EMBURY COCKTAILS

Friday Night Cocktail: In Another Time

Sometimes necessity is truly the mother of unexpectedly lyric invention. On a recent evening at Embury HQ the beer just wasn't cutting it, and faced with a rather lean spirit selection Friend Of Embury Oliver Rockaway fashioned this cocktail from available-and initially improbable seeming-elements. Some fresh grapefruit juice, ginger syrup, a bit of green apple and three little airplane bottles of Maker's Mark later "In Another Time" was born. This grapefruit bourbon sour is so named after the Sade song we were listening to on repeat while Oliver sought, and found, inspiration.

IN ANOTHER TIME

2 oz  Bourbon (Maker's Mark is a great option for a more rich approach, Basil Hayden's for a lighter)

1 oz Fresh Grapefruit Juice
.5 oz Ginger Root Simple Syrup

Shake and strain into a coupe.

Rim the glass with green apple piece and add a slice for garnish.

The cocktail works just as well, if not better, on the rocks, and is preferable that way for afternoon drinking. Try this instead of a mimosa. Trust us. You will love it.

GINGER SYRUP

Boil equal parts Turbinado sugar and water, add ample chopped ginger, stir occasionally until  thick and strain well.

In Another Time - Sade

Everybody's All American

My piece on Bourbon as an all-American spirit is online over at Out.com--read it here. One of the plusses of writing for a gay magazine is that you can use the phrase "young, dumb and full of cum" in a spirits article and tit stays in. J.R.

Photo: Jamie Chung

Literary Cocktails: The Beautiful Toddies

Photo: Curt Richter

When the Director of the Key West Literary Seminar, Miles Frieden, asked me to come down to do a little specialty cocktail table for the various parties that follow the days' more sober proceedings I simply reviewed Embury and pulled some of the best recipes we've run over the years (yes, years!) and batched them up. But for the first night's party I pulled a last minute substitution. The same cold snap that descended over the rest of the continent did in fact reach Key West and nighttime temperatures in the low 40s meant that an outdoor partygoers could really use something warm. 

A last minute experimentation with my crack drinking & concocting team from Bad Boy Burrito yielded the below version of a hot toddie. My one bit of advice for serving 300 people a cocktail with hot water as an integral part: make sure you've got working hot water source. And if you get percolators, make sure they don't have a residual coffee aftertaste. My assistant Zeph Allen and I worked with the one acceptable percolator and made it work, shuttling hot water across the garden in air pots. A bank of 3 or 4  instantly heating tea pots would have been nice. I'd named the Toddie after Seminar honoree Richard Wilbur's poem "The Beautiful Changes"

THE BEAUTIFUL TODDIE

(We used 8 ounce paper cups)

1 good slug of dark agave nectar, just enough to fill the bottom of the cup (to about 1/3 inch.)

1 1/2 ounces Maker's Mark

Hot water--fill to about an 3/4 inch from the rim, and stir about 5 times

Squeeze and drop in a substantial lemon wedge

Top with a couple healthy dashes of Fee Bros. Grapefruit Bitters.

The Grapefruit Bitters push the whole flavor equation into a zestier zone, bringing up the citrus and offsetting the sweetness of the agave and the Maker's Mark perfectly. By all accounts this was a home run, warming guests so sucessfully that many were able to brave the chilly night for a couple hours, and a couple rounds.

Helper monkey Zeph Allen taking the wheel. (One uses "helper monkey" in the most affectionate sense, and of course it comes from a Simpsons episode where Homer gets one as a sort of drinking & slacking buddy.) It was cool to watch a non-bartender start to get the whole key notion of balance in cocktails, and play with levels and tweak ingredients, an innate sensibility that probably is rooted in his musicianship. Towards the end of the evening Zeph made a few alternate iterations, subbing some light agave for the dark to refreshing, less knock-out drops effect

 

Jolly Benson, Lighting Director for the KWLS and too-infrequent Embury contributor (here) and myself.

Check out Littoral, the blog for the Seminar, here, and look for podcasts of readings and talks from the Seminar at the Audio Archives.

Tomorrow: The Bennet for 200.

Photos: Ian Rowan

Quote Of The Week: Roger O. Thornhill

"I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself 'slightly' killed."  So says Cary Grant as Roger O. Thornhill in "North By Northwest",  from a bone-dry screenplay by the prolific Ernest Lehman. Below, Martin Landau prepares to dose Grant with bourbon and put him behind the wheel of a car in an unkind effort to disappoint said bartenders.

 

Jerk.

Friday Night Cocktails: Booker's Notion

Naming cocktails after songs is a noble tradition--Jeffrey Morgenthaler regularly mines the 70s rock catalogue for titles. But In an attempt at some reverse engineering mixology, I asked Bartender Of The Month Mark Buettler to make a drink actually inspired by the Booker T. & The M.G.'s song "Booker's Notion." I suggested using prior bar manager Jim Ryan's recipe for the Peter Pan Punch as a jumping off point: elegant Basil Hayden's, Luxardo Maraschino liqueur, lemon juice, simple syrup and pixie mandarins, shaken, strained and poured over  rocks. Mark thought the song was "a little grimy, a little dirty," and set about roughing up the original which was delicious but, like its namesake, a bit precious, a tad jejeune. The first step was leaving out the the Luxardo and muddling two brandied cherries in the glass instead, leaving clumps of the dark fruit to float about in the drink. Ramazattti and Blood Orange Bitters, grown-up tangerines and of course the 121-127 proof power bourbon Booker's completed the transformation from pretty boy cocktail to down-and-dirty man drink.

BOOKER'S NOTION

1 1/2 oz Booker's

3/4 oz Ramozzatti Amaro

1/2 oz Stirrings Blood Orange Bitters

1/4 oz Lemon

4 slices of Mandarin Orange

2 Brandied Cherries

Muddle cherries in bottom of double rocks glass, leave in

Muddle mandarin with lemon

Add rest of liquids, shake with ice, strain over cherries in glass

I like to think that Mark took Peter Pan out to a dive bar on this one, getting him drunk and laid. When Peter wakes up in the morning in a strange bed with no idea where he is and no money, he's nonetheless happy. Everyone's gotta learn sometime.

As I snapped the photo above at Dressler a school bus entered the frame, and I instantly thought of a line a friend likes to drop when he gets up to leave a bar: "That school bus isn't going to drive itself." That seemed fittingly grimy for this drink, and for this song, which you can hear below, and download below that.

Booker's Notion

Download Booker's Notion

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.

Bourbon Fest Postcards Pt. 3

Part 3 of 3, Part 1 here, Part 2 here, everything about bourbon here. At the Maker's Mark distillery, giant vats of fermenting mash.

The distillery is much more polished and art directed than Jim Beam--rather than a raw, bare pipes factory it's a a series of carefully preserved and judiciously updated barn-style buildings with red shutters that echo the trademark red wax on the Maker's bottles.

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.