EMBURY COCKTAILS

Embury Revisited: Mark Buettler's Perfect Louis

On the occasion of his birthday I've decided to revisit Mark Buettler's Perfect Louis. While Mark and I are partners in Brooklyn Hemispherical Bitters and he makes some very delicious celery bitters, we don't sell them--but the Bitter Truth Celery Bitters work very, very nicely in this riff on a Perfect Manhattan. I recall Mark used some lovely light organic honey from the Bay Area for his white honey syrup--make sure to get something delicate.

PERFECT LOUIS

1 oz Bourbon (Mark prefers Old Forresters)
1 oz Dry Vermouth
1 oz Sweet Vermouth
1/2 oz White Honey syrup (equal parts white honey and hot water)
2 dashes Angustora bitters
2 dashes Celery bitters 

Stir 30-35 times, Strain up, No garnish

 

Wednesday's Cocktail: The Ghost Of Christmas Past....

This louche riff on a French 75 comes from DJ and Beefeater and Plymouth's man about town Nick Van Tiel. It's a bit flash with the Be24 and the P.J., but it is the holidays after all, and one ought to treat one's guests to something special. And oneself. The honey syrup is simply 3 parts honey to one part water--Nick pours the honey in a mixing tin, adds the water  and shakes vigorously---cold  water is fine when you shake honey, it blends up nicely, something I didn't know. The Angostura pulls it back from the cusp of too-sweet, or too-tart. If you make several at once, which is only natural with champagne cocktails, this is actually a rather simple recipe--as simple as Nick's crisp handwriting on the page of my notebook. I could drink these until New Year's Eve.

Cocktail World Cup: Team Scotland's "The Wandering Chai"

For the punch competition at the Cocktail World Cup Team Scotland ( L-R, Aaron Jones, Ben McFarlane and Nick Reed) may not have won (Team U.S.A. took it home that night) but they did come up with a winner. A delicious milk-style punch, with soy milk taking the place of milk milk, some homemade chai, Appleton's 8 Year Old Rum and the 42Below Manuka Honey. When explaining their thinking behind the drink to the judges (including "Punch: The Delights (And Dangers) Of The Holiday Bowl" author David Wondrich, which made it a bit nerve-wracking, to be certain) the team talked about the fast pace of modern life and the popularity of coffee drinks on the go--to that end the punch was served warm, and in paper coffee cups, with sippy lids.

The use of soy was ingenious, keeping the mix from becoming too fatty, too savory--and it was one of the best uses of the hard-to-define Manuka in a cocktail that I've ever experienced. It was perfect for a cool fall night--as it was  when we were in New Zealand, and as it's--hopefully--the last few wet, cold weeks of spring here in the North there's still a chance to enjoy this liquid antidote to the chill.

THE WANDERING CHAI

800ml Soy milk
600ml 42 Below Manuka Honey
300ml Appletons 8yo Rum.
300ml Homemade chai syrup (made by boiling down chai tea and 1:1 sugar to water.)
A large knob of butter

Add all ingredients to a saucepan and heat (not boil) until butter is melted and milk warm. Serve in a take away coffee cup with a piece of home made almond and manuka honey praline.

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

 

Literary Cocktails: Molé Margarita Punch

For the final party at the Key West Literary Seminar we decided to pull out the stops and make a really dazzling, seemingly improbable cocktail as the grand finale. Over the 3 days of the Seminar our little cocktail table had gained something of a faithful following, with repeat visitors who sought us out and even one group that referred to themselves as our "groupies", which was flattering. I was struck by how this sophisticated, literate crowd of (as I like to refer to them) lifetime New Yorker subscription holders found the notion of specialty cocktails to be quite novel. It's easy living in New York and being within this whole cocktail scene to forget that this boozy renaissance has not quite hit outside of urban centers--there are certainly exceptions around the country, little bars and restaurants that take the craft of the cocktail seriously, but there's plenty of room for education and better libations.

So when we began serving the molé margarita minds were promptly blown.

It's gone by different names since Mark Buettler created it in the fall at Dressler, after challenging himself to find a way to use Ovaltine in a cocktail. When German bitters outfit Bittermans came out with their Xocolatl Molé Bitters, he saw a way to crack the code. The resulting neo-margarita was called Puebla on the Dressler menu, but I called it Y Tu Molé Tambien when I first wrote about it. We re-dubbed it the  Tarnished Halo at a party for James Rosenquist where Mark did the cocktail catering and renamed the drink after one of the artist's pieces. But for for the purposes of the party I simply referred to it as a "molé margarita"....and the crowd went wild. I'd batched it by sense rather than measurements---I had the luxury of having had many, many of the originals from Mark's hands. And in lieu of using store bought Orgeat Chris Otten of Bad Boy Burrito made a batch from scratch, toasting almonds for a couple hours, then cooking them down with a quite a lot of dark agave nectar--he did it using his considerable cuisine kung fu, dispensing with anything resembling a recipe, so I can't tell you what he did. But Torani makes a perfectly fine Orgeat (here). Like with the Bennett punch we made a big batch, shook individual drinks with ice and strained into glasses, topping with the bitters as a final touch. These glasses were rimmed with the crowning touch--a combination of Ovaltine, almond flour and Murray River Flake Salt. I'd recommend starting small and making individual drinks before jumping up to the punch version--get to know the flavor and you'll be able to tweak the big version to your taste. Here is the original recipe:

Y TU MOLE TAMBIEN/TARNISHED HALO

1 1/2 oz blanco tequila

1/2 oz fresh lime juice

1/3 oz dark agave nectar

1/3 oz Orgeat

Shake Strain into a Double Rocks Glass rimmed with Ovaltine/Almond Flour/Sea Salt

Add Fresh Ice

Top with 4 Dashes of Bittermans Xocolatl Molé Bitters

Give a Slight Stir to Incorporate the Bitters and Serve....

Rim Mixture:

2 parts Ovaltine
2 parts almond flour
1 part sea salt (Mark used  Fleur de Sel de Guerande, we used Murray River Pink Flake Salt)

Happy literati, suffused in a molé and tequila glow.

Torani Orgeat

Bittermans Bitters

All Mark Buettler posts and videos 

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 Cocktail: The Perfect Louis

Mark Buettler from Dressler again, this time with a brilliant cocktail that he created. A riff on the Perfect Manhattan, this one using bourbon (hence the Louis-ville), organic honey syrup and the elusive celery bitters. Quite possibly the best new cocktail I've tasted in the past year. Mark makes his own celery bitters from scratch, but Bitter Truth does them, which makes preparation considerably simpler-although it does help if you read German for ordering them online. The fellas at Brooklyn Barmen have 'em, and no German required.

PERFECT LOUIS (By Mark Buettler)

1 oz Bourbon (Mark prefers Old Forresters)
1 oz Dry Vermouth
1 oz Sweet Vermouth
1/2 oz White Honey syrup (equal parts white honey and hot water)
2 dashes Angustora bitters
2 dashes Celery bitters
Stir 30-35 times, Strain up, No garnish

Dressler

Brooklyn Barmen