Tagged cocktails

• 2022-07-23 8:34 AM -04:00

  Amaro Showdown at Casa Di Desmond

  I have a small collection of Italian Amaros. I decided to try them all

  A while back I started going through a phase where I would buy any reasonably well-reviewed bottle of Italian amaro I could find at my local liquor store, in a halfhearted and somewhat misguided attempt to reconnect with my Italian roots (my mother is from Sicily). I can't honestly say that it worked (what would that even look like? I already talk with my hands, I don't need to do it more) but it did result, as you might expect, in a small collection of Italian amari being added to my home bar.

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• 2021-08-10 5:53 PM -04:00

  Drambuie has a bad reputation, but for what it is worth it's pretty good in a sour - 2 parts Drambuie, 1 part lemon juice, shaken over ice and strained.  This is from a guy who actually likes Rusty Nails.

• 2020-05-26 9:23 PM -04:00

  Possibly unpopular opinion: Martinis do not taste very good.

• 2020-05-24 6:28 PM -04:00

  Reply to https://twitter.com/dxnielvaughn/status/1264680744456159234?s=20

  You don't know me, but I have that exact same vermouth and it's delicious!  You made a Boulevardier, right?

  

  Twitter

  

  Daniel Vaughn on Twitter

  “Everyone's picking up quarantine hobbies. Mine is cocktails! Slowly but surely building out the bar and the repertoire. @kvlly obviously has zero complaints.”

• 2017-09-13 12:09 PM -04:00

  Stuff Desmond learned: red vermouth is actually made (usually) from white wine and gets its color from other ingredients.

• 2017-04-22 5:04 PM -04:00

  St Germain and Suze make a good combination.

• 2017-04-07 6:04 PM -04:00

  Desmond's tasting notes for Strega: a less burny version of Chartreuse.

• 2017-01-07 9:32 PM -05:00

  Not Invented by Monks

  Continuing in my attempt to document the mixers and liqueurs I've been sampling recently, I will now focus on Benedictine, a French, brandy-based, herbal liqueur.

  The name conjures up images of secluded monks guarding secret recipes handed down for generations (see my article about Chartreuse, another monastically themed libation, for a similar background) but according to Wikipedia the real story is a bit more prosaic: it was apparently invented by wine merchant and industrialist Alexandre Le Grand who later tried to link his concoction with the Benedictine Abbey of Fécamp in Normandy to boost sales.

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• 2016-12-31 2:21 AM -05:00

  It's Not Easy Being Green

  About a year ago, I bought a bottle of green Chartreuse. I bought it because I stumbled upon something called a Bijou cocktail and decided that I wanted to try it.

  Chartreuse is a liqueur made by French monks from a secret recipe purported to be hundreds of years old. It's usually described as tasting "herbal", but I find that's about as useful as saying that something tastes like "chicken"; it's the word you use when you can't think of anything else to say. For my money, I find that it's very sweet and tastes strongly of anise (which I don't mind; I like Drambuie, which also has a strong anise flavour) but also has a kind of "vegetable" aftertaste that I find a bit off putting,

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• 2016-12-27 8:45 PM -05:00

  Life is Bitter

  The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, David Embury's classic, is notable for being somewhat rigid in its definition of a cocktail. He basically divides all of cocktail-dom into two camps: the aromatic ones (Manhattans, Martinis, Old-Fashioneds), and the sour ones (basically anything with lemon or lime juice in it, though never enough to overpower the main liquor).

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• 2016-12-22 10:17 PM -05:00

  It Started with the Vesper

  Lately I've been experimenting with "mixers". By "mixer" I mean aperitifs, liqueurs, and digestifs that almost always appear as secondary ingredients in a cocktail, but that one almost never thinks of drinking on their own. The intention here is to write a series of articles about each one.

  It started with the Vesper, a mixed drink well known in cocktail circles. The recipe comes from an iconic scene in Ian Flemings's Casino Royale, where Bond instructs the bartender as follows:

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• 2015-08-21 8:08 PM -04:00

  Calvados Crusta. Possibly my new favourite drink.

• 2014-12-23 4:49 AM -05:00

  Meditations on the Aromatic Cocktail

  David Embury classifies cocktails into two distinct groups: sour cocktails and aromatic cocktails. I've written in the past about sour cocktails but have been mostly silent about aromatic ones.

  Until NOW, that is! It was an omission that just had to be rectified. Right? RIGHT?!

  Aromatic cocktails are flavoured by some kind of aromatic wine, spirit, or bitters. Based on my (limited) experiments, I broadly categorize these drinks into:

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• 2014-12-22 4:37 AM -05:00

  More on Sour Cocktails

  I've posted before about sour cocktails, but I felt that the subject deserved a bit more elabouration. The material here, as before, is quite heavily inspired by (some might say stolen from) David Embury's classic taxonomy from The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.

  Embury's basic approach was to define a sour cocktail template. In his mind, a sour cocktail consisted of:

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• 2013-06-05 12:25 AM -04:00

  Another Batch of Tonic Water

  I made a batch of tonic water syrup a couple of years ago and, though it was a success, there were a couple of things I found slightly off-putting in the result. Specifically:

  • I didn't really like the all-spice.
  • I didn't really like the lemongrass
  • I thought there was too much citric acid.

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• 2012-09-14 1:24 AM -04:00

  Sour Cocktails and the Embury Ratio

  Over the last couple of years I've put together what I consider to be a fairly impressive home bar, and I've spent much of that time experimenting with various cocktails.

  There are people in my social circle for whom mixing drinks is a bit taboo. When I say that I use Calvados) or Cognac in a cocktail, the first reaction I usually get is "What a waste!"

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• 2011-07-16 6:28 PM -04:00

  Adventures With Tonic Water

  Some people from work invited me to the Dominion Tavern a week or two ago. I was persuaded to try the gin and tonic, as I was told that the tonic water was homemade.

  I ordered one. The drink that came was orange in colour and looked vaguely like tang. In other words, it did not look like a gin and tonic. It tasted, however, unmistakeably like a gin and tonic - a rather good gin and tonic at that, and this comes from a guy who's not particularly enthusiastic about gin and tonics.

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