. The palate seems softer and maybe with a bit less fruit and a bit more of the chocolate.

I dig around for some Cognac to try it against and unearth a bottle of Courvoisier VSOP Exclusif, a blend intended for mixing. It immediately strikes me as having more tight, dry, high notes, with an emphasis on orange and orange blossom. The palate is immediately fiercer; it subsides quickly to a softer, chocolate balance but it is undoubtedly less complex. I also have a bottle of regular Courvoisier VSOP: here I get pears as well as chocolate, plus an element of tea, perhaps from wood tannins. But it is frankly rougher than any of the Goudoulin Armagnacs.

In fairness a VSOP need only be four years old, half the age of the youngest of the Goudoulin samples. But the best price for Courvoisier VSOP I can find is £32.50, while the 8-year-old Goudoulin is not much more at £38 (though with Rueverte you’ll have to spend £150 to get their free delivery, otherwise it is a hefty £9 for that one bottle).

I was highly impressed by these samples. I had previously dipped a toe into Armagnac waters on more than one occasion but hadn’t really thought about it much in recent years. That may well change now, not least because, for the age and complexity of the spirits involved, they do represent pretty good value.

The Goudoulin Explore Set is £20.50 plus delivery.

Ted with his two new products, Terminus Oxygénée Absinthe and Coeur de Jade

Thursday was National Absinthe Day in the US, marking the day in 2007 when the ban on absinthe, introduced in 1912, was lifted. One of the men responsible for getting the law changed is Ted Breaux of Jade Liqueurs but he was actually in London at the time launching a couple of new products, and I met up with him in the Punch Room of the London Edition hotel.

Ted conducts a webcast from the bar

Being out of the country on such an important day didn’t hold Ted back, as he was able to do a live webcast, answering questions that were texted to him. I admire his powers of concentration, being able to do that using a laptop in a noisy hotel bar, and I resisted the temptation to photobomb, perhaps drifting across the background swigging from a bottle of Ted’s finest…

Ted’s new absinthe, Jade Terminus Oxygénée Absinthe Supérieure, gets the name “Terminus” from the fact that he claims it is the last absinthe he will launch (or at least the last in his “portfolio of historically accurate absinthes”). “Oxygénée” represents the special historical process that Ted has recreated for this product.

Ted is a native New Orleanian with a background as an environmental scientist. He became curious about the famous Old Absinthe House bar that still stood in the city, a testament to the era when New Orleans, with its French connections, was the country’s absinthe capital. There has been a lot of voodoo talked about absinthe, what it had been, the psychotropic effects it had on the brain, etc.* Ted was in a position to use modern scientific techniques (mass spectrometry and gas chromatography, I believe, though don’t ask me how they work) to analyse exactly what was in extant samples of pre-ban absinthe and the bulk of his Jade range are recreations of specific products (though I believe that for legal reasons he won’t necessarily spell out which ones on the label).

Before the ban, the Cusenier distillery in France produced Cusenier Oxygénée Absinthe Hygenique, a product that they subjected to an oxygenation process that they claimed made it uniquely “hygienic” and safe, an attempt to stem the growing tide of opinion that absinthe was deleterious to the health. It sold at a considerable premium. Ted’s new product uses the same botanicals as the original (as well as a unusual species of Artemisia from the foothills of the Alps, rarely found in absinthe), and is also subjected to a “hot oxygenation” process that closely mirrors the original technique. Ted doesn’t give too much away but he observes impishly that it involves pure oxygen and hot distillate and, consequently, he makes sure there is no one else around when he does it. (If you hear reports that the Combier distillery has exploded you’ll know why…) Prior to bottling the spirit is rested for three years.

Terminus on the left and V.S. 1898 on the right, neat

I line up a sample of Terminus against Jade V.S. 1898 to try and get a handle on its character. Although it’s hard to see in the photos, the Terminus seems slightly more yellow to me. Neat, the V.S. seems to have high, sharp notes of caraway on the nose, while the Terminus is softer, broader and grassy. Add water and the general distinction continues, with the V.S. having high, lean, clean, aromatic notes, with a hint of violets, while the Terminus is softer, earthier, more buttery, a bit more pungent, with a dash of orange peel on the nose and more “dark” notes (e.g. woody cinnamon) than the V.S.

Terminus left, V.S. right, louched (1:2.5 absinthe:water)

The other product Ted had with him was his new Coeur de Jade. It’s not an absinthe at all but an eau de vie, the base spirit that he uses for the absinthes. “People would taste it and ask me why I didn’t bottle it,” he explains, “so I did.”

It is a colourless grape spirit (mostly Chenin Blanc), double pot-distilled as would have been done pre-ban. I’m intrigued by this because it is surprisingly smooth for an unaged spirit (it is 42% ABV), and I might have guessed that over 100 years ago they could not have produced something so clean, but Ted assures me it is authentic. In fact it is the use of the less “efficient” pot still, rather than a modern Coffey still, that enables the spirit to retain its flavours and be more than just “neutral” alcohol.

Technically it is a fine (made just from grape juice), as opposed to a marc, which uses the leftover lees, skins, stalks, etc, from the winemaking process, in the same way that grappa does. (I’ve had some delightful marcs, but they can be huge, filling the room with their aroma.) It is an intriguing product, because it is subtle but with a distinct character. It is reminiscent of grappa (and I gather that the Italians were the most vocal in wanting Ted to bottle it), but more delicate than most grappas I have tried. There is a floral, almost candied, fruit nose from the grapes, with elements of apricot, almond and strawberry. The mouthfeel is relatively rich, sweet and smooth for an unsweetened spirit, and I get a distinct impression of rosewater on the tongue.

Subtle as it is, I’m immediately struck by the mixing possibilities, perhaps blending with light vermouths to make a fragrant summer cooler. And indeed the obliging barman in the Punch Room makes a Sazerac with Terminus absinthe and the Coeur de Jade in place of whiskey or Cognac (depending on your personal feelings about how a Sazerac should be made), which works very well indeed, with the distinctive fresh fruit fragrance of the spirit coming across clearly and harmonising with the aromas of the absinthe.

Jade Terminus Absinthe Oxygénée can be had for £68.95 and Coeur de Jade for £29.95, both from the Whisky Exchange.

* Even Phil Baker’s excellent The Dedalus Book of Absinthe from 2001, one of the first volumes I read on the subject, asserts that pre-ban absinthe contained perhaps 25 times as much thujone as modern examples, and it was this that gave it its mind-bending potency. In fact subsequent analysis shows that absinthe from this period contained no more thujone than modern versions, and it is unlikely that this chemical is responsible for any special effects absinthe is perceived to have. Ted himself does believe that absinthe has a particular physical effect on the drinker, the famous “lucid intoxication”, and believes it can probably be attributed to the combination of stimulant and sedative plants in the botanical mix.

The Rapid patent cocktail mixer from 1933. You can see it in action in the video below

Drifting through my local flea market (sorry, “Antiques & Collectibles Fair”) my eye was caught by a strange device. It looked a bit like a cocktail shaker with a glass body, silver-plated cap and integral spout, but protruding from the top was a plunger or piston. Closer inspection revealed that it was not for shaking—instead there was a spinning paddle inside, driven by pumping on the button on the top. It was an automatic cocktail stirrer.

Drawings from Rolph's patent application

To shake or to stir? Most cocktails require chilling and while some are constructed around ice cubes that stay in the drink, many are chilled through brief and vigorous exposure to ice before being strained and served ice-free, to avoid unfortunate and unpredictable dilution as the ice melts. You can do this most flamboyantly and speedily by putting the drink and the ice in a shaker and shaking it hard. But this will break up the ice a bit, leaving little shards of it in the cocktail (which bar pros tend to strain out by pouring the finished beverage through a device a bit like a tea strainer) and a cloudy finish that bothers some people—though to be honest the cloudiness fades quickly. (Japanese bar legend Kazuo Uyeda, on the other hand, seems to like these bits of ice: not only does he use a Manhattan shaker without a strainer, but he up-ends the shaker and gives it a good waggle to chase out any ice shards that might be lurking inside.)

But others are so concerned about ice contamination that they won’t shake certain cocktails at all, preferring to stir them over ice. This way your drinks stays clear and dilution is kept to a minimum. Many consider that certain drinks like a Martini will be “bruised” if shaken—the entrenchedness of this idea is precisely why James Bond bucks the trend and insists his Martinis are shaken.

The machine in the market had clearly been designed to enable drinks to be stirred but in a low-effort and thoroughly modern way. I immediately made it clear to Mrs H. that this would be a highly suitable thing to buy me for Christmas.

An earlier patent of Rolph's, for a "radiator cap
ornament". That's pretty much all it says, though it
looks to me as if the head and hands bob up and down

In time I discovered that it was an invention called The Rapid. It was the brainchild of one William Mair Rolph, who patented it in 1933. There isn’t much about Rolph online, though he was clearly a serial inventor—as well as pumps, syringes, devices for the accurate measurement of doses of liquid and a picnic hamper that unfolds into a table, he came up with many improvements for motor cars, such as indicators, windscreen wipers, a sun visor for the driver, and—bizarrest of all—a radiator cap ornament in the form of a seated Chinese figure which, according to the patent documents, really is nothing but an ornament. Aside from that I gleaned that he was inducted into the Royal Aero Club in 1914 and in 1917 was decorated by the King of Belgium for his contributions during the Great War. (I like to imagine he was in the Royal Flying Corps but I have no evidence for this. He may have been a spy, for all I know.)

I’ve seen various configurations of the Rapid design online, including one which is all metal. The patent application suggests it should have gradations marked up the side to help mixing, but whoever made mine clearly decided to go with the vertical cut-glass fluting for aesthetic reasons instead. The patent document also shows an alternative paddle with fork-like prongs for beating eggs, cream, etc. But the point is that this was not just a pipe dream—these things were actually manufactured.

So does the Rapid work? It’s more fiddly to load and clean that a bar glass or beaker but, as you can see from the video below, that paddle really does swoosh the ice and liquid around. For any given length of time spent mixing, the Rapid delivers more cooling than a human arm and a barspoon, yet the resultant liquid is perfectly limpid and seems not to taste any more diluted.

However, I did discover that my particular example has a tendency to jam. (In fact you can see in the video that at the end of the mixing, just before I pour it, it does precisely this.) But when it’s working it does a good job. Needless to say there are electric drink mixers out there now, but nothing as stylish as this.

All the bottles in the range feature the four-rose symbol moulded into the glass

I met up with James Childs of Spirit Cartel recently to talk about Four Roses bourbon. Spirit Cartel have only fairly recently taken on this brand, but it is one with a longer history than most American whiskeys.

Founded by Paul Jones Jr, Four Roses moved from Atlanta to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1884, but Jones claimed production and sales back to the 1860s. The name Four Roses has a romantic back story: Jones plighted his troth to a Southern Belle and she told him that if she decided to accept his proposal of marriage then she would wear a corsage of red roses to the forthcoming Grand Ball. On the night she was indeed wearing four roses, and Jones allegedly named his bourbon in her honour.

A Prohibition-era bottle of Four Roses sold as a medicine from a drug store

Most famously the brand continued to distil throughout Prohibition. Jones bought the Frankfort Distilling Company in 1922, a facility with a licence from the US Government to produce whiskey for “medicinal purposes” (one of only six such distilleries in the country). If that seems odd, bear in mind that many “patent medicines” of the era had high alcohol contents, even if they made no mention of this on the label or in advertising (and in some cases actually claimed not to contain alcohol). This was part of a trend for establishing acceptable (albeit veiled), domestic forms of consumption—as distinct from the unseemly and socially harmful world of the saloon. Such was the moral labyrinth of the issue, where many prohibitionists were politically dry but personally wet, that when nationwide Prohibition was finally enacted many Americans, who might have voiced their support for it, were actually taken aback by the completeness of the ban.

A liquor prescription form (written on St Patrick's Day, 1926), looking
like a share certificate or government bond (click to enlarge)

It’s worth noting that only in 1917 the American Medical Association had issued a statement that there were, in fact, no medical applications for alcohol at all. However by 1922, with Prohibition now under way, they did a volte face and declared that booze was indeed a medicine suitable for the treatment of 27 different conditions, including cancer, diabetes, asthma, snakebite and old age, and that any attempt to control such medicinal application was “a serious interference with the practice of medicine”. Surely only a cynic would suggest a connection between this and the fact that doctors generally charged $3 to issue a liquor prescription and pharmacists $3 or $4 dollars to fulfil it. In the first six months of Prohibition 15,000 doctors applied for a permit, allowing them to write up to 100 prescriptions per month.*

So now your doctor could write you a prescription for whiskey (or spiritus frumenti, “spirit of grain”, if trying to be dignified about it)—one pint every ten days. So could dentists and even vets. And it seems that, even as a medicine, alcohol’s efficacy was affected by quality and style: the Frankfort catalogue for pharmacists lists specific brands of rye, bourbon, rum, brandy and gin. Not only did some druggists do well, but some were not really pharmacies at all: one Manhattan saloon nicknamed the Hell Hole simply closed its doors, then reopened as a “pharmacy”, and carried on pretty much as before. In The Great Gatsby Jay Gatsby, clearly a bootlegger, is said to have made his money from “a lot of drug stores”…

In this 1940s postcard (left) the Four Roses name dominates Times Square; in Alfred Eisenstaedt's
famous photo of Times Square on VJ Day (right), you can make out the same sign

The American distilling industry didn’t readily bounce back from Prohibition: whiskey making needs a certain continuity because barrel-ageing is such an important part of the process. Until the recent resurgence in craft distilling and the proliferation of small distilleries all over the country, there were whole states with no real distilling tradition left at all (something Stuart Hobson of Indiana vodka was consciously trying to rectify in his own state). This put Four Roses in a strong position precisely because it had carried on producing and its brand was recognised—in fact it is believed that during Prohibition one in four bottles of bourbon sold in the US bore the Four Roses label. Until the 1950s it was the top-selling bourbon in the US. But then Seagram, who had acquired Frankfort in 1943, made the decision to focus on European and Asian markets and stopped selling Kentucky Straight Bourbon in the States, offering only a blended whiskey in that territory.** Today even the brand’s own press release describes this as “made mostly of neutral grain spirits and commonly seen as a sub-par ‘rotgut’ brand”.

But the brand was bought by Japanese brewery Kirin in 2002 and they are consciously trying to rebuild its once stellar reputation, selling only Kentucky Straight Bourbon. It seems to be going well, as Four Roses Distillery (now in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky) was named American Whisky Distiller of the Year in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015 by Whisky Magazine, which also inducted Jim Rutledge, Four Roses master distiller since 1995, into its Global Whisky Hall of Fame in 2013.

The single storey of the Four Roses warehouse

So what goes into the bottle? Uniquely, Four Roses use five different yeast strains and two different mash bills to make ten different bourbon recipes, which are individually barrel-aged and then blended to make their range of bottlings. They make much mention of their single-storey warehouse: Kentucky can get pretty hot, and in warehouses many storeys high the ones at the top will get hotter and the interaction with the wood will be accelerated compared to those resting at the cooler lower levels; it is also the case that the hotter barrels lose water through the wood, raising the ABV over time, while the cooler barrels lose alcohol as they age, lowering the ABV. Some facilities capitalise on this by selecting whiskey from different levels for different purposes, or rotate barrels between the different levels to even out the effects, but at Four Roses they simply store all the barrels at ground level, believing this to create a gentler and stabler ageing process. (The barrels are still stacked six-high, and even here the lower barrels lose alcohol while the higher ones lose water.)

The entry level product is Yellow Label, bottled at 40% ABV. They give no age statements,*** but there is an interesting infographic on the website revealing that this blend includes eight different whiskeys. There are two core spirits, one with a rye-heavy mash bill (60% corn, 35% rye, 5% malted barley) and the other with more corn (75% corn, 20% rye, 5% malt) and both using yeast strain K, described as full-bodied with light spiciness and light caramel. The other conponent spirits use four other yeasts with each of the two mash bills. Next up is the Small Batch (45% ABV), which uses the same two core spirits, plus just two others. At the top of the range (not counting occasional limited editions) is the Single Barrel (50% ABV), using just the rye-heavy mash bill and yeast V, described as “light fruitiness, light vanilla, caramel and creamy”.

Samples of the three main bottlings. The Single Barrel seems darker which might suggest
more age but it could just reflect that, at 50% ABV, it is less diluted

James gave me some samples of the three main bottlings. The Yellow Label hits you with vivid sawmill wood notes and mint, with elements of citrus, caramel and even coconut. On the palate it is surprisingly light and smooth for an entry-level whiskey, with hints of rose, strawberry and peach.

Moving up to the Small Batch the nose is immediately warmer, richer, smoother and darker. By comparison the Yellow Label has a more obviously “mealy” flavour, something that reminds me of sesame or wet plaster. The Small Batch is strikingly different, with hints of coffee on the nose and a palate that is drier and tighter (perhaps from the higher ABV, but there may also be more rye in the blend) but with sweet orange and marmalade flavours too.

The Single Barrel has a smooth and refined nose, with pronounced peach and pear elements and hints of blueberries. At 50% ABV it is inevitably dense and fiery on the tongue, but remarkably smooth considering its strength. To experiment with diluting it a little I make an Old Fashioned with it and, sure enough, the complexity unravels, with smoky, tarry and woody notes emerging, along with pear, cherry and melon fruit flavours.

I dig out a few other bourbons from the cupboard for comparison. Bulleit retails at about £28, roughly the same as Four Roses Small Batch. They are actually in similar territory—which shouldn’t be a surprise as I gather that Bulleit source bourbon from Four Roses. The two bourbons share a peachy nose, though the Bulleit seems tighter, drier and spicier to me, and the Four Roses fruiter and mellower; I’m guessing the Bulleit uses more of the higher rye mash bill than the Four Roses Small Batch.

Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select sells for about the same price here but is quite different. With a mash bill of 72% corn, 18% rye and 10% barley, its flavour strikes me as mellower, offering an expanse with more wide and high notes whereas the Four Roses Small Batch by comparison seems more thrusting, dominated by forceful mid-range intensity with strong wood and smoke flavours.

Elijah Craig 12-year-old retails for about £35, making it pricier than the Four Roses Small Batch but not up with the Single Barrel at about £40. It has a warm and inviting aroma with fruit notes and a remarkably smooth, polished palate for its 47%, with notes of chocolate orange. The Four Roses Single Barrel by comparison is dominated by that sophisticated aroma of pear and peach, a fascinating, focused and refined fragrance that you can ponder on for some time. On the palate it is steelier (it’s 50% alcohol and 35% rye); I can’t find out anything about the Elijah Craig mash bill but I’m guessing it’s more corn heavy (online hearsay has it at 75% corn, 12% rye and 13% barley). It’s interesting that the higher up you go in the Four Roses range, the more dominant rye becomes.

The Four Roses approach is intriguing: really old bourbon is always going to be less common that really old Scotch, if only because of the climate differences, but it is interesting to see the de-emphasis placed on age here and the attention given to yeast strains. To me the end result offers pretty good value in the UK. The Yellow Label is about £20–21, which is near the bottom end of bourbon prices (nothing is much less that £17–18). At £26–27 The Small Batch represents a very worthwhile step up, while the Single Barrel offers something profound that’s really worth savouring.

* For more on this see Daniel Okrent’s excellent history of Prohibition, Last Call (Scribner, 2010)

** The terms are heavily regulated. Anything called “bourbon” must be produced in the US from at least 51% corn and aged in new, charred oak barrels. There is no minimum age requirement, though to use the name “straight bourbon” it must be aged for at least two years. If there is an age statement it must be the age of the youngest bourbon in the blend. Something labelled as “blended” whiskey must still be at least 51% bourbon but it can also contain neutral spirit, colouring and flavouring.

*** Jim Rutledge has commented that “in general I’m not a fan of Old Bourbon”. It seems that each individual barrel is aged until it tastes “mature”, and with so many source bourbons to play with the emphasis seems to be more on the blending. There is a private barrel scheme where visitors to the distillery can create their own blends of the ten source spirits, and whiskey nerds post online about mixtures they have tried. There are also blends that are created exclusively for the Japanese market—although the US is the brand’s fastest-growing market, Japan is their biggest. One thing that Jim says they might try is a rye whiskey, though he admits that he will have retired before it is ready to drink.

The copper-plated items from Sainsbury's with the ingredients for a White Lady

I was marching through the mega-Sainsbury’s supermarket at Beckton, hoovering up Prosecco deals, when my eye was caught by a display of tools for the home bartender. What made them unusual was that they were made from steel plated with copper. In fact in this case they turned out just to have shakers and ice buckets, but by chance a couple of days later I was checking out a new restaurant in my neighbourhood when I saw, behind their freshly fitted-out bar, a whole array of copper plated tools, including hawthorn strainers, bar spoons, jiggers and tongs. I subsequently discovered that Cocktail Kingdom sells all this stuff, which I suspect is where the restaurant got it from. They even sell copper-plated speed pourers.

I couldn’t help wondering what the thinking was. In truth I suspect it is just meant to look fancy: Cocktail Kingdom also do silver- and gold-plated equipment. And let’s not forget that none other than Jerry Thomas himself, once he got rich and famous, adorned both himself and his bar tools with precious metals and jewels.

But I couldn’t help wondering what effect the copper might have on the drinks being made. Gold is famously unreactive, as is the stainless steel that this equipment is made out of. But copper, like aluminium, is reactive. In fact I have a copper bowl designed expressly for whipping egg whites, as the copper is said to react with the egg and help to stiffen it. And given that cocktails often involve some acidic ingredients, would contact with the copper give the drink a metallic taste?

Two White Ladies

There was only one way to find out: a head-to-head comparison between the copper item from Sainsbury’s and a stainless steel shaker I already had. I decided to make a White Lady cocktail because it not only contained a shot of lemon juice, but also egg white—so I could test the egg-stiffening theory. I used 1¾ shots gin, 1 shot Cointreau, 1 shot lemon juice and the white of 1 egg. Each was shaken hard to froth up the egg white. (For simplicity’s sake I refrained from “dry shaking”, either before or after the ice, a practice some use to get a thicker texture from the egg white.)

I can’t say that I detected a metallic taste in the cocktail made with the copper shaker. Initially I didn’t fine-strain, and the drink from the copper shaker had a different texture because it actually had small pieces of ice in it—perhaps I unconsciously shook that one harder? After fine straining the two drinks I actually felt that the drink from the steel shaker had a richer texture, though Mrs H. said she couldn’t tell them apart.

The cap and shoulder of the shaker are copper-plated on the inside too, while the body is not

As another test, I made a brace of Daiquiris. I even added the ingredients to the upturned cap and shoulder of the copper shaker (these bits are copper-plated on the inside for some reason, while the body of the shaker is not), so they might have a chance to interact before I added the ice and shook. My feeling this time was that the drink from the copper shaker had a different, slightly “off” taste. But then it struck me that each drink had included the juice of a whole lime—so I could just be tasting the difference between two different limes. So I repeated the experiment, this time blending the juice from the two limes before dividing it between the two shakers.

The result? Nothing that I can detect. Copper is widely used for making stills in the distilling industry because it is said to absorb sulphurous impurities, so clearly it is viewed as a reactive component in the presence of alcohol. But it doesn’t seem to affect the taste of cocktails at the end-user stage.

You can see the ice particles in the cocktail
on the left (click to enlarge)

One thing that did emerge from this comparison, however, was the difference in shaker design. I don’t think I can blame the shape or construction of the copper shaker for the preponderance of ice particles in my White Lady—that is more likely to be down to poor technique on my part, or just being too lazy to fine-strain.* But I did notice that it seemed rather unwilling to pour the finished drink, compared to my trusty steel shaker. Looking closely you can see that the latter has long, narrow slits around the side of the built-in strainer, in addition to the circular holes, while the copper shaker just has the holes, making it slower to pour. Bar pros all tend to use Boston shakers anyway (either glass-and-tin or tin-and-tin), but I rather like the iconic shape of the Manhattan shaker. So if you’re in the market for one, it might be an idea to look at the design of the strainer.

Note the extra slots around the side of the strainer on the right. Even though the holes are smaller
it pours more quickly and smoothly than the copper one

* Japanese bar legend Kazuo Uyeda, also a fan of the Manhattan shaker, doesn’t fine-strain his cocktails as he says he likes the fine ice particles in the drink.

A Mr President cocktail

I like a Negroni (equal parts gin, red vermouth and Campari), and I seem to have this in common with much of the world, as it is on trend these days. (Which is interesting when you consider that it is quite bitter—perhaps we are just getting more sophisticated in our cocktail palates, or perhaps it is the appeal of the vintage/heritage aspect.)

I was therefore intrigued when I later encountered the Boulevardier, which is effectively a Negroni with the gin replaced by bourbon or rye whiskey. It was created by Harry MacElhone, of Harry’s Bar in Paris, for Erskine Gwynne, socialite, nephew of Alfred Vanderbilt and editor of the Boulevardier magazine. It appears in Harry’s book Barflies and Cocktails, published in 1927, where it is given as equal parts bourbon, Campari and red vermouth. (Harry’s earlier ABC of Mixing Cocktails has an Old Pal cocktail that is equal parts Canadian—i.e. rye—whiskey, Campari and dry vermouth, which is a pretty dry drink. Oddly, a cocktail with the same name appears in the 1927 book made with red vermouth.) You often now find the Boulevardier with the whiskey elevated to 1½ parts, though certainly with Redemption Rye or Rittenhouse 100 Proof equal parts is easily enough. I would certainly put this cocktail up there with the Negroni; if you like Campari you should try it, as it is essentially a Manhattan with added Campari. Even with milder Maker’s Mark bourbon I think equal parts works fine, though ramping the bourbon to 1½ is still interesting.

Count Camillo Negroni, alleged inventor of the cocktail of
the same name. However, the contemporary Negroni family
insist that their ancestor Count Pascal Olivier Negroni is the
real creator. See here for the low-down on the spat

All of which got me wondering what would happen if you tried using other spirits in place of the Negroni’s gin.* What about rum? In Havana’s Prohibition-era glory days as a watering hole many extant cocktails seemed to spawn an equivalent that used rum instead of the original base spirit—the Sloppy Joe’s Cocktails Manual has three “President” cocktails, all essentially a Dry Martini made with rum instead of gin, with a few other bits and pieces thrown in. Sure enough such a thing as a rum Negroni already exists: the Kingston Negroni uses pot still Jamaican rum, while the Mr President uses white Cuban rum (though the proportions are different here: 1¼ shots rum, ¾ shot red vermouth, ½ shot Campari). I’m not entirely convinced about either of these: the white rum is easily smothered by the other ingredients, contributing only a little sugar character; although clean, I find it a bit too sweet. In the dark rum version (I used Myers’s) the rum certainly makes its presence felt, though I suspect that I am ultimately not really a fan of this sort of Jamaican rum with its dry, dusty, woody rasp, and it is debatable here whether this quality compliments the rooty bitterness of the Campari or quarrels with it. I think on balance that this is a successful combo, in that you can certainly taste all the ingredients in the mix, although they seem to be circling each other warily. Compared to the Boulevardier, however, it is definitely less inspired.

A Milano is simply a Negroni made with vodka instead of gin, or an Americano (originally known as a Milano-Torino) made with vodka instead of soda. Ultimately it lacks the complexity of the Negroni or the Boulevardier, as you can’t taste the vodka, even if you bump up the proportions. It is also known as a Negroski. This cocktail need detain us no further.

A Rosita cocktail

Inevitably, where one whisky goes another will follow, and the Scotch Negroni uses blended Scotch instead. I used Famous Grouse and, although I am not generally a fan of Scotch-based cocktails, this one undoubtedly works. The whisky balances against the orangey fruit notes in much the same way as it does in a Blood and Sand (Scotch, orange juice, red vermouth and cherry brandy) and seems to add a chocolatey warmth.

Replacing the gin with Cognac (I tried Courvoisier Exclusif) is surprisingly successful, and quite different from the other variants. The fruitiness rises up, suggesting apples and prunes, and it balances in a very satisfying and complex way, though the overall effect is more a warming autumn drink (I imagine—I’m writing this during a heatwave here in the UK). I also tried it with Calvados and it works too, in the same fruity way, though it lacks the complex spread of flavours that the Cognac offers.

Finally we come to the Rosita, made using reposado tequila (I used Tierra Noble**). Simply replacing the gin with tequila at equal parts, the tequila sits squarely in the mix; the recipe I found gives 1½ parts tequila and although this still works I’m not sure it’s necessary. (The recipe, from Gaz Regan's Bartender's Bible, actually has the vermouth as an even blend of red and dry white; this gives a subtle and quite dry result, though I think I prefer it with just red vermouth.) It’s a fascinating combination, with the petrolly, smokey, herbaceous agave flavours entwining with the bitter, orange notes of the Campari. It works in a similar fashion to the Scotch version, with smoke being present in each case and each a relatively subtle blend compared to the minty, sawmill punch of the rye whiskey version.

Out of all of these, for me the Rosita takes first prize—it’s not just “interesting” but is a cocktail I will definitely come back to—thought the Boulvardier and the Cognac Negroni are definitely worth trying too.

* Of course there is much more you can do to a Negroni than just vary the base spirit. In fact Gaz Regan has written an entire book about it…

** I was given a couple of samples at a trade show, but I don’t think they ever did sort out distribution in the UK. Which is a shame as it’s a great product.

A friend of mine, who is an actor specialising in historical roles, rang me up in March and asked if I could help him out. He’d taken a small job for English Heritage but had now been given an audition for Mr Selfridge on the same day. Would I mind taking over from him in the English Heritage job?

The entrance hall at Eltham Palace where we shot the video

I’ve never done any acting but the job in question was simply to pretend to be a 1930s cocktail waiter in a video to promote the wonderful Eltham Palace. It’s a place well worth visiting, with some parts of it dating from the time of Henry VIII, and other parts added by Stephen and Virginia Courtauld in the 1930s, including the magnificent Art Deco entrance lobby with wood-inlay murals and a revolutionary concrete dome roof with glass-block skylight. Once you’ve see this room you’ll subsequently notice it cropping up in period movies all the time. Apparently Stephen himself used to make cocktails in that room every day at 6pm.

Stephen and Virginia aboard the Virginia

The team had chosen three cocktails (evidently from the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, judging by the recipes they gave me), the Aviation, the Mah-Jongg and the Commodore. I admit I had not actually heard of the latter two, but I’m a big fan of the Aviation. My friend the actor had already sourced the ingredients so I just scooped up some ice, brought a carload of vintage glassware and cocktail accessories as set dressing and a couple of dinner suits.

I was surprised to discover that there was no script: I was simply asked to talk as I made the drinks. Fortunately it’s a subject I’m quite interested in so I didn’t run out of things to say (in fact they have wisely edited out a lot of my rambling).

Mah-Jongg the lemur

The cocktails were evidently chosen for the relevance of their names. The Courtaulds had a pet lemur named Mah-Jongg. They also had their own yacht, the Virginia, and even a separate map room at Eltham Palace where they planned their voyages. In fact it was pointed out to me that the entrance hall was designed to resemble the prow of a ship from a certain angle. (Stephen himself was never a Commodore, though—he did serve during World War I but in the army, not the navy.) I think the Aviation was chosen to reflect the popularity of aviation as a sport in the 1930s; after Lindbergh’s solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1927 the world went Lindy crazy for some time.

Aviation
The recipe that appears in the Savoy Cocktail Book is:

⅔ dry gin
⅓ lemon juice
2 dashes maraschino

However, this cocktail originally contained crème de violette too (it is present in the earliest printed recipe, in Hugo Ensslin’s 1917 Recipes for Mixed Drinks). I’ll never understand why it fell out of favour—I can only assume it became hard to get hold of—as it is its presence that gives the cocktail its distinctive sky-blue colour, as well as a touch of floral violet. The recipe I use is:

2 shots gin
½ shot lemon juice
½ shot maraschino
1 tsp crème de violette

Don’t be tempted to overdo the violette as you’ll lose the subtlety and your drink will go purple.

Commodore
The Savoy recipe is:

1 glass of Canadian Club whiskey
1 tsp syrup
2 dashes orange bitters
Juice of ½ a lime or ¼ a lemon

I find it works best if the quantity of lemon/lime juice is roughly equal to that of the sweetener, so my proportions were:

2 shots whiskey
½ shot syrup
½ shot lemon juice
2 dashes orange bitters

Not bad, though not hugely fascinating either.

Mah-Jongg

2 shots gin
½ shot Bacardi white rum
½ shot Cointreau

On paper a rather odd mix, with the gin base augmented by a surprisingly small amount of white rum, but it is actually rather nice. You would not expect to be able to taste the rum, but you can subtly, and I wonder if it is there to smooth off the finish of the gin? As I point out in the video, all the ingredients here are spirit-strength, so it is a potent cocktail.

* For those too young to remember, a reference to the 1990s TV adverts with Stephen Fry

Afraid that I would spill booze over the famous Art Deco carpet, they carefully rolled it back, and I was
interested to see a wooden floor beneath. Staff said they believed it was a dance floor for the Courtaulds' parties

The experimental Maid in Jalisco. Looking at it, I think I should come up with a cocktail for St Patrick's Day,
garnish it in the same way with thin slices of cucumber, and call it a Four-Leafed Clover…

Cucumber in booze is nothing new—both Hendrick’s and Martin Miller’s gins include cucumber among the flavourings.* But synchronicity dictated that I receive two emails today that embraced the noble plant and, since it is summer and I am in England, what could be more apt?

Emerald Street, a well-written daily offshoot from Stylist magazine, today featured a number of inspiring things you can do with your blender, including a frozen Margarita that includes puréed cucumber (two peeled ones, the juice of five or six limes, 100ml tequila and four cups of ice cubes, whizzed together, plus agave syrup to taste).**

Meanwhile, a post on the Real Absinthe Blog takes a scholarly look at Hemingway’s consumption of absinthe and concludes that, in his writing at least, he only ever drinks it in the traditional way with water, plus the Death in the Afternoon cocktail (absinthe and Champagne). Absinthe has such a powerful flavour that where it does appear in cocktails it is often present in homeopathic quantities (typically the serving glass is rinsed with absinthe that is then discarded before the cocktail is poured in). Last year Gaz Regan in his Regan Report noted the importance of absinthe as a cocktail ingredient but likewise warned against adding too much. Anyway, the post included a link to an earlier item describing the Maid in Cuba cocktail:

2 shots white rum
1 shot lime juice
½ shot sugar syrup
Small handful of mint leaves
3 slices of cucumber
Absinthe

Vigorously shake the first five ingredients with ice and strain into a glass that has been rinsed with the absinthe. It’s essentially a melding of Cuba’s two most famous cocktails, the Daiquiri and the Mojito, with added cucumber and absinthe.

Absinthe is pretty complex stuff in its own right, so you might argue that it is best drunk on its own. However, that would be a coward’s way out, so I found myself wondering what it might naturally synergise with. Gin, with its botanical arsenal, seems a likely contender, and classic absinthe cocktails like the Corpse Reviver No.2 and the Monkey Gland (gin, orange juice, absinthe and grenadine) do tend to be gin-based.*** I wouldn’t say that absinthe had a particular affinity for the white rum in the Maid in Cuba, as it is pretty much a blank canvas, but just thinking about it you can suspect that the herbaceous nature of tequila is going to marry well. And you’d be right. Just try rinsing a glass with absinthe then pouring in some tequila and you’ll see what I mean—the flavours of the two ingredients merge seamlessly.

So, by splicing Emerald Street’s cucumber Margarita with the Maid in Cuba you come up with something we might call the Maid in Jalisco:

2 shots tequila
1 shot lime juice
Agave syrup to taste (½ shot perhaps, although this was too sweet for me)
3 slices of cucumber
½ tsp absinthe

Shake with ice and strain. I started off just rinsing the serving glass with absinthe but I felt that it needed another ½ tsp at least (I was using Jade Terminus). I think the absinthe really works, though I must admit I’m less sure about the cucumber. I think that just by adding absinthe to a Margarita you have something very interesting indeed.

* Evidently cucumber doesn’t work if you infuse it with the other botanicals and distil, so it must be added post-distillation. (See my exploration of how Hendricks is made.) This means that these gins can’t call themselves “London Dry Gin” as this is an EU-defined category that does not allow any additives after distillation. Some people get quite exercised about this and query whether the definition or terminology should be changed, but I have always said that consumers almost certainly won’t consider the term “London Dry Gin” to be a stamp of quality. If anything they will probably assume that it means it was made in London, which it probably wasn’t, as the term does not encompass any geographical requirement.

** Classically the Margarita uses triple sec (such as Cointreau) but it is increasingly common to use agave syrup instead.

*** With the noble exception of the Sazerac, of course, a New Orleans classic that adds a smidgeon of absinthe to rye whisky, Cognac or a blend of the two, along with sugar and bitters.

I received a press release recently for a bottled water called Isbre. It is sourced in Norway from an aquifer under a 5,000-year-old glacier at the end of the Hardanger Flord in Ulvik, where it is bottled on site. The Big Thing about Isbre is its purity, showing no more than four parts per million (ppm) of total dissolved solids, which is apparently the lowest figure ever for an unprocessed water.

Purity is an interesting concept in drinks. There is a natural tendency to associate it with safety and health, and producers of spirits, especially vodka (about which there is not much else to say) frequently use the p-word, either talking about the purity of the spring water they use to dilute their alcohol, or bragging about innovative filtration methods, often involving precious metals or stones. In fact if you look at the website of Technofilter, a leading manufacturer of filtration systems for the vodka industry, they make the point that, while filtration (traditionally through birch charcoal) was once necessary to remove impurities that imparted bad flavours or odours or even made the vodka unsafe, nowadays any producer can buy in incredibly pure alcohol and all distilleries will have the means to make distilled water on site. Modern vodka filtration is more about altering the flavour and perhaps fishing out unsightly particles that may have been introduced from machinery or from additives like sugar or honey that are sometimes introduced to create a perceived smoothness.

Naturally sparkling, Apollinaris pitched itself as having medicinal benefits, "the sworn enemy of gout,
rheumatism and indigestion", in this detail from an 1876 advert. Despite the high mineral content it also
speaks of "purity" and "softness". Note also that they recommend it as a mixer for brandy, gin and wine
(click to enlarge)

This 1903 ad is pushing Apollinaris (by now threatened
by mechanically aerated waters) as a mixer for Scotch

Once upon a time drinking water that came in bottles was generally referred to as “mineral water”—the point being that you drank it precisely because of the dissolved minerals in it, either for the taste or for imagined health benefits. (According to a table on the Isbre website Evian has 300 ppm total dissolved solids, Vittel 400, San Pellegrino 990 and Apollinaris, a German spring water with a long history, which I’ve not seen for sale in the UK, a whopping 1800.) Our modern interest in bottled water may have been prompted simply by fashion and marketing, so that we want to be seen clutching the hippest water brand, or perhaps by a rise in health-consciousness and a belief that tap water is not safe. (There have been scares in recent years about the levels of oestrogen in mains water, for example, or worries about fluoridation, although in fact UK tap water has to pass more stringent tests than bottled water does.)

I live in south-east London and my tap water is pretty tasty (not true of some parts of the UK I have visited). It is a hard water with, on average, 261 ppm of calcium carbonate, which comes from the chalky composition of local aquifers. (This can tend to leave lime scale deposits in your kettle or on the showerhead, but it makes the water quick to wash away soap and apparently forms a film on the inside of old lead pipes which prevents the metal from leaching into the water supply.) The UK Drinking Water Inspectorate regularly tests tap water and apparently London’s is the best in the country (mind you we are talking about a 99.98% pass rate compared to 99.94% in the worst-performing area, so there is not much in it). You can see a full chemical analysis here.) No fluoride is added but the total dissolved solids are about 350–400, compared to Isbre’s 4.

SW4 gin diluted half and half with tap water, Isbre and distilled water

All of which got me wondering about water in booze—not the water that is used to dilute spirits to bottling strength (over which I have no control), but water that we might add at the point of preparing a drink. Many people believe, for example, that adding a small amount of water to malt whisky helps unlock flavours and aromas. And even if you don’t add water, any drink that you serve on the rocks will be diluted as the ice melts.

I gather that in Japanese whisky bars it is de rigeur that if you add water to your whisky you use only water from the same spring where the whisky is made. Camper English of Alcademics has done some interesting experiments diluting different Scotch whiskies with spring water from different parts of Scotland. The general result was that water from a particular region brings out flavour characteristics associated with whisky made in that region.

But the test here today is about the benefits of purity in water. I decided to put Isbre* up alongside London tap water. And to push things to the other extreme, I also got hold of some commercially produced distilled water.**

The same test using Nikka Taketsuru Pure Malt whisky

Tasted neat, the three waters seem remarkably similar to me, though the purity of Isbre does give it a softer feel and a perceived sweetness to the finish. The hard tap water, particularly after it has been in the glass for a while, has a flatness, a hint of something sour or metallic. (I expected the distilled water to taste much the same as the Isbre, but to me it actually tasted less pleasant, with a slight bitterness to the finish.)***

I try diluting some SW4 gin (the high-strength 47% version), half and half with water. I don’t normally drink gin this way, though my father-in-law likes his gin half and with water and a dash of bitters. It’s quite a revelation, actually, because the botanicals in the gin are loud and proud, with the high, resinous juniper joined by orange sweetness and floral, woody notes, and a bitterness towards the end. To my surprise there was quite a noticeable difference between tap water and Isbre, with the former seeming to have a heaviness or roughness. Gin and Isbre, on the other hand, felt lighter and more ethereal on the tongue and, moreover, you had a sense of perceiving the botanicals more clearly and vividly. The distilled water gave the same effect, and I honestly couldn’t detect a difference between that and Isbre.

Ice cubes made from (left to right) tap water, Isbre and distilled water. As you
see, the purity of the water does not have an effect on the clarity of the ice

I try the same thing with Nikka Taketsuru Pure Malt Japanese whisky, again half water, half whisky, and get the same result. The tap water gives a hard, flat quality, compared to the sweet smoothness of Isbre. Distilled water is likewise smooth and light.

What about ice? If you pour yourself a whisky on the rocks and sip it slowly enough for the ice to melt, then you have diluted your drink quite a lot by the end. I always regret doing this, because ice made from my tap water leaves a gritty deposit in your drink when it melts. I make some ice from Isbre and try the same thing and, hey presto, no grit.

Nothing to see here: vodka with cubes of the three ices. They look identical until…

But if you think that ice made from pure water will be crystal clear, think again. The clarity of ice is affected far more by how fast it freezes and at what temperature (see this explanation). I make up trays of ice cubes using Isbre and distilled water and they look the same as ice cubes made from tap water.

I start off with vodka on the rocks, taking 25ml of Ketel One and adding two cubes each of the three types of ice. As you might expect the results are essentially the same as when we simply added water: at first the samples seem alike but as the ice melts the sample with tap water ice takes on a flatness, something a bit like soggy cardboard, with a slight sour note, compared to the other two, which seem to maintain the original flavour of the vodka better.

Once the ice has melted, the vodka with the tap water ice now has white mineral
deposits at the bottom of the glass. This was from just two cubes of ice. No such
deposits appeared with ice cubes from Isbre or distilled water

But in my household I suspect more ice gets used in the shaker (then discarded) than added directly to drinks. Would water purity still make a difference in this context? I rustle up three Martinis, using SW4 47% and Noilly Prat. I follow James Bond’s example and shake, rather than stir, on the grounds that this will presumably result in more dilution and an enhanced effect.

Three Martinis, shaken with ice made from (left to right) tap water, Isbre and distilled

I use a measure of gin and a teaspoon of vermouth for each sample, add six ice cubes and shake exactly 40 times. I eschew a garnish to help focus on the matter in hand. Not unexpectedly, the differences are less noticeable this time, though I still think that the Isbre has a softer, sweeter mouthfeel and a sense of greater depth and transparency in the flavours of the ingredients. The tap water ice seems to give a slight masking harshness and again even the distilled water seems less appealing, which I cannot explain. But these are subtle distinctions.

This whole process has been a revelation to me. There are many bottled waters out there, with their own flavour profiles that may or may not blend harmoniously with other ingredients, but as a simple starting point it is an eye-opener to use water that is much more neutral than what I am used to. While the contribution in ice used to shake cocktails is subtle to say the least, when it comes to ice over which drinks are served, and certainly where water is directly added, using purer water makes a noticeable difference. When Isbre comes to market in the UK (I can’t find it for sale anywhere yet) it will be about £1.50 a litre: for ice to serve in drinks (as opposed, perhaps, to shaking) I think this is certainly worth paying.

One thing I am keen to try now is absinthe—which is typically served with two to five times as much water as spirit…

* Of course Isbre isn’t the only bottled water one could try—in fact while searching my inbox I stumble across a press release sent to me a few years ago for a brand called Sno, made in Iceland from a glacier, this time 20,000 years old. They also bang on about purity, but Sno contains 68ppm of dissolved solids according to the press release (though on their current website this has dropped to 52), so for the purposes of our experiment Isbre is more useful.

** Curiously, almost all suppliers had a footnote that their product was not suitable for human consumption. Considering that the whole point of distilled water is that it contains nothing but water, this is odd. It could be that if you habitually drink nothing but distilled water you would miss out on vital minerals, but I suspect it is simply that any product that is intended for human consumption has to undergo various tests that the water distillers don’t want to pay for—their products are actually designed for laboratory use or cleaning delicate equipment.

*** Although Isbre’s website only talks about total dissolved solids, I did find another site which gave more of a breakdown. This suggests the only detectable minerals are nitrates (0.05 ppm) and silica (2 ppm) from the rocky aquifer. My distilled water, for the record, has <0.2 ppm nitrates, <0.1 ppm lead, <0.2 ppm ammonium and <10 parts per billion silicon and chloride. So the distilled water actually has more of all these contaminants than Isbre, with the exception of silicon—and I gather that 5–25 ppm silica is typical for natural water, so Isbre is still fairly low. This site also gives Isbre’s pH as 5.7, which is slightly acidic. I can only assume that the silica (silicon dioxide) is in solution in the form of silicic acid. Which, in case you were wondering, is considered to be good for you. However, I later got hold of the latest lab report from Isbre themselves: it doesn't give a figure for silica but I see that the pH is 6.6, which is pretty close to pH neutral. Nitrates in this sample are down to 0.015 ppm and there are around 0.5 ppm traces of calcium, sodium, sulphate and chloride and 0.1 ppm magnesium and potassium. Total dissolved solids are given as just 3.9 ppm.

Thanks to my sister and brother-in-law for giving me a real brass IAE nameplate, modelled exactly on the graphic device at the top of this page. I finally got round to putting it up today. For some reason Mrs H. wouldn’t let me fix it to the front door* so it now graces the door to the den where this rubbish gets written, a small room in a Victorian terraced house, piled high with stacks of paper, old beige computer equipment, scribbled notes with important numbers on them, dusty gadgets and adaptors of one kind and another. (All surfaces seem to have acquired an alluvial sediment of bits of paper, obsolete technology or gewgaws and personal effects left behind by customers at Candlelight Club events.** There is really only one small area, the corner of a shelf, that offers enough horizontal space for a mug of tea.)

* A courier once came to deliver a sample, addressed to “The Institute for Alcoholic Experimentation”. I don’t know what he expected to find, but Mrs H. clearly heard him through the front door, on the phone to his boss, saying, “…But it’s just a house!”

** Of course I do message them all asking who is missing this bit of jewellery, or that hat, or this set of house keys, or that small black cardigan, but they very seldom claim these items. The larger things get taken to the charity shop while the rest sit in a number of shoeboxes. Some were probably only bought as costume or props for the occasion, but other items—such as a single high-heeled shoe—one might have expected the owner to want back. One day I shall make an artwork by laying them all out together in a room…

By chance I found myself with three different brands of Parfait Amour in the house recently—Bols, Boudier and Cartron. This liqueur is possibly most used in cocktails for its purple colour, but despite its similarity in this respect to crème de violette it is not primarily flavoured with flowers. Recipes vary and Bols, who claim to have invented it, do use rose and violet petals to make it, but the flavour that seems to link the different interpretations is actually citrus.

The Cartron website doesn’t give away the recipe but implies that this liqueur is all about the citron. The nose is strongly of orange and lemon, as is the palate, which is sweet, with a liquorice note and only the subtlest florality. It does make you wonder why someone would come up with a citron liqueur then decide to make it purple—and this sample is the most intensely coloured of the three—but the site has a quote from 1769 about the use of citron in Parfait Amour so it has clearly been made this way for a long time.

(Left to right) Boudier, Bols and Cartron

Boudier’s version also hits you with oranges on the nose and something sweet like crystallised angelica or parma violets. On the palate it is drier and seems more spirituous than its 30% ABV. There is orange here again and perhaps something nutty. The website has nothing to say about this liqueur, but I gather that curaçao oranges, rose petals, vanilla and almonds go into it.

Bols’s ingredients are much the same as Boudier’s—orange peel, vanilla, almonds and “flower petals (principally roses and violets)”—but their version is quite different. They speak of how many a lover’s quarrel has dissolved under the influence of this drink, and it does have the reputation of being a dainty tipple for ladies. (It’s interesting, then, that Cartron talk of how it is “ideal in light and fresh cocktails” and don’t actually suggest you drink it neat.) The Bols example has a more confectionary nose and is sweetest on the tongue. More than anything it reminds me of that nougat that has bits of candied fruit in it, a character that must come from the almond and vanilla as well as the citrus. I would say that the Bols version is the most distinctive—the others seem a bit vague by comparison—and is the only one I can imagine dainty ladies choosing to sip. The Boudier seems a bit too austere and the Cartron has that liquorice edge that might prove divisive.

Although I don’t have any to hand, De Kuyper also make a Parfait Amour that they describe as a marriage of citrus (lemon and bitter, fragrant curaçao orange) and vanilla. Marie Brizzard make one with sweet oranges, orange blossom and vanilla. Giffard make theirs with orange, vanilla, violets and geranium and Lejay use bitter orange peel and violet buds.

A Jupiter, made to Ted Haigh's proportions

There actually aren’t many classic cocktails involving Parfait Amour. The Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930 has just two (there are significantly more with crème de violette and, I suspect, more with Crème Yvette as well), the Jupiter and the Trilby No.2. No one seems to know anything about their origins, but I’m assuming the Trilby was titled after the play of the same name,* as was the wont with smash-hit plays in those days.

Jupiter
2 shots gin
1 shot dry white vermouth
1 tsp Parfait Amour
1 tsp orange juice

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. The first time I put a row of these together, using the different brands, I’m not sure what to make of it: it seems very much of the time when the Martini was the bedrock and many “new” cocktails were just slightly contaminated versions of it. The tiny quantity of orange juice doesn’t seem to add much apart from a cloudiness: it’s possible that this opacity in conjunction with the Parfait Amour is intended to create a pale sky colour (Jupiter is Roman god of the sky), though in the case of the dark Cartron you get something that looks like a severely polluted sky just before an ugly storm, while the others veer more towards orangey-pink.

A Trilby cocktail

The Boudier’s citrus character blends easily enough with the gin and does poke its head up now and then with notes of sweetness and stemminess too. The Cartron has a similar effect, though it gets a bit lost. The Bols version is certainly more distinctive: while the juniper/Parfait interface is not horrible, it will come as a bit of a shock to Martini drinkers. Overall it is more cloying and doesn’t seem to sit comfortably with the seriousness of the Dry Martini ingredients. Might go better with Babycham.

However, noting that Ted Haigh, in Forgotten Spirits and Vintage Cocktails (2009), champions the Jupiter but is very particular about measures—in his recipe the gin is at 45ml and the vermouth at 20ml—I have another go the next night, using his exact quantities (and Bols liqueur) and the result is indeed more elegant. I must have overdone the Parfait Amour previously, as this version is actually quite dry. This probably does make the best of the liqueur; its nougat character takes on a hint of (white?) chocolate in this subtle incarnation.

Trilby
1 shot Scotch whisky
1 shot red vermouth
1 shot Parfait Amour
2 dashes absinthe
2 dashes orange bitters

Again, the Carton and Boudier versions produced only a fairly subtle influence. The Bols Parfait Amour made its presence felt more, sitting in the mix with the malty rasp of the Scotch, the herbal sweetness of the vermouth and the pungence of the absinthe (I used just a rinse), though whether the end result is complex or conflicting is debatable.

A Blonde Bombshell

I have a feeling that Parfait Amour can be quite a busy blend of flavours in itself, and so might actually work better in simpler combinations. Experimenting, I found that just adding a dash or two to a glass of Champagne or sparkling wine was one of the most satisfying serves, enabling the flavours of the liqueur to open up but not overwhelm (and in fact Bols claim on their website that this combination is drunk at weddings all over the world). There are a number of cocktails that are basically this, plus another ingredient as well. The Blonde Bombshell, for example, recommended on Bols’s website, adds elderflower liqueur:

Blonde Bombshell
15ml Parfait Amour
15ml elderflower liqueur
Top with Champagne or sparkling wine

The two liqueurs do complement each other, with the prickly high notes of the elderflower slotting in with the Bols’s warm nutty and vanilla layers. But I find myself boosting the elderflower (I’m using St Germain) to get a good balance, and frankly the whole thing is a bit too sweet for me anyway. Adding more sparkling wine helps, as does squeezing a bit of lemon juice into the blend.

A Double Perfect

The Double Perfect does the same thing but uses triple sec instead of elderflower liqueur. Again they specify 15ml for each liqueur but, warned by the Blonde Bombshell, I start with just 10ml and frankly this is all you need (unless you’re using a very large glass).

Double Perfect
10ml Parfait Amour
10ml Cointreau
Top with Champagne or sparkling wine

The Cointreau cranks up the orange aspects already present in the Parfait Amour and controls the confectionary nougat elements, making for a relatively elegant, poised use of the liqueur, especially in these reduced quantities. (I’m using Bols, which has a broader flavour than the other two brands, which are more citrus to start off with, so I’m not sure how much point there would be to this blend using Cartron or Boudier.)

And as a final test, my eye was caught by this combo on diffordsguide.com, to which he gives a higher score than most other Parfait cocktails:

The Brazen Martini

Brazen Martini
2½ shots bisongrass vodka
¼ shot Parfait Amour

Once again it really only takes a teaspoon of the liqueur to do the job, though I’m not convinced that it is a job worth doing. The pungent herbal element of the vodka, with its bitter aftertaste, interfaces interestingly with the plump, sweet vanilla of the Parfait Amour in the same way as the absinthe does in the Trilby, but it is more thought-provoking than actually pleasant, and is really not a cocktail I would be keen to have again.

As you can probably tell, I can’t get terribly excited about Parfait Amour—and I’m in good company, as the great David Embury, author of The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (1948), ranked it with Forbidden Fruit as his two least favourite liqueurs. The best delivery methods for it are the Jupiter, the Double Perfect or just a small 5–10ml dose in sparkling wine—but as you can see, the key here is to use it sparingly.

* The play, an adaption of the Georges du Maurier novel, played first at the Boston Museum in 1895 before Herbert Beerbohm Tree brought it to the UK, where it ran with great success at the Haymarket Theatre in London. Trilby O’Ferrall is the female lead. The Trilby hat gets its name from the play as well.

Mrs H. pointed out that we had mint growing in the garden, something that I admit hadn’t really sunk in before (I am not the green-fingered type). In fact more than once I have gone to buy some herb or other only for her to show me later that it was actually growing ten feet from the kitchen door.

So I did what any gentleman would do, and made a mint julep. I mention this only really to share with you my intense satisfaction with it: every now and then you make a cocktail where everything falls into place, as if for the first time you truly see what it is all about.

Juleps in waiting: some of the leaves that got away… this time

I took five leaves of mint and put them in a tumbler with about a teaspoon of sugar syrup,* maybe a teaspoon and a half, and muddled it. Then I filled the glass with ice** and added an undisclosed quantity of Four Roses (I used the Single Barrel, which was perhaps extravagant, though it worked well), then stirred.

You get a fresh, pungent aroma from the mint that you simply don’t get from things that are “mint-flavoured”, and this mint had been only a couple of minutes off the plant. The drink was sweetened, but not sweet, and the character of the whisky shone through. The Single Barrel is bottled at 50% so it can take a bit of dilution from the ice without seeming at all watery (and this ice adds no flavour of its own), though I tried the same recipe the next night with the Four Roses Small Batch and it worked well too.

I think I should try using more things from the garden in drinks—though I fear that it may be some years before the fruit of the lemon tree I gave Mrs H. last month will be sliced in our gin and tonics…***

* This was actually commercial syrup from Monin but you can make it yourself easily enough. Ed McAvoy (then Jameson brand ambassador) showed me the simplest way to do it: using a funnel fill a bottle, such as an empty wine or spirit bottle, two-thirds full with dry granulated sugar, then boil a kettle and carefully top the bottle up, before corking it and shaking it vigorously till the sugar dissolves.

** I used ice made in an ice tray with Isbre spring water.

*** And not everything from the garden is good to put in your drink. A few winters ago, inspired by DBS’s post about using snow in drinks, I padded out into the frosty garden and scooped some fresh snow off a plant to make a julep or an absinthe frappé or some such. I forget the actual cocktail, but I vividly remember how astonishingly repulsive it was, full of strong, weird, off flavours, sour and flat, dirty and choking. To this day I cannot understand how water than has fallen frozen from the sky and landed on a leaf can have acquired such a taste, unless the air in London is seriously polluted.

After my pronouncement last year that new vermouths were as rare as hen’s teeth, they seem to be coming thick and fast. Vermouths are primordial cocktail ingredients so, with the Second Golden Age of Cocktails in full flow, I suppose it should not be surprising to see this development. It may also be tied in with the trend for bars to make their own infusions, as well as the alleged interest in lower-alcohol cocktails (vermouth can be the base of a drink—you don’t have to add it to spirits).

Belsazar has been around since last year, and we were given some samples to play with at the Candlelight Club in the spring, but I only recently got to complete the set by tasting the red version. Vermouth is wine that has been aromatised (infused with herbs, spices, barks, fruit, etc) and fortified. The list of botanicals must include wormwood to qualify for the name vermouth, and most of them tend to offer a balance of bitter, sweet, aromatic, herbal and floral flavours. As with many boozes the original idea was to make a tonic wine, a delivery system for the perceived health benefits of the botanicals in the mix.

Traditionally vermouths come from Italy or France, and older cocktail books will usually refer to “French” vermouth (dry white) or “Italian” vermouth (sweet red). The Belsazar range has the distinction of being made on the edge of the Black Forest by the old family-run distiller Schladerer, blended from six German wines and fortified with the firm’s traditional fruit brandies.* They claim that most of the botanicals are home-grown and sweetening comes from locally-sourced grape must.

There are four expressions, following the usual pattern of Dry [white], [sweet] White, Rosé and Red. They come in dark brown bottles with an Art Deco-influenced, diamond-shaped label, the background colour of which varies for each version. For years we’ve been used to the very limited range of vermouths in the UK being moderately priced,** but Belsazar follows the pattern set by Antica Formula of being considerably more expensive. And where Antica was £25 for a litre (now about £32), Belsazar Red is around £28 for 70cl and the others between £26 and £29. (By comparison, Martini Rosso can frequently be found in supermarkets for £10 a litre.)

The Dry (19% alcohol by volume) opens on the nose with hints of orange, a zesty freshness and dainty floral top notes like elderflower, sweet elements of honeysuckle and sherbet, a hefty combination of simmering tartness and a candied quality that one fears could become cloying. The palate has orange and lemon notes to the fore, but is unexpectedly and uncompromisingly dry, with powdery wood flavours of cinnamon and sandalwood, a bitter finish and even savoury notes of rosemary and thyme suggesting themselves. Noilly Prat is, by comparison, paler in colour, sweeter on the nose and more honeyed on the palate. Belsazar has darker, bolder flavours and a more bitter aftertaste (the botanicals apparently include not only wormwood but gentian and cinchona as well).

The strongly coloured Belsazar range

And yet in a Dry Martini, even a relatively wet one of 3 parts gin to 1 part vermouth, Belsazar Dry makes a balanced and approachable cocktail, with the vermouth in no way overpowering. Indeed one recommended serve is the Reverse Martini, with more vermouth than gin (60ml Belsazar Dry to 30ml gin, plus two dashes of orange bitters), just as Regal Rogue’s house Martini has: the result here is not a classic Dry Martini, as it is more about the vermouth, but it does showcase the way the vermouth’s various herbal, fruit and savoury contours interlock with the juniper and coriander gears of the gin. Again, compared to Noilly, Belsazar makes a woodier, more wormwoody, slightly saltier Martini, while Noilly makes a cleaner, more citric cocktail.

Belsazar White (18% ABV) has an aroma of honey, orange and crystallised fruit. The palate is pretty sweet but with a herbal dryness to balance it out a bit. I confess that bianco vermouth is not something I personally have much call for; for me the sweetness is off-putting. Likewise, the Rosé (17.5% ABV) is not something I would seek out. It has a nose of strawberry, rhubarb, redcurrant and candyfloss, and its palate offers the same combination of sweetness, a little tartness and herbal, wormwood dryness, plus elements of strawberry and orange. But add tonic water and flavours of peach and raspberry emerge, still with that bitter root finish, and I have to say that if you use Belsazar Rosé to replace half the gin in a gin and tonic you do get a very pleasant drink, the sweetness dialled down and herbal and fruit notes allowed to rise up.

The Bovril-like consistency of Belsazar Red

Which brings us to Belsazar Red (18% ABV). This was the last one I got to try but it is definitely my favourite. The nose is of cinnamon, ginger and a dry rootiness. The palate offers balsam, cassia and sandalwood, with a juicy bitter finish like rhubarb, something floral plus berries and black cherries. The colour is unashamedly murky, pretty much opaque, in fact.

If you like a Manhattan (about 2½ parts US whiskey to 1 part vermouth plus a dash of bitters) you will want to try Belsazar Red: with rye-heavy Bulleit bourbon the notes of cinnamon, burnt orange and chocolate latch on to your tastebuds, finishing with rhubarb and prunes. The woodiness of the vermouth marries effortlessly with the wood character of the bourbon and, even with a dash of maraschino, it comes across as a serious, quite dry cocktail. I try a Manhattan with Rittenhouse 100 (50% ABV), and it makes a turbid, uncompromising drink, the wood notes of the vermouth again mingling with the rye wood and dry aromatic contributions of the bitters; but it is vivid and complex too, with new flavours of tart fruit, chocolate and cooked vegetables constantly popping up.

A Belsazar Manhattan: a cocktail you can get your teeth into

Belsazar Red makes a punchy Negroni (equal parts, red vermouth, gin and Campari), with the cinnamon, burnt orange and rhubarb character making itself clearly felt. Get the balance right and the vermouth does not dominate, however, with the Campari’s bitter fruit element slicing through and the gin’s juniper finding its place in the mix. It is powerfully flavoured but velvety on the tongue. You instantly feel that it might be too easy to drink too many of these.

So is there anything intrinsically German about the Belsazar range? Not that I can see. They don’t taste of smoked cheese, sausage or sauerkraut and I don’t think I would even have guessed they were made from German wine. But if you can afford them, they are definitely worth a look. The Dry is an intriguing Martini ingredient, beefy yet limber, but my favourite is definitely the red, making a powerful but profound statement in the classic red vermouth cocktails.

* Which shouldn’t seem so unusual, given that the word vermouth comes from Wermut, German for “wormwood”.

** As a student I remember regarding vermouth as a good session drink because of the alcohol:price ratio. Not that I would recommend getting hammered on Martini Extra Dry.

It’s been almost five years since I posted about Moussec, yet it still seems to be attracting interest. I only dimly remember the product when it was available, but some older readers have fond memories of drinking it or of working at the factory in Rickmansworth.

Mr Philip Scammell, a former Moussec employee, dropped me a line yesterday tipping me off to a strange incident in 2012 when workmen renovating a property on rue St Claude in Les Riceys, in the Aube region of France, suddenly found gold coins raining down on their heads. Hidden in the space between the ceiling and the floor above were bags containing 497* US $20 coins, weighing 17kg in total. The building was owned by Champagne Alexandre Bonnet and was being adapted as accommodation for grape pickers. But a local historian revealed that up until 1960 it had belonged to Moussec.

Maison Moussec: 2 rue St Claude still bears the Moussec name

The historian, François Gilles, explained how the firm was founded by M. Rivollier, a biologist by training, who pioneered the production of sparkling wine in the Riceys area. However, between 1921 and 1923 he was engaged in a legal tussle with the Marnais over the right to use the term Champagne, as the Aube had been excluded from the 1908 law defining the Champagne region. The suit seems to have proved financially ruinous for Rivollier,** who then turned to a new ruse. He bought up unsold grape juice from the region and concentrated it through vacuum-evaporation to the consistency of fruit pulp. He then shipped this to Britain where it was diluted again and fermented into sparkling wine. My original suspicions are confirmed that the purpose of this was to avoid duty on imported alcohol. The report from L’Est Eclair writes, “The solidified juices could be shipped to England without difficulties, whereas wine was hit by heavy taxes and sometimes denied entry altogether.”

The ceiling space that had hidden
the coins for nearly 100 years

But the report also talks about Rivollier “taking advantage of certain consequences of Prohibition in Anglo-Saxon countries” (or possibly “English-speaking countries”). Obviously we never had Prohibition in Britain: it is possible the writer was simply referring to import duties (would these have risen during Prohibition in the US? I can’t think why), but it is also possible that the writer is referring to both the UK and the US.

The gold coins, which were sold at Bonhams in Los Angeles in 2013 for $945,000, dated from 1851 to 1928, according to Bonnet CEO Philippe Baijot. The fact that it was US gold, deliberately hidden in the late 1920s or early 1930s, does rather beg the question of whether Rivollier was doing more than simply dodging British import taxes. Was he also trying to bootleg Moussec into the US? Judging by the size of the hoard, he seems to have been doing rather well at it.***

Was this M. Rivollier's bootlegging loot?

I’d be curious to know if there are any records of Moussec in the US. It’s possible that Rivollier was exporting some other booze, or simply exporting the juice concentrate, which would have been legal—but I doubt it would have been worth it, given the quantity of US-grown grape juice available. In fact Californian vineyards that had previously produced wine, simply switched to selling grape juice during Prohibition, vast quantities of which were shipped east where it fuelled sly domestic wine-making operations, particularly among communities from parts of Europe with strong wine-drinking traditions.

In any case, Moussec certainly seems to have thrived in Britain. In Approved Cocktails, published by the United Kingdom Bartenders Guild in 1937, there are four references to Moussec as a cocktail ingredient.

A 1938 aerial photo of Rickmansworth with the site of the Maltings marked

Mr Scammel also gave me a bit of information about his own time in the business in the 1960s. He writes:

The Moussec winery was situated in what was once known as The Maltings in Cloister Road, Rickmansworth. I started as a Technical Assistant on October 1st 1962. The Works Manager was Mr Ian Marshall, the Chief Chemist was Mr George Young and the production chemist Colin (?).

My responsibility was the fermentation of the grape juice imported in the form of concentrate from the company’s plant in Les Riceys in Aube, France. The concentrate was stored in concrete vats situated underground at the front of the winery in Rickmansworth. It was re-diluted using spring water from under the factory (?) and then fermented using yeast which had been extracted from a successful spontaneous fermentation in the Paris laboratory of M. Rivollier and then stored on agar plates in the laboratory.

Following a short break as a Research Assistant at Schweppes Research Laboratory in Hendon, London, from 15th October 1965 until 30th April 1966, I returned to Moussec where I was engaged in research work on wine pigments until 15th September1966.

This wartime advert is from December 1939 and focuses on the irritation of trying to have
a Christmas party during black-out (a ban on lights at night, to make it harder for enemy
bombers to find their target). Makes me wonder where they are getting their grape juice
from—perhaps they had built up stocks before the war began

According to a document Mr Scammell sent me, his last project was on a rosé wine: red wine concentrate was re-diluted and fermented, before being fined in a way that reduced the pigmentation to that of a rosé wine. This was then blended with Moussec to produce a pétillant wine. It’s not clear if this wheeze made it to production.

Other documents show that Moussec was sold in 1969 to Reckitt & Colman, and the Rickmansworth plant was subsequently closed to amalgamate all of R&C’s production. In 1982 the brand was extended to two still wines, made from French and Italian grape concentrates and labelled simply as “Mellow Red” and “Medium Dry White”, with packaging described by the product manager, in an article in Harper’s from 1984, as “modern and informal without being pretentious”. This shows how even by the Eighties there was still a perception that wine was complicated and elitist and producers were struggling to find ways to make the man in the street feel it was for him. In any case this shows that the original sparkling Moussec was still being produced in 1984.

* Seriously, 497? Surely 500 would have been a nice round number? I wonder if the last three were “accidentally” lost. As it happens, under French law the hoard is split between the landowner and the finder, one of the workmen.

** Annoyingly for him, a few years later in 1927 the legal definition was changed to include the Aube.

*** Cutty Sark whisky was allegedly created for the US market in 1923—in the middle of Prohibition. Which is to say that it was created to be bootlegged into the country. However, filmmaker Bailey Pryor, who has made an Emmy-award-winning documentary about the famous rum runner Bill McCoy, the man said to have smuggled Cutty Sark, tells me that this is baloney. A source high up at Berry Bros. & Rudd, who invented the blend, told him that the bootlegging story was made up years after the event. And it’s true that no photos seem to exist of McCoy with any Cutty Sark, although there are photos clearly showing crates of Gordon’s Gin, for example. Moreover, McCoy’s bootlegging career actually ended when he was captured in November 1923. Although imprisoned for only nine months, he did not return to rum-running again.

Big Gin makes a big impression

Tequila cocktails with Ocho

Marks & Spencer cocktails-in-a-can

Maplay - Distilled Maple Syrup Spirit

The Claridge Cocktail

Don't be afraid of Fernet-Branca

Armagnac, Gascony's sleeping beauty

Terminus: the absinthe to end all absinthes

A marvel of 1930s cocktail technology

Four Roses rises

Bar tools: is copper proper?

Some Negroni variants

Your smooth-talking bar steward…*

Absinthe, tequila…and cucumber

The purity test: is your water and ice letting your drinks down?

A naming of names

The purple reign of Parfait Amour

A garden of bourbon delights

Belsazar: vermouth with a Teutonic twist?

More on Moussec (and a Prohibition secret?)