Join me each week as I try my hand at learning about, making, and drinking 52 exotic/tiki cocktails over the course of a year, sticking as close to the original recipes as possible.
Showing posts with label simple tiki drink. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simple tiki drink. Show all posts
After how much I liked my version of Milwaukee Tiki Bar Foundation's "Martinique" cocktail, which features Chartreuse, I decided to keep going with Chartreuse and found the Chartreuse Swizzle in Martin Cate's Smuggler's Cove book, where the main ingredient is ... you guessed it -- Chartreuse.
The Chartreuse Swizzle is a modern exotic cocktail creation by Smugger's Cove bartender, Marcovaldo Dionysos. The interesting thing about this drink is that green Chartreuse is the main spirit, which seems to be pretty rare.
This is an easy one:
1.00 oz. pineapple juice (I used fresh from the pineapple I had on hand; canned works too)
0.75 oz. fresh lime juice
0.50 oz. John D. Taylor's Velvet Falernum
1.50 oz. green Chartreuse
Combine all the ingredients in a Collins or Zombie glass. Fill the glass with crushed ice until it's 3/4 full. Swizzle with a lele or barspoon for 30-60 seconds until the glass gets frosty. Top up with additional crushed ice as needed to fill glass. Add garnish. I garnished with a sprig of mint, a pineapple leaf, and a swizzle napkin wrap.
Martin Cate explains the swizzle napkin wrap, which he learned at Trader Vic's. Basically, take a cocktail napkin and open it up. Fold diagonally creating a right triangle. Fold or roll the wide edge a few times and tie the two ends together around your glass. It gives the drinker something to hold onto so they don't have to hold a very cold, frosty glass.
Given my new-found appreciation for Chartreuse, I really like this one. Even though it's a frosty swizzle which typically would conjure images of a drink to be enjoyed on a hot summer day, this cocktail seemed perfect for early fall - a little spicy, a bit floral, with the sweetness of the pineapple juice taking the edge off of the Chartreuse. My better half called it "medicinal" but not pejoratively - she actually quite liked it.
This is a lovely, easy cocktail to make - definitely worth trying.
While you're swizzling up this modern cocktail, stream some modern exotica - one of my favorites - the Martini Kings!
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:
