EMBURY COCKTAILS

Eeu de Vie Offerings: The Taming of Ardberg

 

Pursuant to my piece in the New York Times T Magazine on the Small Bars of Sydney we'll be running cocktails from the bars included therein. First up is Eau de Vie, the snug, elegant and damn near perfect speakeasy in Darlinghurst. Barry Chalmers, a wry Scotsman,  runs the show there, and we spoke about how the crew had been cherry-picked for their respective strengths.  The personalities behind the bar are quite diverese and complement one another both in style and specialties. It's a well cast gang, all with immense cocktailing skills and deep knowledge of spirits. Barry's made this cocktail for me  while I was there, an audacious attempt to fashion a cocktail around of the profoundly peaty Islay single malt, the Ardberg Ten Years Old. Having partaken of the very cocktail Barry's making in the above photo I can attest to his  success with this endeavor.

THE TAMING OF ARDBERG

40 ml Ardberg Ten Years Old
20 ml Martini Rosso
10  ml Averna
1 Bar spoon Muscovado sugar
1 Dash Angostura Bitters
1 Bar spoon Kirsch

Stir down, serve up with an orange twist.

Vintage Reserve: J & B, Playboy May 72

We see and must obey...Browsing through vintage Playboys online, one finds some very cool vintage spirits ads. More after the jump, and past Vintage Reserves here.

Wednesday's Cocktail: William Grant & Sons Quartet

The other night I was a guest at a William Grant & Sons cocktail tasting at the Bouley Test Kitchen on lower, lower, lower West Broadway. Leisurely, intimate, and painlessly informative-the drinks' creators were right there to discuss their inspirations as they made them for you-it was one of those surreal, highly cinematic and unusually gracious evenings you sometimes experience when you write about cocktails.

William Grant's small portfolio boasts a hardy, eclectic array of spirits, so the cocktails employing their brands were all over the map, but unified by a certain elegance and certainly a high grade of craftmanship. Bartenders and brand ambassadors. ringed the room serving Grant-based drinks, four of which were real standouts for me.  William Grant's noted doyenne, Charlotte Voisey, manned the first cocktail station as you entered the kitchen, and we found ourselves migrating back their throughout the evening for another taste of her Blood and Sanguinello, a pink and amber cloud of single-malt scotch, Lillet Rouge, and exotic citrus punched up by Solerno, their new blood orange liqueur.

BLOOD AND SANGUINELLO - Charlotte Voisey

Solerno 0.75 oz
Glenfiddich 0.75 oz
Lillet Rouge 0.75 oz
Fresh pink grapefruit 0.50 oz
Fresh lemon juice 0.25 oz
4 luxardo maraschino cherries
Orange bitters 2.00 dashes
Egg whites

Combine ingredients and shake very well
Serve up in a coupe (or small wine glass)
Garnish with a thin slice of blood orange.

People kept migrating back to Charlotte's table for to further sample the Blood and Sanguinello.

Rob Krueger  of Employees Only and Macao served up his Kobayashi Cocktail, with homemade candied kumquats. He told me he'd wanted to strike a balance between the style of his two establishments.