EMBURY COCKTAILS

A Civilized Alternative To Countless Pints On St. Patrick's Day: Jameson Black Barrel Select Reserve

(Note: This post was originally published on newnownext.com, the online side on the Logo network. When I first tasted the Black Barrel my instant reaction was: gateway Irish whiskey for the unitiated and the second thought was: I could see this bracing iteration of Jameson landing with the gays. Thus, the open shirt come-on of the photo (below) I shot for the piece. But rest assured: all are welcome to enjoy this fine spirit. J.R.)

Irish Whiskey has fallen off in popularity in the last couple generations in the U.S. but as drinkers' palates get more sophisticated and complex subtleties are starting to come back into the forefront of sprits (see: mezcal, pisco) the category is swiftly coming back into vogue. One bold new expression of a classic should further hasten that return. From the gold standard of Irish whiskies, Jameson, comes a subtle, restrained new iteration that falls well below the aged versions in terms of price, but holds up beautifully on flavor profile.  Jameson Black Barrel Select Reserve is made from a combination of rare grain whiskies and pot still malted and unmalted whiskies, and aged in sherry & bourbon casks for an average of 12 years (as opposed to standard Jameson's 7), Then a team of distillers blends them in a wickedly tasty ratio that has the sock in the jaw you expect from Irish whiskies, but without the more maltly, almost syrup-y quality of Jameson. Where Jameson has a green apple sweetness the Black Barrel goes more autumnal, with notes of vanilla, toasted oak and stone fruit, set off by a touch of welcome spice and heat that gives each sip a complex and evolving arc. Bracing and supple, this sipper may just be the gateway Irish whiskey that seduces you.

Jameson Black Barrel Select Reserve is only available in New York right now but will be rolling out to other markets in the months to come. It clocks in at about $44, and it can be ordered from Astor Wine & Spirits. J.R.

Further New Traditionalists Partying & The Meyer Lemon Whiskey Sour

Team Embury just catered another event at The New Traditionalists, this one extremely well-attended, very liquid and quite the bash. We batched up 3 great punches and I'll post those recipes shortly, but I wanted to get this recipe for the Meyer Lemon Whiskey Sour I was making to order up here now, as Meyers are very available right now, at least here in New York.  Initially I used Basil Hayden's which is always lovely and delicate, but switched to the durable and more affordable Jim Beam Rye when that ran out, with no significant loss of drink virtue--in fact, the more earthy rye may stand up to the sweet Meyer better. I used Agrimontana sour cherries (available here) to bring a rich, savory extra sweet/sour-ness that is far superior to poisonous red maraschino cherries. When I ran low on simple syrup I added some of the syrup from the cherries which yielded a darker cocktail with a certain fatty quality--also delicious.

MEYER LEMON WHISKEY SOUR

2 oz. Bourbon or rye
1/2 oz/ Simple syrup
Juice of 1 Meyer Lemon (about 1/2 to 3/4 oz, mix to taste)

Shake with ice, serve up or on the rocks. Garnish with an orange twist and a cherry or two.

World Cup Drinking: England Vs. Algeria, Louis 649 and Further Daytime Bourbon Cocktailing

 

Another maddening draw on the field, but the cocktails in New York are fine. Louis 649's suggestions for daylight World Cup imbibing includes the Brown Derby, further supporting my hunch that bourbon and citrus cocktails like Rye House's "Team USA World Cup Smash" and Embury's own "In Another Time" are the way to go over mimosas any day, particularly weekdays when you find yourself commencing cocktail hour around a 10 am kickoff.

BROWN DERBY

2oz Old Forester Bourbon
1oz Grapefruit Juice
.5oz honey syrup

Shaken & strained into a chilled coupe glass.

World Cup Drinking: USA V. Slovenia, Rye House & The Worst Call In Recent Memory

How this....

and this...

 

...went to this, after what the New York Times called a "stunning rally
 followed by a "shocking call" (Full NYT story here) will be discussed for decades to come.

The giddy euphoria that had followed the late game rally was replaced by quiet desperation for this crew that showed up at 10:00 a.m at Rye House to watch the high-pressure game. It was the kind of devastation where you don't even want to drink, but Lynnette Marrero nobly poured USA Goa Shots (a Tito's Vodka Lemon Drop) all around despite the goal being discounted.

 

It was a bit like the band playing on the deck of the Titanic as it sank. We all drank them, however, and mine gave me the inspiration, perhaps ill-advised, to drink through to England Vs. Algeria at Louis 649. This World Cup, if you're fortunate to live in a time zone where games come on in the mornings, is a great rallying cry to daytime drinking.

The "Team USA World Cup Smash" Lynette handed me upon arrival was a delightful little pre-breakfast eye opener, rivalling Embury's own "In Another Time" as an extremely persuasive bourbon cocktail alternative to the dreaded Mimosa.

TEAM USA WORLD CUP SMASH

Muddle 4 Lemon Wedges
3/4 oz simple syrup
2 oz Old Forrester 100
6 Mint leaves

Shake & strain over ice.

And in Lynette's own neat hand:

Friday Night Cocktail: Brandied Cherry Bourbon Sour

An unexpected surplus of bourbons was delivered to my friends' home in Lyme, New Hampshire, all  in service of a piece I'm working on for VMan Magazine. This led to an impromptu and extremely casual tasting session of four bourbons, which I'll be writing about Monday. It also compelled me to make some cocktails with the bounty--after a lengthy swim across Loch Lyme and back we were all a bit knackered and sunburnt and something sweet and revitalizing was called for. I'd intended to make some Meyer Lemon Whiskey Sours but, of course, Meyers have a way of being elusive when you're looking for them. I decided to adapt John Byrd's recipe for the Meyer Sour and simply use some lemons we had on hand, very simple, very classic. The stroke of unintentional genius came when I wondered aloud if there were maraschino cherries in the house or if we'd need to go the store and Sarah suggested using her brandied cherries that she'd made for desert to follow the southern-style meal she was preparing (buttermilk-soaked fried chicken, collard greens, beans and bacon). I tried a sour with a brandied cherry as a garnish and knew we'd hit on something.

 

The added booziness and sugar of the brandied cherries pushes the equation in a decadent direction--proper Italian luxardo cherries would be great in a sour, but the brandy adds a heady opulence and gives the drink a lovely pink cast. We were all immediately revived and in good cheer. J.R.

BRANDIED CHERRY BOURBON SOUR (Adapted from John Byrd's Meyer Lemon Whiskey Sour recipe)

2oz. Basil Hayden's Bourbon
A light .5oz. of simple syrup (the brandied cherries bring plenty of sugar so go easy on the simple.)
Juice of 1 Meyer Lemon
Shake and strain
Garnish with brandied cherry (don't be afraid to throw in some extra juice) & orange slice

BRANDIED CHERRIES:

1 lb. Bing Cherries, pitted
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 vanilla bean, split in half
1/2 cup brandy

Combine sugar and water in sauce pan.  Scrape seeds from vanilla pod into sugar mixture and add pod as well.  Bring mixture to a boil.  Add cherries and 1/4 cup brandy and simmer for ten minutes.  Remove cherries with a slotted spoon and reserve.  Simmer liquid in saucepan until syrupy and reduced to about 1/2 of a cup.  Pour syrup over reserved cherries and let cool.  When cherries are cooled, stir in remaining 1/4 cup brandy.

Brandied cherries can be kept covered and refrigerated for several weeks.  Flavors will improve with time. Sarah Hodge.

 

Results of the eratz bourbon tasting next week.

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.

Bourbon Fest Postcards Pt. 2

(Much of the  following is borrowed liberally from press materials from Jim Beam) At the Jim Beam plant, a table representing the components of the distillation process. Ground corn is mixed with pure limestone-filtered water and then cooked at a fairly high temperature. The temperature is then lowered and the ground rye is added. After the mixture has cooked, the temperature is lowered again for the addition of barley malt. This begins the mashing process. Barley is malted by moistening the grains until they sprout, which releases an enzyme that converts grain starch into sugars. When the conversion is complete, the mash is transferred to the fermenters.

Yeast is then added to the mash to begin the fermentation process. Each different strain of yeast imparts a distinctive flavor and aroma to the finished whiskey, and each distiller has a preferred strain. At Knob Creek, they use a proprietary jug yeast that has been the same since the end of Prohibition. The yeast converts the grain sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

When the fermentation is complete, the mash, now called “distiller’s beer,” is pumped to the still. Inside the tall column still, mash entering from the top meets steam entering from the bottom. The steam vaporizes the alcohol in the mash and carries it out the top of the still to be cooled and re-condensed. This product of the first distillation is called “low wine.” The low wine is delivered to a second still where it is heated and converted again to a vapor that is collected and condensed. The product of this second distillation step is called “high wine” or “white dog.”

New whiskey is as clear as water. All of the distinctive color, and some of the flavor, come from aging in new, charred oak barrels. The longer a Bourbon is aged, the more flavor and color it takes from the wood. The charring of the inside of the barrel produces a layer of caramelized sugars in the wood, which slowly dissolve into the resting Bourbon.

Bourbon Fest Postcards Pt. 1

In 2007 I visited Bardstown, Kentucky as a guest of the Jim Beam family. While it's a family of bourbons, and a business enterprise, it's also a real family and what I was struck by how much it felt that way.  Certainly, Fred Noe, the seventh-generation head of the Beam company, made u feel like guests of a family, sitting at the head of a picnic table at a party at his house, telling some of us how Jim Beam and ginger ale was his drink of choice on a ht summer night, and that he was never happier when he was sitting on his back porch drinking one. It was also fantastic how these big guys in suspenders and non-ironic trucker hats were crafting some of the best spirits in the world with the same level of care and understanding of terroir and process as as a French winemaker. I grew up in rural Oregon in a town dominated by the logging industry so I was quite comfortable among these guys, but back in Molalla men that looked this cut down trees for a living, and here they made wondrous, sophisticated spirits.  I took to referring to the distillers we met, and with no disrespect intended, as redneck artisans. It's hard to convey how completely bourbon suffuses Kentucky culture; there's a level of tradition and passion for spirits passed on from generation to generation that I've certainly never experienced anywhere else in America. The landscape feels steeped in bourbon--it's in the fields of corn, rye and barley and it's in the water.

At the Jim Beam ditillery the group of spirits writers were led on a tour that was much like going through Willy Wonka's Chcocolate Factory filled with all manner of magical surprises.

Wednesday's Cocktail: Will Foster Double Bill

Will Foster, proprietor of Casita Bar in East London's Shoreditch District and the man who turned Embury onto The Verdita, was recently in Florida at the same time as I was in Key West, so he and Mrs. Foster came down for a visit. Naturally, we had to have a little drinks get-together. Will had some pretty grand ambitions that were amended due to lack of availability of a couple of key ingredients, and his ability to change it up and adapt is instructive to the home bartender who doesn't have access to all ingredients under the sun.  Will and I had been chatting about bourbon since his arrival and when I asked him what we might serve at the party he ruminated on it over the next 24 hours. He arrived on a riff on the Bossavelha, a cachaça based drink he'd created for Sagatiba Velha: 

BOSSALVELHA

50ml Sagatiba Velha
20ml Creme de Peche,
25ml lemon juice
1 bar spoon accacia honey
3 quarters of a peach,

Muddle the peach, cachaça and honey add the rest,  shake very hard and strain into a coupe. W.F.

Will planned to adapt it to a bourbon base, and was dead set on Buffalo Trace: "Buffalo lends itself well to cocktails because of its deep flavour and smoothness - one can still taste it through mixers and other elements."  Will asked for fresh peaches, creme de peche, lemon and white honey, and while he and Mrs. Foster were out enjoying the Key West sunset our host Haven and I were driving all around town trying to source the ingredients.  Key West is one of the great drinking towns but that's great in the volume sense, not in quality or variety. After hitting almost every liquor store in town with no luck, at our last  stop we did find the Trace, and big bottles too. No creme de peche was to be found, but there was some peach brandy, situated next to racks of the peach schnappes Will had explicitly warned against, and after some soul searching I grabbed it. So the key ingredient was covered-or was it? Three grocery stores later and there were no fresh peaches to be found. So we hit the frozen aisle and grabbed bags of frozen peaches.

Back at Haven's we rendezvoused with the Fosters and brought him up to date on the near misses, a bit   hesitant-the man's an artist behind the bar and you want an artist to have his weapons of choice. No fear. As Will wrote to me later, "When winging it, it is always essential to remember that there's always a way and the show must go on!" So a muddled drink became a frozen one, as the peaches would only work that way, really, and the peach brandy was in fact an acceptable substitute in our pinch.

THE BOSSY BUFFALO

50 ml Buffalo Trace
20 ml peach brandy
1 teaspoon honey
25 ml lemon juice
4 frozen peach slices,
3 ice cubes, blended

Of course, these proportions were quadrupled by Will as he made blender-size batches of the Bossy Buffalo, and it all worked out perfectly.

Mr. and Mrs. Foster, impressed by the massive jug of Trace, dutifully document it.

 

Mr. and Mrs. Foster picking mint for the batch of Mint Juleps they served.

Some guests were a little taken aback by how strong they were: essentially just bourbon, mint and sugar, and crushed ice. As they chill up in the glass and the ice melts they become much more manageable for the bourbon novice. Will advises infusing  the bourbon with the mint at least overnight to achieve a very saturated flavor. Our resident Kentuck native Jenny (left) approved of the Juleps, which was doubly nice as the mint came from her garden. J.R.

Casita Bar

Sagatiba Velha,

Buffalo Trace

And everyone was quite happy at the end of the party.

Friday Night Cocktails: Meyer Lemon Whisky Sour

As we continue to celebrate all things Kentucky pre-Derby, this Friday Night Cocktail is a twist on the classic Whiskey Sour, substituting the distinctive Meyer Lemon for the traditional standard lemon. John Byrd, a great resource for Embury, bartender at Dressler and one of the Brooklyn Barmen team, came up with this one after we were discussing the drinks in the 1952 film The Mating Season.  Thelma Ritter whips up a giant batch of whiskey sours that kicks a house party Gene Tierny is hosting into high gear. I wondered if there were something to make a sour a bit more approachable for the novice whiskey drinker, particularly in a party context,  and John proposed this persuasive update with the seasonal Meyer. In the film Ritter raisese the subtle distinction between making a whiskey sour sweet or sour, and the Meyer, allegedly a cross between a mandarin and a lemon, mananges to split the difference between the extremes-in fact, in deference to the film, you might say it mates them--and as luck would have it, it's Meyer season.

MEYER LEMON WHISKEY SOUR

2oz. of Rye or Bourbon (John favors Jim Beam Rye)
.5oz. of simple syrup
Juice of 1 Meyer Lemon
Shake and strain
Garnish with cherry & orange

I wasn't certain if John had intended for this to be served up or on the rocks or up and while waiting for a response to an e-mailed query I consulted the film, where they drink their sours up (although possibly blended, it's a bit unclear). Then I heard back from John: "I always like body in my drink so I never strain the juice, and on the rocks is nice or in tall glass with some soda." I'd already shot (and drank) the cocktail above when I got that and I can confirm that it works up. J.R.

John also does a version with tangerine: "This one  is almost the same but I backed off on the simple syrup because the tangerines I had were pretty sweet. Taper it off with a touch of Meyer or lemon."

Dressler
Brooklyn Barmen
The party scenes from 'The Mating Season' are on YouTube, first part here, second part here.