EMBURY COCKTAILS

Happy Birthday Eau de Vie, & Some Experimentations from Philip Gandevia

Here at Embury our affection for Sydney's Eau de Vie is well documented, both here and in The New York Times. (The really smashing Sydney-centric cocktail blog Everyday Drinking confirms our high opinion of the team's  mad skills in a series of posts here.) On the eve of the stellar bar's one-year anniversary soon-to-be lead barman Philip Gandevia sent along "several experimentations" that employ our Brooklyn Hemispherical Bitters. We were inpired to finally bottle the bitters to share with Team Eau de Vie, and their very name alludes to a trans-hempispherical bitters exchange with this bar on the other side of the world. So we're incredly pleased to see them put to such high level use by Gandevia.


SMOKEY 'Ol SEOUL LOVE

50ml Reposado (Ocho works well, DJ just fine)
12.5 Grenadine (the good stuff... Pomegranate juice and all 15 kills it in sweetness, but 10ml is not quite enough)
3 dashes Peychauds (the drink's gotta be pink)
Liberal with Brooklyn Hemispherical Sriracha Bitters
10ml (or so - barspoons a bit shy, but dont let it dominate) smokey single malt goodness (or something illegal...)

Stir with love. Garnish with a lemon twist - but discard and donate to some lacklusture gin drink. Add a cherry if you feel it needs it, but the drinks pretty enough as is.

THE CONTENDER

50ml Tanqueray (or solid London Dry)
3 Fresh strawberries
20ml Lemon
20ml Apple juice (go cloudy if possible)
2 Chunks mandarin
Srig of rosemarry (no stem just leaves)
Dash egg white
15ml honey water (organic)
Tspn corriander seed

Crush then shakey shakey (Can infuse strawberrys in gin ala tequila por mi amante) and Brooklyn Hempispherical Strawberry Bitters to top.

THAI LADY BOY MEETS THE SCOTTISH GENT

45ml Reposado
30ml Aperol
20ml Cinzano Rosso
2 Thai Basil leaves
Brooklyn Hemispherical Rhubarb Bitters (go nuts)
Smokey rinse.

Stir, orange twist

WAITING ON THE WORLD

50ml Finlandia Grapefruit
25ml Lemon juice
20ml Honey
Egg white
Brooklyn Hemispherical Meyer Lemon Bitters on top....


Eau de Vie

Everyday Drinking

Brooklyn Hemipsherical Bitters

 

Rhubarb Bellini: Martha's Vineyard Edition

Photos: Sharon McGauley

The trans-hemispheric quest to create a rhubarb bellini came to fruition on a recent afternoon in Martha's Vineyard, with a crystal blue sky and brilliant sunlight and an wedding by the sea. Discussions about and experimentation with the mythical bellini had taken place in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, then continued in Melbourne, carried on through Sydney, were picked up again back to New York and ultimately crescendoed on Chappaquidick. The version that coalesced that day was a bit different from what I'd imagined it would be a week prior, when I was across the international date line on the other side of the equator. Some brilliant scheming in Australia went a bit awry and never quite came to fruition in time for the wedding--as Joni Mitchell might say, 'things conspired.' But to paraphrase Julia Childs: you'll never be a great chef if you always follow the recipe. In the end working with available elements yielded charming bellinis that refreshed wedding guests parched from the intense rays of the sun with a a welcome sweetness. (The heat and the vivid sun were elements that we may have not considered on that rainy evening in autumnal Melbourne.)  Below is the recipe I landed on that afternoon, and in the second half of the post some of the twists and turns that led to this iteration, for those who are interested in such cocktail questing. And while all the other variations certainly had their virtues, this one that came to be on the day that my longtime friends were getting married seems to have been exactly what was supposed to have been  all along.

RHUBARB BELLINI, MARTHA'S VINEYARD EDITION

1 cube demerrara sugar
3 dashes Peychaud's bitters
3 dashes Regan's Orange Bitters #6
3 dashes Fee Bros. Rhubarb Bitters
1/4 oz. fresh orange juice
1/4 oz. fresh lemon juice

Drop the demerarra cube into a tall flute, douse with all the above bitters. Add orange and lemon juice and fill-carefully, as it will be extra bubbly when it comes into contact with the sugar and the citrus-with champagne. Add a substantial orange twist, and one final dash of Fee Bros. Rhubarb Bitters on top for the nose.

Wednesday's Cocktail: The Lovely Rita

Embury Cocktails Presents: The Lovely Rita from Embury Cocktails on Vimeo.

iPhone & iPad friendly version here.

Friday Night Cocktails: Party Of Six

As part of his duties as Bartender Of The Month here at Embury, Mark Buettler is required to contribute an original cocktail every week in October. He'd forgotten that fact when I'd stopped by to shoot his entry for the sherry cocktail contest that every bartender with a blog or a Facebook page seems to be entering, and he was put on the spot to come up with something on the fly.  This impromptu number made from spirits in Mark's bar started out life as the Party Of Five, but the last minute addition of Aperol was the sweet but surprisingly complext guest that truly made the party.

PARTY OF SIX

1 oz tawny port (Mark used a 1997 tawny Colheita)

1 oz Beefeater 24

1/2 oz Poire Williams

1/2 oz Aperol

1/4 oz. St. Germain elderflower cordial
1/4 oz. lemon juice

 

Shake and strain into an up glass of your choice, garnish with a lemon twist.

Wednesday's Cocktail: The Ascot

I just came across this photograph of an Ascot taken in the fall of 2007, right after my first spirits press junket (Beefeater, see pen) and I was awash in the punchy afterglow of the discovery that drinking could be not merely euphoric and occasionally destructive but also aesthetically invigorating and, in the right hands, actually transcendent. The alchemy that a really good cocktail creates was new to me, and when I first started writing about spirits I found myself sitting at various bars around the world doing what can reasonably be called research. These experiences of watching and listening to skilled bartenders as they made and explained drinks changed me, and I daresay the seed for Embury was planted in that halcyon fall, when St. Germain was miraculous and new (see notes in photo) and I first grasped what kind of instant transformations a gifted bartender (or an excellent recipe, followed closely in one's home) could effect. It was a revelation that seemed worth sharing during that November cocktail hour when I took this photo. It still does.

J.R.

THE ASCOT

2. oz Beefeater gin.
3/4 oz Punt e Mes vermouth
1.5 oz Aperol Aperitivo

Stir and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon peel.

Welcome The Manchester

On a recent trip to Manchester, England to do a piece for Genre's Travel Issue I met up with Matt Fairhurst, Head Barman at the Harvey Nichols Manchester . Largely self-taught rather than a product of the U.K. mixology mill that can be a bit Draconian and arch, he delighted in making  riffs on classics and in inventing purely original creations. An incredible boon to his creative impulses was the proximity of the Harvey Nicks' spirits section, which lay about twenty feet past the entrance to the restaurant. Matt has access to an impressive selection of specialty spirits and other ingredients there, and when he's working on marvelous new inventions all he has to do is pop round the other side of the place to grab, say, cherry bitters or Marsaca, the  Croation cherry liquer. As with so many autodidacts I've met in the bar world, Matt's unfettered enthusiasm yields wondrous results-he hasn't been told what he can't do, and so believes he can do anything, concoction- wise--and thus he can. Here are his notes on this drink on the left--his variation on a Manhattan, dubbed The Manchester:

 

"With respect to the Manhattan I made you guys, it was in between sweet and perfect.  Usually bartenders will make a Manhattan - sweet, dry or perfect (as I'm sure you are aware). I've been playing around a lot using different types and quantities of both bourbon/rye and vermouth. This means you can be so specific and creates a larger scale when making or ordering a Manhattan, which I think customers a quickly catching on to.  In addition to the vermouth I like to add 5 ml of glace cherry syrup this adds; texture, flavour and gives the drink a real shine, I think the first sip is with the eye.  The recipe was;

 

3 drops Angostura Bitters (quite good with aperol bitters as well)

15 ml Antica Formula sweet vermouth

10 ml Noilly Prat dry

50 ml Old Rip Van Winkle 10yr old

5 ml Glace cherry syrup

Garnish with a lemon twist- when making the twist if you use a potato peeler rather than a knife, you just get the zest and none of the white pith which will add a bitter flavour to the drink, twist the lemon rind over the surface of the drink and rim the glass before dropping it in."

Let me assure you, it is sublime.  I'll have more of Matt's recipes here in the near future as he's contributed some of his inventions to my piece on Asian-influenced cocktails for the January issue of OUT. Below are some Harvey Nicks signature drinks, as well as another Fairhust orginal, The Gentleman Zombie.

Decadent Opulence

40ml Baileys

15 ml Cream

15 ml Blackberry puree

10ml Cacao

10ml Caramel

Titan Cosmo


35ml Orange vodka
40ml Strawberry puree
5ml Gomme
10ml Lemon juice
10ml Frais de bois

Blackberry Cascade

12.5 ml Chambord

12. 5ml Vanilla

3 Blackberries

Champagne float

GENTLEMAN ZOMBIE

 
Matt's version of a zombie--lethal!!!!!!
 
20ml Havana Club
20ml Doorly's
20ml Appleton XN
15ml Gooslings
10ml Wray And Nephew Overproof 63% abv rum
35ml Lime juice
20ml Taylor's velvet falernum
Dash French absinthe
5ml Maraschino
10ml Apricot brandy
5ml Gomme
30ml Orange juice
50ml Pineapple juice
squeeze of fresh pink grapefruit
 
Do not drink more than two!