Cocktails 101 from the Loft, Time Out Best Bar

Creme de la Creme

2011-03-21T09:50:00.001-07:00

Homemade Fruit Crèmes

There are an awful lot of brands of fruit liqueur on the market, and there is an even bigger range in their quality. When I first attempted to make my own fruit liqueurs, I held out hope that I could make something that tasted better that some of the poorer brands. I did not expect to be able to make liqueurs which hands down beat everything out there.
But then why not? Fruit crèmes are made with fruit, sugar, alcohol and water. That's it. And having made some properly, it became clear why the bad brands are so bad. They just don’t have much fruit in them, if any, and clearly use fake fruit aromas to bolster their intensity. Even with the good brands who make liqueurs properly with no shortcuts, the liqueur will have been made many months before you are drinking it, and they will lose some freshness of fruit flavour in this time. The liqueur recipes here you can drink the moment they are ready and the difference is remarkable.

There are several books on the subject of making homemade liqueurs. They are a very useful tool to start with, but I find that they all are a bit over simplified and the end products a little amateurish, dare I say. There are techniques not discussed in them to clarify your end products. I have tried 2 methods which work well, and have their own benefits and disadvantages. A clear product not only looks far better, it has a better mouth feel, less astringency or bitterness on the finish, and lasts longer, and for these reasons are an absolute must when trying to make something better that you could buy in.

My technique for making fruit crèmes has several stages and is rather time consuming, but I feel that it extracts the maximum amount of flavour and thus gives the best intensity in the resulting liqueur. With fruit crèmes, it is essential to use high ABV spirit. The higher the ABV, the better the alcohol strips flavour and colour from the fruit. Polish Pure Spirit does a good job at 80% ABV. I have also used 96% alcohol which I brought back from Italy with me, where you can buy it in any supermarket, as many people make their own homemade liqueurs (Every southern Italian will tell you that their mum/dad makes the best limoncello in the world) and the intensity of fruit flavour in the resulting liqueur is excellent. 40% or 50% vodkas simply do not work as well.

The first stage is maceration in alcohol (for those who don’t know the difference between maceration and infusion, maceration is done at low temperatures, infusion at high temperatures). I have read several sources that say to macerate the fruit for a month, but I feel that one week is sufficient, though if you have the time 2 weeks is better. High strength spirit is very efficient at extracting flavour, and raspberries, blackberries and blackcurrants are all very small, so the alcohol does not have far to travel to extract flavour from the centre of the fruit.
The best fruit to use is the best frozen fruit you can find. Your fruit supplier will be able to source something good for you, as many patisserie chefs use frozen fruit, as the fruit sugar content is far superior to fresh fruit. If you do not need to worry about a fruits shelf-life in a supermarket, and its perishability on its way there, then you can pick fruit at its absolute ripest and immediately freeze it. Freezing fruit destroys the cell structure, and so is a terrible technique to preserve fruit if you want to maintain is texture, but in liqueur making the texture of the fruit is completely irrelevant, as we will be filtering every last bit of cellulose from the drink.
Using frozen fruit also helps to reduce the maceration time, and this may explain the discrepancy between what I have found in practice and what I have read in sources. Frozen fruit has already had all its cell membranes broken by the act of freezing, so as it thaws in the alcohol, the alcohol does not need to waste time diffusing across the membranes.
The second stage after draining off the liquid from the fruit is to add sugar to the fruit. This draws out more liquid and flavour due to osmosis, in a gentler way than squeezing or centrifuging. This also means that the sugar we are using to sweeten the liqueur is strongly flavoured with the fruit and this help the final flavour intensity.
The last stage, when this sweetened liquid is removed is to add water to the fruit, twice. This washes out any remaining sugar, flavour and alcohol from the fruit.
For these recipes some of the directions might seem a little vague, but this is because you have to taste things as you go along and act accordingly as fruit flavour and water content vary from fruit batch to batch. Also, depending on what you are going to use the liqueur for, you might want to adjust the amount of sugar you are going to add. If you are going to make predominantly aperitif style drinks, you might want to hold back on the sugar content. If you are going to use them as a sweetener balanced with sour, you will want to keep the sugar concentration higher.

This technique is good for Framboise, Mure, Fraise, Griottes, Myrtille,

• Take a 2 litre jar with a swing lid. Completely fill the jar with frozen fruit (approx 1 kg) Shake the jar gently to pack the fruit down.
• Fill the jar with high ABV alcohol (approx 1 litre). Make a note of how much alcohol you have put in (Important if you want to know to work out the final ABV)
• Close the jar and leave for 1-2 weeks. Turn the jar whenever you are walking past.
• Strain off all the liquid and reserve. It will be more than the 1itre of alcohol you put in, as water will have been extracted from the fruit.
• Add sugar to the fruit, and leave for 2 days (notes on how much sugar to add are below)
• Strain off this liquid and add to the reserved alcohol. Press the fruit through a sieve.
• See how much reserved liquid you now have. It will probably be around 2 litres. If you want to obtain a liqueur around 25% ABV, and you started off with Polish Pure spirit then you will need to add a further 1200ml of water to the fruit, 600ml at time in order to end up with 3200ml at 25%. Each time, leave the water for 4 hours, turning the jar regularly.
• Once you have added this water to the reserved alcohol, pass all the liquid through a fine muslin.
• clarify the remaining liquid (see below).

Notes

Sugar Content – For most fruit aim for 250g sugar per litre for a normal fruit crème.
If you are going to use it in more aperitif style drinks, add around 180g sugar per litre. By sugar per litre, I mean in the final liqueur, so for 250g per litre and 3200ml of final liqueur, you need to add 800g of sugar.
Griottes - As they have a lovely sour taste, only add around 90g per litre, as more sugar hides this sour edge. You can always add more sugar, but you can’t take it away.
Mure – All the fruit crèmes are ready to use once they have been filtered, except the mure. Mure will need a further 2 weeks ageing, as there is an astringent pithy taste that takes a while to disappear.
Fraise – At no stage whatsoever must you press the strawberries. Pressing the strawberries cracks the seeds and the freshness of the flavour plummets.
ABV calculations – to work out the volume of the final liqueur, use the following equation:

Volume of Final Liqueur = (Volume of high ABV alcohol used) x (ABV high strength alcohol)
(ABV Final Liqueur)

Clarifying your end liqueur

As mentioned, I have tried 2 techniques for clarifying liqueurs. They are using pectin Enzymes and using wine filter pumps. Both work well. With pectin enzymes, the cost is very low, and the process rather satisfying, but it takes around a week and there is a reasonable amount of waste. With wine filter pumps it is very quick, there is little waste, but is a much more expensive option.

Pectin Enzymes.

Pectin occurs in most berries, and is responsible for the haze you will have in your liqueur. Pectin enzymes make the pectin molecules clump together until they are big enough to fall out is suspension and collect at the bottom of the jar. You can buy Pectin enzyme online from winemaking suppliers, and you only need use a couple of teaspoons.
Simply stir the enzyme into the liqueur and leave for a week.
What makes this rather satisfying is after 2 days or so, a crystal clear line starts to appear at the top of the liqueur and slowly moves down the jar over the course of a week.
The enzyme does not affect the taste of the liqueur, but you are left with a sizeable amount of liqueur at the bottom of the jar which you cannot use. To separate the liqueur layers, simply siphon off the top clear layer, squeezing the tube when you get near the bottom cloudy layer, to slow down the flow and not agitate the bottom layer.

Wine Filter Pumps

Wine filter pumps are great. In minutes you can turn a big demijohn of cloudy liqueur into a crystal clear liqueur. The small amount of leftover liqueur can be added back when filtering the next batch to eliminate nearly all wastage. The only issue is the cost of the pump and the filters which are a bit of a commitment. The pump costs around £150, and the filters around £2.50 a time. The filter pads come in 3 grades, 1 being the finest and 3 being the least fine. Grade 3 works fine, and doesn’t clog up as quickly, although using the finer grades does extend the life of the liqueur. If you are interested, a good entry level pump is the buon vino mini jet. There are several internet suppliers who sell it in the UK.

Sugar Syrups made from teas and spices.

2010-03-25T03:16:00.001-07:00

Over the last 4 years or so a few herbal or tea base liqueurs have began to appear on the market. Having tasted most of them, I can safely say that they come nowhere near the taste of homemade varieties. Tea syrups need to be relatively fresh, so we make them once a week and keep them in the fridge. This is the same for all our sugar syrups. The lovely thing about homemade sugar syrups is you don’t need any preservatives because if you do have some left over at the end of the week, throw it away and make some more, but a smaller amount. They are really cheap and easy to make.

Teas

I never do alcoholic infusions with teas (or spices for that matter). The alcohol always draws out bitter tannins which are not present in aqueous infusions. Alcoholic infusions are fine if you are making a bitters, which you intend to use dropwise, but in an ingredient you intend to use 10ml+ of, it is not going to work. The Chinese have know about distillation since the early 1100’s and have always only used tea with water, and they know a little bit about the subject.
There are many types of teas, but the main categories are white, yellow, green, red, black and flower teas. The different types are prepared in different ways, but I will not cover this here, as the method of production does not help us to understand why the teas taste the way they do, and I wish to talk about their uses in mixology.
Green Teas are the largest category of Chinese tea (which I consider to be the best), but they are pretty much all put into one collective pot (no pun intended) in the UK. Green teas are sold as such, and hardly ever have the actual name of the variety on the pack. There are a vast number of categories.
One particularly interesting subcategory is Oolong teas. These light green teas can have the most incredible fruit driven aroma, with peach at the forefront. Good Oolong tea is an amazing cocktail ingredient and is very versatile, having sufficient strength of flavour to go well with white and aged spirits. Oolong with a good 6-8 year old bourbon is absolutely delicious and a must try.
Another category is Puerh tea. Puerh teas are aged and have a strongly earthy taste that lends itself to blending with bitters and vermouths. In general I use 5-6 teabags or teaspoons of loose tea to make a bottle of syrup with green teas.
Red teas (the most common type in the UK although they are generally called black teas here) have more tannins than green, yellow or white teas. With distilled spirits, these tannins are more pronounced and can feel astringent on the palette. Red teas such as English Breakfast, Assam, Darjeeling etc. can still be used, but one needs to be careful with the length of time you leave the tea to infuse, and how much tea you use per bottle of syrup.
Flower teas are a very useful category, and in this I will include other flavoured teas. The majority have a red tea base, as red teas’ aroma does not fade with the addition of other flavours. However with some more delicate flavours, green tea is used as a base. Red Teas flavoured with rose or lychee flowers are very interesting and well worth playing around with, but probably the most well known flavoured red tea is Earl Grey. The strongly citrusy notes associated with bergamot make it ideal for mixing, especially with gin. This also goes for Lady Grey, although I find the orange and lemon notes added rather confected, and feel it would be better to use an orange and lemon twist with Earl Grey. Lapsang Souchong is a red tea which is dried over burning pine which imparts a strongly smoked flavour. This means it is an interesting partner for scotch, or for smokey martini twists. There are a couple of different flower teas made with green tea, and the main one of interest is Jasmine tea. Jasmine has a delightful exotic, floral nose and it blends beautifully with white and dark spirits, in particular gin and scotch.
Another category of flavoured teas is chai tea. Chai teas have spiced added, the most notable being cinnamon, but any blend will have at least 3 or 4 other spices in it. Chai teas can come in both green and red varieties. I tend to use the green, as the red varieties tend to have more tannins and as such do not blend as well. The spice notes go well in wintery or Christmas drinks.
Then there is the subject of herbal teas. There are myriad herbal tea blends on the marke,t far too many to cover here, but I will briefly touch on unblended teas, that is Camomile and Rooibos.
Camomile has a remarkable calming flavour and it is capable of cushioning the kick of some particularly strong tasting spirits. I once made a simple daiquiri with camomile tea gomme and Woods 100, and the resulting drink was surprisingly soft to drink. This works well in general with dark spirits, particularly rums and bourbons, served in short cocktails.
Rooibos or redbush tea is a lovely flavour, really nutty with a sweetness before any sugar is added. I personally think it tastes great with peppery tastes, particularly peppery vodkas, and with strawberry or passionfruit, but as always have a play around.

Spices

For anyone who thinks spices are expensive, please know that that is what Sainsbury’s and Tesco would have us believe. I buy my vanilla online from an company called Oakleaf European, and a pod works out at about 30p, meaning that a 700ml bottle of homemade Madagascan Vanilla gomme costs under £2, about the same as a bottle of Roses Lime Cordial (which I do hope you are making for yourselves now with the recipe from the last issue of Class). For other spices I use a company called Spice Master, and they are very cheap and the products are great. A kilo of Cinnamon quills is £11, or about 10p each which means that the Tatanka should be going on menus everywhere. (Zubrowka and pressed apple with a cinnamon quill stirrer if you didn’t know)

Not all spices work well in cocktails. Many simply do not taste good with alcohol, such as mustard and garlic. A tiny hint of garlic in any savoury dish will act as a brilliant flavour enhancer, whilst the garlic will be almost impossible to pick out, but in an alcoholic drink the garlic is always present and conspicuously so.

In general I find that spices which need some maceration time to release their flavour are those best suited to gommes. This would include Allspice, Cinnamon, Clove, cardamom, star anise, vanilla, and I’m sure a few more. Others such as ginger and lemongrass release their flavour with a bit of muddling or shaking, and as such are best used fresh in my opinion, along with nutmeg and pepper, whose taste goes stale once they have been ground. I would also suggest that herbs should always be used fresh.
For Herbs, I have found that using fresh herbs tends to have the best results, as they release enough of their flavour immediately. This is the case for basil, thyme, mint and coriander.
When making my spice gommes, I tend to do it on the stove, as it is the best way to infuse the flavours, by cooking for around 10 minutes. I only add a small amount of the sugar for this cooking period, so as not to caramelise the sugar at all. By cooking the gommes, they are also sterile, so this helps them keep for a little longer. We also store them in the fridge.
Another point to raise is to always use whole spices. Ground ones never have as fresh a taste, and will make a much darker and cloudier gomme, which never looks good in a drink.
When making the gommes, remember that spices are very strong flavours, so we do not need to use a lot to flavour the gomme. We are also cooking the spice for 10 minutes and so are extracting most of the flavour. In general, I would suggest the following amounts per bottle of gomme.

Cinnamon – 2 large quills (or 4 short ones)
Cardamom – 6 pods
Star Anise – 6
All Spice – 15 berries
Clove – 10
Vanilla – 3 pods, split

I use the same method to make all the above into syrups. One thing to note is if you like some of these flavours together, simply add both spices to the gomme. I have a lovely recipe for spiced caramel which is great in winter drinks which I will give at the end.

Method

Put 400ml of water and 50g of sugar in a pan with the spices. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Add a further 300g of sugar, stir to dissolve and then take off the heat. Allow to cool and then strain through fine muslin.

Spiced Caramel Syrup

350g sugar
500ml water
3 split vanilla pods
2 short cinnamon quills
6 cloves

Place all the above in a pan. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30mins until golden brown. Strain and pour into a 700ml bottle and top up with water.

This is a great ingredient for Xmas or winter drinks. Try it with red wine, orange slices and blackcurrants for an awesome mulled wine, or as the sweetener in an eggnog.

As always with anything I write here, have a play around and do something different. It is a whole lot of fun, and that is what mixology should be about. Try making your own Falernum, or a cinnamon cardamom and star anise gomme (a lovely match for a fruity cognac). You are only limited by your imagination.

Resources

www.innteas.com (for great oolong tea)

www.spice-master.com

www.oakleaf-european.co.uk

Recipes for 4 bar staples which are in a different league to anything you can buy.

2009-11-12T02:45:00.000-08:00

The Gimlet has always been an enigma to me. How could such a drink have evolved from a time of classic, great drinks and still be remembered today? One effectively takes gin, the finest of the base spirits, and adds juice from concentrate, flavourings and sodium metabisulphite to it. Oh, and colouring. And that is exactly how it tastes as far as I am concerned. No-one drinks gin and orange squash, or vodka and Vimto (apart from Charlotte Church I am told, not sure whether it was in jest), so why would anyone want a Gimlet?
For many years now, I have played around making homemade ingredients for drinks in my bars and I have slowly come to the realisation that, unless distillation is required, homemade ingredients are always superior to what you can buy commercially.
The reasons for this are numerous. Firstly, cordial and liqueur manufacturers are businesses at the end of the day, and they need to make money, and so some corners will always be cut, whether this is the addition of flavourings or the used of less fruit etc.
Also, when making just enough for your bar, you will need to add no preservatives, or hardly any, where commercial producers have to make products with shelf lives of years.
And lastly, even the most conscientious of producers cannot inspect every piece of fruit or peel that goes into their product. If you are making 1 bottle at a time, then the conscientious bartender can.

In this series of pieces, I will go through some of the ideas from my 8 or so years of experimenting. In this first piece I will be covering Lime Cordial, Grenadine, Passionfruit Syrup, and Orgeat. Each of these can be made within 30 minutes or so, and the drinks that can be made with them are indistinguishable in terms of quality.

Orgeat

Orgeat is a particularly good case of cheating by manufacturers. They pretty much all use water, sugar and flavourings. Now these flavourings are mainly almond essential oils, and so are from almonds, but making orgeat by maceration in the following way tastes far superior. I have added a little bit of hazelnut for some complexity, and the polish pure spirit to extend shelf life, and increase the intensity of flavour.

400g Blanched Almonds
100g Blanched Hazelnuts
800ml Water
700g Sugar
100ml Polish Pure Spirit
Rose Water to taste
Makes 2 bottles

Roast the nuts on an oven at 200°c for a 3 minutes to help release flavour. Remove and place in a food processor until powdered. Please do not use flaked or ground almonds. The final product is nowhere nearly as good. Also the nuts must not have the brown skin on them, as this will lead to a product with a massively reduced shelf life.
Add to a pan with the water and 100g of the sugar. Bring to the boil. Remove from the heat, and add the rest of the sugar. Stir to dissolve.
Leave for 1 hour.
When cool, pour and press though a sieve, and then through a fine muslin. Then add the neutral spirit and the rose water. Bear in mind that the spirit will need a day to integrate into the cordial. It will taste and smell very boozy at first but will be unnoticeable after a day.

This cordial should be good for 1 month or so.

Grenadine

Most commercial grenadines are little more than red coloured gomme, and many if they have ever been near a fruit are not even made with pomegranates. This recipe is the good stuff.

10 Pomegranates
700g Caster sugar
800ml Water
Makes 2 bottles

Scrape out the insides of the pomegranates and place them in a pan. Discard the skins. Add the water and 100g of the sugar and bring to the boil. Then simmer for 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and add the rest of the sugar. Then stir to dissolve. Leave to cool. Then Strain through a sieve and then through a fine muslin.

The 2 important stages here are the longer cooking time and the cooking with only part of the sugar.
• The longer cooking time is because pomegranates have a dry, slight pith-like aftertaste. This taste is exaggerated by alcohol and becomes astringent on the palate. However cooking breaks this flavour down, and it takes approx 20 minutes to do so.
• We cook with only part of the sugar because if we added all the sugar, the boiling point of the liquid would be much higher than 100°c and at this higher temperature, the sugar will begin to caramelise, and although this might be lovely in a treacle-style drink, it does not work so well in the many long summery drinks grenadine is usually used in. We need to add some sugar though, as the sugar helps to extract flavour from the pomegranates.
The grenadine should last for a month or so in the fridge. Should you want to increase the shelf life, add a teaspoon of tartaric acid to each bottle. This also has the effect of thickening the grenadine and making it far more syrupy.
As with all these cordials, simpler drinks really highlight the difference, and so try it in Bacardi cocktail. I think you will be very pleasantly surprised.

Passionfruit Syrup

Bought passionfruit syrups are made with passionfruit juice from concentrate, and all have preservatives added. This cordial of mine is the best of the recipes here, and I have yet to find a drink which does not taste infinitely superior with the homemade variety. Also if you buy passionfruit by the box, then they really are not very expensive. It costs about 50p more per bottle to make your own, and the extra cocktails you will sell because the drinks taste better will more than make up for it.

30 passionfruit
700g caster sugar
800ml water
Makes 2 bottles

Scrape out all the passionfruit and place in a jug. Discard all the skins. Place the jug to one side. Then add the sugar and water to a pan and bring to the boil. When boiling take off the heat and add the passionfruit. Leave for 1 minute, and then pour through a sieve and then a fine muslin. Then place this pan in a larger pan filled with crushed ice to chill the syrup quickly.
The important stages in this are the short infusion time and the rapid chilling afterwards. Fresh passionfruit is a sharp flavour, and cooking breaks down this acidity. By removing from the heat and then infusing for one minute, we take the edge of this acidity, but do not remove it completely and do not cook the passionfruit flavour, so it remains fresh. This is also the reason for chilling rapidly. It is the closest we can get to flash pasteurising in the bar without very expensive specialist equipment.
This Syrup lasts up to a week in the fridge, but shelf life should not be too much of a problem. We get through about 8 bottles a week at the Loft.

Lime Cordial

The biggest selling cordial on any bar, and the only one here that is cheaper to make yourself, and yet hardly anyone does. This recipe only needs 4 limes and 1 lemon to make one bottle. Just watch your knuckles when doing the zesting.

8 Limes
2 Lemons
700g Sugar
800ml water
2 tbs citric acid
Makes 2 bottles

With a grater, remove the zest of the limes and lemons. Juice the fruit, and reserve the juice.
Place the zest in a pan with the sugar and water. Bring to the boil, stirring all the time, and then remove from the heat. Cover and leave for 5 minutes. Add the juices and then chill the syrup rapidly, by placing the pan in a larger pan with crushed ice in it and stirring till cold.
The oils in the lemons and limes are heat resistant and will not be adversely affected by cooking for 5 minutes. This gives us a good amount of maceration. However the citrus juices are not at all heat resistant, hence letting the syrup cool slightly before adding them, and then the rapid chilling.
This is the one cordial here where I have added a preservative, but it needs it, and I have used far less than would be used commercially.

Just try a Gimlet with Junipero and this.....

The Great Moscow Mule Rant!!!

2009-07-29T03:49:00.000-07:00

The Moscow Mule is a great drink. It pretty much single handedly made Smirnoff the global behemoth it is today as it was responsible for Smirnoff becoming a household name in the U.S. in the 1950’s. Before this drink came along no-one west of Berlin drank vodka, and gin was the white spirit of choice. A beautifully simple creation of Russian vodka, lime juice and ginger beer, the name comes from the kick from the ginger beer.

There is not a lot to say about how to make a good Moscow mule per se. The modern palette is a little sweeter, and so many recipes nowadays will call for a dash of sugar syrup or lime cordial. Also the use of Angostura bitters is very common, and it gives the drink tropical notes and added depth. Also some bars will use fresh pressed ginger with sugar and soda to make a mule with a very serious kick. This is what we do at the Loft. Good modern brands of ginger beer are D&G and Fentimans.

Now for the rant. John Martin owned the rights to Smirnoff, and having met Jack Morgan, the owner of the Cock’nBull Saloon in Hollywood, who was launching a ginger beer, they decided to come up with a drink to promote both their brands. In itself a bit annoying but in this case the ends justified the means.

However, in a case of history repeating itself, Smirnoff and now Schweppes are promoting Moscow Mules made with ginger ale. This is a bland insipid drink with no kick whatsoever. For anyone who does not know, ginger beer has a strong taste, hot and very gingery. Ginger ale on the other hand is very mild and needs accompanying by a strong flavour, Scotch or Pimms or whatever you want, but something with a little flavour and not vodka. Some arse in marketing has obviously persuaded the powers that be that if they try and sell us Moscow Mules with ginger ale, that they will sell more cocktails. So they are basicaly advocating desacrating a classic drink. One can understand it from Schweppes, as they have no connection to the drink, but someone at Smirnoff should have recognized their brand’s historic connection to the drink, a connection almost unique in the cocktail world (there are others such as the Bacardi Cocktail, but they are nowhere near the mule in terms of sales) and insisted on the use of ginger beer. It’s not even like Schweppes don’t have a ginger beer, they do. Also when Smirnoff launched a pre-mixed Moscow Mule a few years ago, it was made with ginger beer, so they know what to put in it. Probably these didn’t sell so well, and they thought the problem was the ginger beer, when it wasn’t, it was the lack of fresh lime. Anyway, there are now countless people who were introduced to the “Moscow buck” (the proper name for a tall drink with ginger ale)and I hope that enough of them with taste thought it was rubbish.

If Diageo and Schweppes want to push ginger ale, do it with Pimms.

Hosting A Christmas Cocktail Party!!

2009-07-28T02:42:00.000-07:00

A little premature, but the press are always thinking ahead and Waitrose Magazine asked me to do a little piece on Christmas cocktail parties, so here it is.

The Christmas cocktail party brings to mind images of log fires, mistletoe, gently steaming drinks and fathers embarrassing their children with their “dancing”. It is a time of year for friends and family, and so if you are organising a cocktail party, you don’t want to be stuck in the kitchen slaving away trying to make the drinks. So here are some tips to get all the hard work out of the way in advance so you can still let your hair down.

The first thing you need to do is decide what drinks you are going to serve to your guests. I have included five recipes, four of which use the same homemade ingredient, spiced caramel syrup, details of which can be seen below.

Work out the number of people coming, and, and then work on 2 or 3 cocktails per person. Christmas cocktails are great to get the festive party started, but they are all a little sweet to drink all night, and your guests will probably want to move on to something else after a couple.
Write out a shopping list of all the ingredients you need. Consider buying some beers and wine as well, but not too much as your guests will certainly bring something.

Serving cocktails can be time-consuming, and assuming you want to talk to your guests, there are some little pointers to help you get those drinks served fast.

Serve everybody the same drink at the same time. If you are going to serve a few different cocktails, serving 10 of the same drink is much quicker than 3 each of 3 different drinks. No one is going to say anything, as you have gone to the effort of making cocktails, and it’s Christmas!
Make sure you have enough glasses or cups to serve everything in. You don’t want to have to start washing 10 glasses when people are waiting for their drinks.

Decide which drinks you are going to serve in which cups/glasses in advance. So maybe serve hot drinks in a mug or cup it has a handle so no-one burns their hand. Wine glasses are good for eggnog. It always looks nice to serve the same cocktail in the same glass. If you don’t have loads of glasses, you might want to consider hiring some. Majestic offer a free glass hire service.

For the eggnog recipe below. Make it up in advance and keep it in the fridge. Then all you need to do is ladle it out.

For the mulled wine and cider recipes, place all the ingredients in a saucepan and put the lid on, and then heat when your guests arrive.

Homemade Spiced Caramel Syrup

300g sugar
600ml water and
3 split vanilla pods
2 short cinnamon sticks
6 cloves

Place all the above in a pan. Bring to the boil and simmer for 25-30mins until golden brown. Strain and pour into a 700ml bottle and top up with water. This should be more than enough for any party you are doing

Mulled Wine (serves 5)

100ml Spiced Caramel Syrup
100g Blackcurrants, crushed
1/2 orange, sliced
1 bottle Shiraz/Syrah

Put all ingredients in a pan and place on a gentle heat until simmering. Strain into a jug, and serve immediately with fresh grated nutmeg over the top. Garnish with an orange wheel. If you can’t find fresh blackcurrants, frozen is fine, or use frozen mixed fruits of the forest.

Hot Berry Cider (serves 6)

1 litre Cider
50ml Spiced Caramel Syrup
3 tbs (Ocean Spray or Waitrose) Cranberry Sauce
2 handfuls fresh raspberries
150ml Calvados or Somerset Cider Brandy
1 Lemon, sliced

Put all ingredients in a pan and place on a gentle heat until simmering. Strain into a jug, and serve immediately. Garnish with a cranberry and a raspberry.

Hot Toddy (serves 6)

300ml Blended Scotch Whisky
60ml Honey
60ml Spiced Caramel Syrup
120ml Lemon Juice

Have this pre-mixed. Then pour into 6 rocks glasses and add hot water. Served with a lemon slice and some a dash of grated nutmeg

Place a sugar cube in a champagne flute, and add a couple of dashes of angostura bitters. Just cover the cube with cognac. Then fill the glass with Champagne.

Eggnog (serves 6)

200ml Milk
100ml Double Cream
200ml Spirit
100ml Spiced Caramel Syrup
4 Eggs

Place all the ingredients in a pan and whisk. Turn on the heat to low, and continue whisking until the mixture starts to thicken slightly, and will cover the back of a spoon. Take off the heat, let cool, and then place in the fridge to chill.
The spirit choice is a personal one. Scotch, Bourbon, Rum or Cognac are all suitable, so maybe use what you already have. Serve with a dusting of cocoa powder or grated nutmeg or both.

Margarita 101

2009-07-09T05:44:00.000-07:00

The Margarita is the best selling cocktail in the world today. This summery classic of Tequila, triple sec and lime juice made well is awesome. Unfortunately, the majority are terrible, made with pre-mixes that have probably never even seen a lime. These over-sweet-confected-rubbish drinks can be had wherever neon “cocktail” signs are seen. Hopefully by the end of this piece, we will have established a few ground rules to making a great Margarita.

There are loads of reasonably plausible stories as to who first invented the Margarita. The drink was probably a play on the Tequila Daisy which was popular in Mexico in the 1930’s (a daisy is made with a spirit, grenadine and lemon, although lime was probably used instead in Mexico, as they are far more abundant there). All the stories seem to be about someone making the drink for a girl called Margarita, or a lady called Margaret making it, but I’m sure that person who did invent it also realised the play on words involved, in that in Spanish, Margarita means daisy.

So a classic was born. The first verifiable mention in print is from the December 1953 Esquire Magazine (“She’s from Mexico, and her name is the Margarita cocktail”) In this article, the recipe quote is 1 ounce tequila with a dash of triple sec and the juice of a lime or lemon. From these proportions the original drink would have been quite tart. The modern palette is a little different, but a bigger difference is in the palettes of us Brits and are friends over the pond. I have always made my margaritas with an equal amount of triple sec and lime juice, and most British bartenders would do the same. Simon Difford says so in his Cocktail tome. In the States, Margaritas are served much sweeter, presumably because that is how customers want them. Both Dale “add a little gomme” Degroff and Gary Regan quote recipes with twice as much sweet ingredient to sour. (Just for the record, adding a little gomme to a balanced drink is hardly ever a bad thing, just be careful not to add too much).

As far as Tequila goes, it is a personal preference thing, but I personally would only use a Blanco or Reposado, and normally a Blanco. For me, the presence of wood flavours, although not intrinsically a bad thing flavour-wise, distracts from the character of the Margarita, and that is a light refreshing summery drink. In terms of brands, again it is a personal choice, but please steer clear of anything you can buy in a supermarket. At a push, my favourite blanco would be Arette, and Herradura my favourite Reposado, but there are plenty of others I would happily drink.
Having touched on the subject of wood flavours, let us move to the subject of triple sec or the orange flavour in general. I have seen Grand Marnier used in Margaritas quite often, and I have to say it has nearly always been in a bar where I think the reason they used it was because it costs more than Cointreau or a triple sec, and not because they think it makes a better drink.

Personally, I would never use it as not only does it introduce wood flavours but also cognac flavours and they have no place in a margarita. If you want to do a posh Margarita, use a posh tequila. The new Jose Cuervo Reserva Platino for example is great, or Don Julio if you are not feeling quite so flush. As for which triple sec to use, Cointreau is obviously good, and also easy to obtain. There are other good triple secs, but you would have to go out of your way to find them unless you are in the trade. Try Merlet or Briotet if you can find them.

Also while discussing the sweet ingredient, I feel I should touch on the now very common use of the Tommy’s Margarita, namely a Margarita with Agave syrup in place of Cointreau. This drink was invented by Julio Bermejo at the legendary Tommy’s in San Francisco. It is a great drink, particularly with premium tequilas as the agave does not hide any of the tequila notes, and if anything enhances them. I know from working my way through a sizeable part of the Tommy’s back bar one evening. It is a must try drink, and it is easy to find Agave syrup in most big supermarkets nowadays.

With lime juice as usual only consider freshly squeezed.

As for proportions, we touched on this earlier. For me 2:1:1 is right. The exception to this is for margaritas served on the rocks or frozen. The more ice in the drink the more sugar you need. Think 2.5ml sugar syrup for on the rocks, and 10ml sugar syrup for a frozen drink.
As for technique, some drinks need to be shaken harder than others. The Margarita, like the daiquiri, needs, in the words of Outcast, to be “shaken like a polaroid picture”. The colder the drink and the more air introduced into it the better. Also, never double strain as the small ice crystals suit the Margarita down to a tee, and double straining with remove half of the air shaking introduces in the first place.

The last topic to cover is the use of salt rims. The first thing to note is that the original Margarita did not have a salt rim. So it comes down the personal preference, and this polarises opinions big time. I used to have salt rims on my Margaritas, but not anymore. I don’t really think it adds anything to the drink. I read one person claim that it decreases the tartness of the lime and increases the sweetness of the sugar, as well as reducing underlying bitter flavours from the orange peel and the lime juice, but the Margarita is supposed to be a little tart, and whoever said a few bitter notes in a drink is a bad thing? As mixologists, we strive to create complexity in the flavour profiles of our creations.

Key things if you are going to use a salt rim are getting the rim only very lightly salted, not getting any salt on the inside of the glass, only salting half the glass, to give you or the customer the option of a salt-free sip, using a decent quality salt, and using a flaked sea salt as the salt hit is slower.

Lastly, for twist of Margaritas, as with all simple drinks, have a play around. Fresh fruit Margaritas taste great so try combinations of fruits, or diffent sweeteners, or adding a herb or spice or chilli. Have a bit of fun.

Classic Margarita

40ml Arette Blanco Tequila
20ml Cointreau
20ml Lime Juice

Shake over ice very hard, and strain into a chilled Margarita glass.

Little Miss Margarithai

2 parts Arette Blanco Tequila
¾ part watermelon sugar syrup*
¾ part lime juice
1 stick lemongrass.

Crush the lemongrass at the bottom of your shaker. Shake all the ingredients over ice, and double strain into a chilled martini glass.

*Watermelon sugar syrup. see my watermelon blog.

Elderflower Margarita

40ml Arette Blanco Tequila
20ml Elderflower Cordial
20ml Lime Juice

Shake over ice very hard, and strain into an ice filled rock glass.

Watermelon sugar syrup cocktails!

2009-07-08T03:43:00.000-07:00

These drinks use a great homemade ingredient, watermelon sugar syrup. I came up with it as I found watermelon drinks to be, well, too watery. It is really easy to make, and is great for summer drinks parties, because it is incredibly versatile. It is lovely with vodka, gin, rum, tequila and cognac, and also with pineapple, orange, apple, cranberry and pomegranate juices. It even goes well in a white wine spritzer, or in a Pimms and lemonade. It doesn’t really matter what booze your friends bought on special offer at the off-license. So have some fun and just play around!

To make the syrup, cut up a watermelon into chunks, and push it by hand through a sieve to juice it. If you have a centrifugal juicer, you can use that. Half fill a bottle with sugar and then fill up with the juice. Shake it until it dissolves. Then it’s ready to use. It lasts for about 5 days in the fridge.

When using the syrup, you will need to balance out the sweetness with some fresh lemon or lime juice.

Melonius Funk

2 parts Vodka
1 part watermelon sugar syrup
1 part lemon juice
3 parts pineapple juice

Shake all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker on ice. Strain into an ice filled tall glass.
Garnish with a piece of watermelon.

Little Miss Margarithai

2 parts Arette Blanco Tequila
¾ part watermelon sugar syrup
¾ part lime juice
1 stick lemongrass.

Crush the lemongrass at the bottom of your shaker. Shake all the ingredients over ice, and double strain into a chilled martini glass.

Nice Sidecar

2 parts Courvoisier Exclusif
¾ part watermelon sugar syrup
¾ part lemon juice

Shake all the ingredients over ice, and double strain into a chilled martini glass.
Watermelon Spritzer

To a large white wine and soda spritzer, add watermelon sugar syrup to taste. There is no need for any lemon or lime in this one.

Mojito 101

2009-06-24T04:53:00.000-07:00

The Mojito is undoubtedly the most popular cocktail in the UK today, and one of the most popular in the world (that number one I am fairly sure is the Margarita). Many a bartender will moan about the fact, as the various facebook groups regarding Mojito hatred will attest. But we all know this is all to do with the repetitive nature of making 8 mojitos at the same time again and again, and little to do with the cocktail’s quality.

The earliest precursor to the Mojito was from Cuba, and a drink known as “El Draque," named after Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 1st’s favourite pirate, Sir Francis Drake. so a fair bit older than the 19th Century stories about picking mint in Kentucky next to the Derby (not true, but a nice one to tell customers anyway. The first mint julep was actually made with rum). Whatever the Mojito may have been called back then, if would have been made with a primitive predecessor of rum, but with the same other ingredients used to hide the harsh taste. Some insist the Mojito's name comes from 'mojo', a Cuban seasoning made from lime and used to flavour dishes. Perhaps as a reference to its lime ingredient, the drink became known as the cocktail with 'a little mojo' - in Spanish, 'mojito'.

It is widely stated that the Mojito was invented at La Bodeguita del Medio in Havana, but the place didn’t open until 1942, and there are written record of identical drinks, if not called a Mojito, dating from 1931 and Sloppy Joe’s bar manual, and he had his bar in Key West, Florida. It has even been suggested that Ernest Hemingway himself may have brought the drink from Cuba to Florida as he was a friend of the owner if Sloppy Joe’s, and he spent time moving between Key West and Cuba it the late 20’s and early 30’s. But it was at the Bodeguita that the Mojito became popular in Havana, and Hemingway was a famous regular.

The traditional Mojito is made with White Rum, Sugar, Lime Juice, Mint and Soda, served over cubed ice. The common method of leaving out the soda and using crushed ice stems from one of the most interesting stories in all on Cocktaildom. Before the revolution and Castro, Cuba was America’s playground, and all the bars from Havana to Varadero had lovely state-of-the-art American ice machines which made cubed ice. After the revolution and the associated trade embargo, These machines one by one started to break down, and the Cubans fixed them as best they could but over time the machines could no longer make cold hard ice cubes, but what came out was more of a slush. So they started to leave out the soda from the mojitos, as the drink would otherwise have been too wet. And so was born the Post-Castro Mojito.

The original Recipe for the Mojito calls for white rum, and with a good white rum it is a lovely drink. However with an aged rum the drink takes on many other nuances, and quite possibly served on crushed ice with no soda it is the better drink. But then again, one made traditionally in a pre-Castro style tastes exceptionally good sitting on a beach in Cuba. It is all about context and personal preference, and I would not say one or the other is the better drink.

As for suggestions as to which rums to use, the Mojito is a Cuban drink, so was traditionally made with Spanish style rums, and they are probably the best to use, as the light grassy notes work well with the herbal, floral notes of the mint. Also Spanish rums are lighter due to the fact that they are predominantly made in column stills rather than pot stills, and this means they are well suited to what is a light summery drink. So try Havana Club, or Santa Teresa.

Regarding the sugar and lime components, one of my pet hates with mojitos is when the bartender muddles the mint to almost a puree and hands me something that tastes like mouthwash. I do not go to a bar to spend my evening picking bits of mint out of my teeth. The mint should be lightly bruised, just enough to release its flavour, but it does not need to be broken up at all. For this reason I like to use sugar syrup instead of caster sugar, as the granules tend to break up the mint too much. If caster sugar is to be used, I would suggest that it is done after the mint is muddled with the lime juice. It is important to note that this is not a Caipirinha, and the sugar is not needed to extract lime oils from the lime zest. On this point, I have often seen lime wedges muddled in a Mojito. There is a reason why Constante Ribalaigua used white gloves to squeeze the estimated 10 million+ limes he is said to have squeezed in his illustrious career. It was that bruising the lime too much would give bitter pith notes to the drink, as he maintained that it clashed with the rum flavour, and clearly muddling is the most violent way of extract juice from a lime. It was never done like that in Cuba, and it just smacks of bartenders trying to be different, but without thinking whether the change might improve the drink, which it doesn’t.

With regards to what sugar to use, unrefined sugar adds much more flavour to the drink than refined white sugar. However, bear in mind that if you are making a sugar syrup, Unrefined syrups tend to ferment quite quickly, so make in on a stove, bring to the boil then chill rapidly and keep it in the fridge. Demerara sugar is too dark for my taste and I would not recommend. If you want a darker, more moreish Mojito used an aged rum with unrefined sugar.

A couple of variations I have seen in Cuba is the addition of Angostura bitters, and the use of Guarapo, freshly squeezed sugar cane juice. As for Angostura, it makes an interesting drink, and is tasty, but it takes over a bit, and personally I wouldn’t add it to my own, but it is definitely worth a try. Guarapo is made by putting freshly cut sugar cane through a mangle and collecting the juice. It is simply delicious and as the sweetener in a Mojito it is sublime. However, unless you have fresh sugar cane to hand, it is hard to replicate.

Mojito Recipes.

Pre-Castro

50ml White Rum
20ml Lime Juice
20ml unrefined sugar syrup
8 Mint Leaves
Soda

Gently bruise mint, add lime juice, sugar and rum. Stir. Add cubed ice, add soda and stir.
Garnish with lime wedge and mint sprig.

Post-Castro

50ml White Rum
20ml Lime Juice
20ml Unrefined Sugar Syrup
8 Mint Leaves.

Gently bruise mint, add lime juice, sugar and rum. Stir. Add crushed ice, stir, and top with ice. Garnish with lime wedge and mint sprig.

Pineapple and Sage Mojito

A Nick Strangeway creation for the first menu at La Floridita in Soho. An excellent drink from one of the best mixologists around.

50ml White Rum
5 Sage Leaves
15ml Lime Juice
15ml Unrefined Sugar Syrup
25ml Pressed Pineapple juice

The Stairs Mojito

50ml Santa Teresa Claro
20ml Lime Juice
20ml Unrefined Sugar Syrup
8 Mint Leaves
Juice of half an apple
Juice of half a pear

One of our ones at the Loft, a longer drink but one which we sell a lot of.

A point to make about the Mojito is it is a simple drink, and as such there is an almost unlimited number of possible twists. Adding berries, adding fruit juice, changing the mint for sage, basil, thyme, rosemary, etc. It is a drink you can have real fun letting your imagination run riot.

Cosmopolitan 101

2009-06-22T05:23:00.000-07:00

The Cosmopolitan stands tall amongst the genre of cocktails that is contemporary classics. A simple enough basic cocktail, it has evolved only slightly from its disputed origins. There are many competing theories as to were the drink first appeared, but we do know that it was in the 70's in the US. It is also probable that at the Rainbow Room in New York, the addition of the now common flaming orange twist garnish did much to set the drink off on the road to style icon status (and obviously Sex and the City did even more to make it a truly global one).

The Cosmo is essentially an exercise in citrus flavours (The combination of lemon vodka, with lime juice, and orange liqueur, and sometimes an orange twist or orange bitter or both). The cranberry juice is there purely for colour, and adding too much is the most common cause of a bad one. For this guide to the cosmo, I would like to go through the ingredients one by one, and say a few words about each.

The choice of lemon vodka is obviously important, but how it is used is equally so. Amongst the various flavoured vodka ranges, there are a lot of dud products, but lemon vodkas seem to have got off rather lightly. Wyborowa and Absolut both have perfectly acceptable lemon vodkas at entry level. Ketel One is better if you fancy spending a little more, but for the best you would need to spend that little bit more, as all the less expensive brands are made by a method called cold compunding, essentially vodka with lemon flavour added to it. The finest lemon vodkas are made in the same way gin is, by adding lemon peel to vodka, leaving it to infuse, and then re-distilling it. This is the case for the Grey Goose and Belvedere Lemon Vodka, and other super-premium new boys such as Hangar One. One common problem however with the more expensive vodkas is that the lemon flavour can be slightly overpowering, but this is easily remedied by using half lemon, half plain vodka. This is especially the case for Belvedere, but the use of half and half produces in my opinion the best cosmo around. With Grey Goose, the orange vodka seems to make a better drink than the lemon, but this drink was renamed the French Cosmo by cocktail purists.

For the lime juice, there is no substitute for freshly squeezed. period. Try and pick limes with a nice shine to them, which are nice and round and fairly hard to squeeze.

The orange liqueur in question should be a triple sec, such as Cointreau, and not a curacao, such as Grand Marnier, as the liqueur should be made with a neutral alcoholic base, and the brandy base of curacaos overpowers the fresh citrus flavours. There are plenty of other acceptable makes of triple sec, but most of these are not readily available even in fairly posh off-licenses. They would be available at specialist off-licenses, such as the famous Gerrys of Old Compton Street in Soho. Briottet, Cartron, and Merlet all offer good triple secs.

A now quite common twist, probably first introduced to save money, but which produces in my opinion a superior drink, is to half the amount of triple sec, and replace it with lime cordial. It gives a lighter, more refreshing final product. Roses Lime cordial is acceptable, but Bottlegreen is superior, if a little more expensive, but still cheap when compared to a triple sec.

As I have said, the cranberry juice is there predominantly for colour and not for flavour. A few years ago, at Milk and Honey in London, the Cosmos were famously made with a single raspberry instead to add the colour, as the bar staff did not want to make any drinks with juice that had not been made on the premises. The resulting drink was delicious, though probably a little too alcoholic for the palettes of most Cosmo drinkers. Well worth a try at home however, especially if it is the first drink of the evening. When using cranberry juice, there are some fresh pressed cranberry juices on the market, but many of them are slightly sweet, and it is important that the cranberry juice used be slightly dry, or it upsets the balance of a drink which should be a little tart. For this reason I would recommend ocean spray.

Orange Bitters is not essential, especially if using an orange twist. I would recommend the use of a twist without bitters, but this is more of a personal choice, and a good option would be to ask the drinker how "orangey" he wants his drink. Asking the drinker how he wants something is always a good way to go. If you want to try a flamed ornage twist, ask a bartender who looks confident at doing them to show you how. This is not hard to do, but where fire is concerned, play it safe.

Proportions are important in the Cosmo. the proportions I would normally recommend are:

40ml Lemon Vodka (or 20ml Lemon 20ml plain for strongly lemon vodkas)
10ml Triple Sec
10ml Lime Cordial
20ml Freshly squeezed lime juice
20ml Cranberry Juice

If using a raspberry instead of cranberry, drop the amounts of sweet and sour ingredients, because other wise the drink will be a little too intense. try 7.5ml triple sec and lime cordial, and 15ml lime juice.

There have been countless variations on the cosmo down the years, many of which didn't really offer anything new, or an improvement on the original. A few of my favourites are:

The Stolipolitan

40ml Stoli Razberi
10ml Triple Sec
10ml Chambord
20ml Lime Juice
20ml Cranberry

This is a much more fruit led concoction, which the citrus playing second fiddle to the berry flavours. It is however very quaffable.

The Passion Fruit Cosmo

40ml 42Below Passionfruit Vodka
10ml Homemade Passionfruit Syrup
10ml Triplesec
20ml Lime Juice
20ml Cranberry Juice
1 dash peach bitters.

This drink is one of my own, and it is made special by the homemade syrup and the addition of peach bitters. for the syrup recipe, check out my previous tweets. the peach bitters is made my la fee, and is available from specialist shops.

The Ginger Cosmopolitan

Probably my favourite twist on the cosmo, it is simply a cosmo with a 1cm cube of fresh ginger crushed at the bottom of the cocktail shaker. Delicious, and an absolutely must try.