my life in cocktails

• 2011-07-26

  A Wrinkle in Time

  I’ve been absent. I don’t usually get into my personal life too much here, but among other things, my grandmother passed away, my mother entered treatment for breast cancer, and I got married. Actually, I got married last Saturday. That was fun. But, the rest of it hasn’t been. To call this a difficult summer would be the grossest of understatements.

  

  What I actually wanted to talk about, though, was my grandmother. The tiny booze bottles you see above are vintage stock discovered in my grandmother’s apartment as my parents moved her to the nursing home. Along with these, there was a full size 40-year-old bottle of Crown Royal in pristine condition — that is to say, it was never opened. Theories have been flying.

  My grandparents always drank Crown, and I have quite a soft spot for it myself. Apparently, my grandmother claimed to be allergic to almost every spirit that wasn’t Crown Royal. As children, my mother and her sisters would fight over who got the leftover bags. I suspect these tiny bottles are airline liquors leftover from either my grandfather’s business trips or my grandparents’ joint travels.

  They’re strange artifacts. I assume they’re mostly still drinkable, although I can’t help but be suspicious of them. I suspect at least some have degenerated over the years, and, of course, there’s something inherently sad about them anyway. They speak not only of my grandmother’s absence, but also of drinks never poured, or toasts never raised. I guess in that way, I’d rather remember the empties. The depth and breadth of my grandparents’ collection of barware suggests there were many.

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• 2011-06-16

  Luxardo “The Original” Maraschino Cherries

  I still haven’t managed to rip the lid off my fourth jar of cherries (no joke), but at least today I’ll get to the third: Luxardo “The Original” Maraschino Cherries.

  Luxardo’s cherries are immediately distinguishable from other cocktail cherries because (a) they are very, very dark in color, a deep bloody red verging on brown (b) they are packed in a rather thick syrup (c) the packaging is demonstratively European in origin.

  

  The cherries are quite firm and tend to be very much in tact, if stemless. They have a rich smell that is reminescent, a bit, of cough syrup. This isn’t exactly unpleasant, but there’s a kind of saturation to the scent that is nearly cloying. The taste is equally intense, carrying a heavy sweetness, a very deep cherry flavor, and a slight taste of alcohol (which may or may not be actually present — the jar doesn’t list ingredients).

  Luxardo’s cherries are unique in that they are made from the maraschino cherry’s namesake fruit, the marasca cherry. In this way, they are certainly more traditional than other cocktail cherries currently on the market.

  However, I would like to make a perhaps unpopular point, which is that these cherries, finely made as they are, are likely inappropriate for a lot of modern drinks. I’m sure they’d do well in anything pre-1900 in origin. And, they’d probably hold up in things devised a couple decades after that, likely through the prohibition era. But, for example, I would probably never throw one of these into that mid-century favorite the gimlet or in any kind of Trader Vic’s-style tiki drink. The flavor is too heavy and would distract from, rather than augment the flavor of these types of drinks. Further, given the ’50s love of neon-colored processed things, I doubt Luxardo’s cherries had much market share in the period.

  So, in summary, Luxardo makes a very fine maraschino cherry, but I reserve them for drinks that are either very strong, very historic, or both.

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• 2011-06-09

  Amaretto

  For this month’s Austin Food Swap, I was going to make irish cream. Then, I forgot to buy whiskey before it was Sunday, and, sadly, you cannot buy whiskey on the Lord’s Day here in the great state of Texas. This was rather disappointing. I had a handle of vodka and no specific ideas, so I started poking around for vodka-based liqueur recipes and hit on a few amaretto recipes that seemed simple enough.

  

  I’ll preface this by noting that while this homemade amaretto tastes like real amaretto, it isn’t really. Traditionally made amaretto has apricot pits and/or almond pits in the mix, and tends to have a hint of bitterness. This amaretto is not bitter at all, but it’s a breeze to make, serviceable in sours and other mixed drinks, and smells lovely.

  I have two ingredient recommendations for this. The first is to go with Monopolowa vodka, as it’s inexpensive enough that you won’t feel like you’re “ruining” it, and it’s high enough quality that it doesn’t make everything taste awful. The second is to use Adams extracts, which are high quality without being too precious to go slopping out by the bottleful.

  This recipe is adapted from the one on About.

  Amaretto
  2 cups sugar
  1 cup brown sugar (or, 1 cup white sugar with 1 T. molasses)
  2 cups water
  3 cups vodka
  4 oz. almond extract
  1.5 T vanilla extract

  First, heat the sugars and water to make a syrup. Allow to cool completely. Stir in other ingredients and jar. There, you’re done.

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• 2011-05-27

  Whipped Lightning

  I’ll be back to the cherries next week. Consider this an aside as I recover from having moved — I can’t even get to my bar at the moment, because it’s been boxed in. I’m sure the bourbon’s getting lonely.

  

  And, so, today, I present to you Whipped Lightning. Whipped Lightning has roughly the best product name in history. It is exactly what it sounds like it might be — alcoholic whipped cream, or, as they dub it, “whipahol.”

  I was very excited when I first read about this product, but then promptly forgot about it. So, finally, we impulse bought the “Spiced Vanilla” flavor a few weeks ago, and I have to say it lives up to its name. It tastes like vanilla-infused Reddi-Wip with an aggressive alcohol taste and burn, sort of like what you run into with cheap rum or vodka, or even Everclear.

  In theory, this would be fun to throw on top of hot chocolate or coffee. It’s already summer here, though, so I don’t think I can bring myself to try that anytime soon. I have, however, tasted the product on its own, and I’ll say that I wouldn’t recommend putting it with anything fancy; it’s got its appeal, much as pouring cheap peppermint schnapps into hot chocolate has its appeal, but the whipahol’s burn is so sharp I think it would drown out anything more refined than itself, like a boorish party guest drowning out a wallflower’s attempts to join in conversation at a party.

  Whipped Lightning falls under my “try once, maybe twice” category. It’s novel. It’s fun. You might be able to come up with something to do with it, but fundamentally, it’s neither inherently necessary nor so good as to become necessary. Whipped Lightning comes in a whole host of flavors, should you be so inclined.

  Anybody got some inventive uses of Whipped Lightning?

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• 2011-05-12

  Maker’s Mark Bourbon Flavored Cherries

  

  Maker’s Mark Bourbon Flavored Cherries, much like the Sable & Rosenfeld Tipsy Cherries I wrote about previously, look more or less like standard-issue cocktail cherries. They’re bright red. They have stems at least some of the time.They look like candy.

  However, their smell reveals a key difference: the Maker’s Mark cherries smell like booze. Go ahead and bite in, and you’ll find they taste that way, too. The Maker’s Mark Bourbon Flavored Cherries offer a much more powerful whiskey kick than the Sable & Rosenfeld Tipsy Cherries do. They would make an excellent complement to a Maker’s Manhattan or Old Fashioned.

  As in the case of the Sable & Rosenfeld cherries, I would say these are a nudge above general consumption cocktail cherries, and I’d actually place them a nudge above the Sable & Rosenfeld ones, too. While Sable & Rosenfeld may win on the front of appearance as the Maker’s Mark cherries tend to look a bit more battle-torn, the Maker’s Mark cherries have a much more complex flavor. That said, I would still consider the two basically part of the same class — slightly fancier cocktail cherries that will be more or less familiar to most folks. These aren’t radically new in the sense of being novel, or radically old in the sense of being a true throwback or classic cocktail-type product. But, for what they are, they’re quite good.

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