Cocktail #21: Suffering Bastard

As my core readers (all 10 of you!) will know by now, this blog and its drinks are heavily influenced by the books and classic recipes relayed by Jeff "Beachbum" Berry and Martin Cate, authors of the Grog Log (JB), Potions of the Caribbean (JB), and Smugger's Cove (MC). The recipe for this week's drink, the Suffering Bastard, appears in all three books above, and each time it's a little different. It wasn't until today, after I had gone shopping, that I absorbed Jeff Berry's recipe in Potions that I realized a) it is the definitive version of the recipe and b) I bought some of the wrong stuff.

In Potions Berry has published the recipe from the private papers of globetrotting bartender extraordinaire, Joe Scialom, most famously of the Shepherd's Long Bar, Shepherd's Hotel, Cairo, 1940s (which makes an appearance in one of my favorite films, the English Patient). Apparently devised as a hangover cure for the 11th Hussars - British troops stationed in Egypt during the Second World War, there are many versions of this drink floating around, and Berry himself published a different version in his Grog Log. What seems to be the definitive version, from Potions:

1.00 oz. gin
1.00 oz. cognac
4.00 oz. ginger beer, chilled
0.50 oz. Rose's Lime Juice Cordial
2 dashes Angustura bitters

Shake everything - except ginger beer - with ice cubes. Stir in ginger beer. Pour unstrained into a double old fashioned glass (I used my double old fashioned mai tai glass I bought at the fabulous Foundation Bar in Milwaukee). Garnish with an orange slice and mint sprig.

My version, cobbled together from the three above books:

1.00 oz. London dry gin (I used Bombay Sapphire)
1.00 oz. brandy (I used Pierre Duchene Napoleon V.S.O.P. which I got for cheap at Trader Joe's)
4.00 oz. fancy ginger ale
0.50 oz. fresh lime juice
0.25 oz. Demerara sugar syrup
2 dashes Angustura bitters

Same method as above. I garnished with an orange wheel, three pineapple leaves, speared with a home made maraschino cherry. My one misstep that keeps my version from being the same as Cate's in Smugger's is I used ginger ale instead of ginger beer. So it goes. Nevertheless, the result was fabulous.

Refreshing, yet with a small kick from the brandy, this cocktail goes down easily. The bitters and the nose from my homemade maraschino cherry lend a hint of spiciness to the cocktail which is amplified by the ginger.

Surely, had I used ginger beer, the result would have been even better. This is without a doubt one of my favorites out of 21 cocktails I've made over the last 21 weeks. Perhaps it's because fall is just on the horizon, but I find myself being drawn more towards this type of tiki drink lately - more dry, more spicy, less sweet. At Foundation in Milwaukee - easily one of the best tiki bars I've ever been to - I had their "Martinique" cocktail - rhum agricole, lemon, grapefruit juice, falernum, Chartreuse, and anise - and it was my favorite drink of the night. I need to cobble together some dough to buy a bottle of Chartreuse to try to recreate it. Anyway - the Martinique's flavor profile was more on the spicy, dry side, than sweet. And it was wonderful!

As I mixed up this drink, I put on an LP I recently bought used at Vintage Vinyl in Evanston, IL - Ellis In Wonderland by Ray Ellis and his Orchestra. I admit without embarrassment that I bought this solely on the merit of it's cover. As it turned out, it's a really pleasant 1950s instrumental - some would derisively call it "elevator music" - but I love it. You can check it out, of course, on YouTube:


Cheers and thanks for reading!

Cocktail #11: Saturn

I love "space age" kitsch, music, and movies. Of course, there are also space age tiki drinks! I decided to give the Saturn a try this week.

A little different than many exotic cocktails based on rum, the Saturn is instead based on gin, which was a nice change of pace this week. Many write-ups of the origin of this cocktail mention famed tiki bartender J. “Popo” Galsini. Apparently he created it at a tiki bar in California in the 60s and it was originally called the X-15, after the manned rocket plane that achieved 4,520 miles per hour. The drink was supposedly created to appeal to the Douglas Aircraft engineers who apparently blew off some steam at the bar after work. In 1967, the X-15 cocktail was renamed the Saturn after an accident with the aircraft which claimed the life of a test pilot. Also according to Jeff Berry, the cocktail went on to win first place in the California Bartenders’ Guild contest and later the International Bartender’s Association (IBA) World Cocktail Championship (WCC) that year, though apparently there is little to substantiate these facts. In any event... here's what we have, recipe via Jeff Berry:

0.50 oz fresh lemon juice
0.50 oz passion fruit syrup
0.25 oz falernum
0.25 oz orgeat syrup
1.25 oz gin
8 oz crushed ice

Put everything in a blender. Blend until smooth. Pour unstrained into a pilsner glass.

As you can see, I opted instead for one of my new vintage tulip glasses, in part because the yield of this drink would not have come close to topping one of my pilsner glasses, and also because I just thought it looked more space age-y (and staging it with my rocket-shaped cocktail shaker and robots from my small collection also helps!).

I garnished with the hollowed out shell of half a lemon, speared with three toothpicks. I then spiked maraschino cherries to the toothpicks, resulting in a garnish that resembles the Sputnik satellite!

This is only my second cocktail using passion fruit syrup, and again, I found that it really took hold of the drink, and it was difficult to make out any other tastes. If I made this again, I might knock the passion fruit syrup down to a teaspoon or so to enable the other flavors to shine through. That being said, I love passion fruit so I didn't mind too much. As summer comes on, I'm also really enjoying blended drinks - they are like refreshing adult slurpees, which is a-ok in my book.

As for listening suggestions for while you mix and drink, consider the following, one modern, one not:

The modern:


Man or Astro Man? have got to be one of the most fun bands of all time. They take performance art to a new level, and completely embrace the space age / sci-fi / surf aesthetic.

And, for the vintage, the king of space age bachelor pad music, Juan Garcia Esquivel's 1958 master piece, Other Worlds Other Sounds:


Cheers!

Cocktail #2: The Royal Hawaiian

This week's cocktail may be a departure for many people who have come to expect rum in their tiki drinks (I was one of them!). Also, it's incredibly easy to make with relatively easy-to-find ingredients (the orgeat being the most obscure, but even that is getting easier to find these days). The recipe is as follows:

1.5 oz. pineapple juice
0.5 oz. fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon of orgeat syrup
1.5 oz. gin

Add all the ingredients to a cocktail shaker that's filled halfway with ice, and shake vigorously. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. I've chosen to garnish mine with a lemon slice and maraschino cherry speared by an umbrella.

This is the first time I've tried this cocktail, and I quite enjoyed it. I'm a sucker for sour - which this drink is - but even if you're not, the lemon is not overpowering here, as it's tempered by the sweetness of the pineapple juice, and orgeat. The drink will form a thin layer of sweet foam on the top, which is really nice before the more sour liquid beneath hits you.

Beachbum Berry has a short history of this cocktail:

"From the Moana Hotel, Honolulu, Hawaii, circa 1948. Webley Edwards' then-famous radio program Hawaii Calls, featuring the Singing Surfriders and the Waikiki Maidens, was often broadcast live from the Banyan Court of the Moana; up to 3,000 middle aged tourists at a time would pack the courtyard to hear Edwards open the show with his trademark 'Aloha,' to which the crowd would always respond, 'a-LO-ha!'"

As you mix up  your own Royal Hawaiian, throw on these Webley Edwards records from YouTube:






Cheers, and enjoy!