Libation Lab » Spirits

St. George’s New Gins (& The Best Place To Taste Them)

Quinn — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:30:20 +0000

My favorite mad scientists, the fine distillers at St. George Spirits have just released their first gin… and their second… and their third. This delectable trio of new gins is incredibly diverse and unique. When I mentioned the endeavor in an article earlier this year, master distiller Lance Winters only described what would become the Terroir gin, with a flavor-profile constructed from his experiences around Mt. Tamalpais, but this spawned more experimentation and further product development and now three gins are hitting the streets at the same time.

St. George Terroir Gin

An “ode to the wild beauty of the Golden State,” I find Terroir to be the most aggressive of the three, and the trees really sing out from this evergreen-inspired spirit, made with hand-foraged, local botanicals. Because Mount Tam played muse in its creation, St. George will donate a portion of proceeds to the California State Parks Foundation.

St. George Botanivore Gin

The generalist of the three, the beautifully balanced Botanivore melds in a lovely way with most any gin cocktail recipe. Although every gin must include juniper, it’s only one among nearly 20 botanical ingredients, making this herbaceous gin more gentle than most.

St. George Dry Rye Gin

Gorgeous in a Negroni, the Dry Rye Gin is made from 100% rye distillate giving it a spicy warmth and it includes only five other ingredients, four of which are there to enhance the flavor of the fifth, a double dose of juniper.

Party With Me At The Distillery!

If you’re in the Bay Area and want to experience these new gins in every wonderful way, St. George is throwing a Bathtub Gin BBQ this Sunday at the distillery in Alameda to celebrate the conclusion of SF Cocktail Week. If it’s anything like last year (or even if they have nothing in common but location and cocktails) it is not to be missed!

A half-dozen of the best local bartenders have been carefully crafting cocktail recipes for this event (I know because a couple used me as a guinea pig), the distillery staff has created another, and there will also be a G&T made with homemade tonic from Pizzaiolo’s Kate August, a Gibson made with onions from Studebaker Pickles, and samples of the new gins straight, and it’s only $35 to try them all!

Photos from last year’s Cocktail Week event at St. George

Time: Sunday, September 25, 2011 4-7 p.m.
Place: St. George Spirits, 2601 Monarch St., Alameda
Tickets: $35 in advance; $45 at the door (food available for purchase)

Bitter Last Words

Quinn — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:10:56 +0000

A friend recently mentioned how one crafty bartender had treated her to his bitter variation of the Last Word, swapping Angostura for gin in the traditional recipe. I had to give it a try, and found it biting and aggressive in the nicest way, so I figure it’s worth passing along.

Bitter Last Words

3/4 ounce Angostura bitters
3/4 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
3/4 ounce Maraschino liqueur
3/4 ounce green Chartreuse

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Gunpowder Test

Quinn — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:10:54 +0000

In the 18th and 19th centuries, when the British Royal Navy rationed rum to mariners, it wasn’t Bacardi Gold.

This stuff had to be fiery enough to fend off the elements, so to ensure their booze wasn’t being watered down, seamen would perform the gunpowder test by dousing a pile of gunpowder with rum, touching it to a match, and if it still ignited, then the proof was high enough to serve to sailors.

I discovered the moron test last week. Rather than looking up the proof of Booker’s Bourbon from my phone, I dunked a finger into my glass and stuck it into a candle flame on the bar. Sure enough, at 125 proof, I was waving a bright blue blaze to the shock and awe of my friends, and patrons at neighboring tables.

Don’t try this at home, but if you do, keep your hand moving to prevent actually getting burned.

Why Connoisseur Is A French Word

Quinn — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 06:35:00 +0000

I was treated to lunch by two fine, upstanding gentlemen from France (no, that’s not an oxymoron), and we tasted through a couple of great Cognac cocktails from Michael Mina and then four of their fine brandies¹, but the highlight of their selection was a pair of vintage cognacs about to come to market in the US.

Camus (rhymes with Shamoo, not Seamus) 1971 and 1989 vintage Cognacs were really fascinating, and totally out of my price range ($590 and $280 respectively). These rare and exceptional distillates really are something to write home about, and to be honest, I liked the ’89 better than the ’71 (call me a cheap date). I wish I had the cognac vocabulary to express the joy they brought to my mouth, but these bottles really are something special.

An interesting tip I picked up at lunch: the quality of Cognac levels off after about fifty years, and generally starts to decline not too long after that. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but if someone is showing off an 80-year old bottle, they probably don’t really know Cognac.

¹ Cognac vs. Brandy

Brandy is any spirit made by distilling wine. This category includes a number of grape brandies like Cognac, pisco, and Armagnac, fruit brandies like applejack, German schnapps and eau de vie, and then there are pomace brandies that are made from the fermented crap left behind from wine making, like skin, seeds and stems.
Cognac is brandy that must be made in the Cognac region of France, made only from certain grapes (primarily Ugni Blanc, Folle Blanche or Colombard), distilled twice in a copper pot still and aged at least 2 years in French oak barrels from Limousin or Tronçais.

History of Craft Cocktails

Quinn — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 21:22:34 +0000

My latest article for DrinkMe Magazine just rolled off the presses, but if you can’t pick up a copy, here’s the piece I wrote, accompanied by some great photos by my dear friend Liza.

Click the image to link to the article on the DrinkMe site, or read it less prettily formatted below.

Cheers,

Quinn

While we may assume that the fancy infusions and quirky conglomerations on offer in craft cocktail bars are something new, it’s a tradition that goes back as far as formal fermentation. Even in the Iliad, Homer wrote of epic heroes drinking wine mixed with goat cheese and ground barley, which might make a Long Island Iced Tea not seem so bad.

The current craze for carefully-constructed cocktails with fresh and exotic ingredients has its roots in a number of historical trends, so don’t be alarmed if a man wearing arm garters offers to make you a drink involving eight ingredients that takes six minutes to prepare; it’s all been done before.

Nearing the end of the Middle Ages, the technology for distilling wine and beer into stronger spirits was carried around the world by explorers, and mixological innovation grew exponentially to combat the fierce assault of raw spirits on the palates of peoples unaccustomed to the burn. Despite commonly-held assumptions, cocktail lovers owe far more to those foul-mouthed sailors than to any mustachioed, vest-clad dandy saloon keeper. It began with their discovering the effects of barrel-aging while transporting booze on ships, where time in oak would calm the fiery spirits and impart vanillin, oils and other flavorings.

The mariners’ importance extended through the early-1600s with what some argue to be the greatest drinking innovation since the advent of distillation: the creation of punch. The salty seamen of the East India Trading Company prepared punches by combining their strong brandy with citrus (to combat the effects of scurvy), sugar and spices being transporting in the ship’s hold, and water that may not have been safely potable without the sterilizing effects of alcohol. It was a highly efficient and delicious system for fighting back the cold, while keeping one’s teeth from falling out and [insert disentary joke here, something about the poop deck].

British colonialism offered more punchy wisdom, like the rhyming recipe for Barbadian Rum Punch “One of Sour,Two of Sweet, Three of Strong, Four of Weak,” in this case meaning one part lime juice, two parts sugar, three parts rum, and four parts water. Garnished with fresh-ground nutmeg, that recipe holds up well even today, if the water is frozen and you add a dash or two of bitters.

In fact, it was the bitters that differentiated the cocktail from all previous punches and myriad mixed drinks, and which distinguished it as a uniquely American invention. Created by steeping medicinal herbs in alcohol to extract and preserve their healing properties in an easily-administered liquid, bitters were first sold for their purported curative value, but the patient’s resulting robustness probably had naught to do with anything vegetal in the mix.

Prior to the 19th century, drinks had not evolved very far beyond the original punch recipes, but once the Revolutionary War was resolved (we won!), and daily life started to settle down, great things started happening on the American cocktail scene. The first cocktails were hangover cures, blending those healthsome bitters with a little hair of the dog and a spoonful of sugar, but eventually cocktails made the transition from morning medicine to evening indulgence. One of the most renowned instances of this development occurred in New Orleans around 1850, when Aaron Bird, seeing the long lines for an elixir being made made by his local pharmacist, Antoine Peychaud, opened the Sazerac Bar and began using Peychaud’s Bitters in his signature cocktail.

1862 saw the publication of the first cocktail manual, The Bon Vivant’s Companion by “Professor” Jerry Thomas, which provided recipes for hundreds of drinks and detailed a number of innovations in the American cocktail craft, like stirring and straining, using gomme syrup, and fancy garnishes on many drinks, even specifying “berries in season” to “dress the top” of many of his punch recipes.

Americans continued in unfettered creativity with spirituous beverages up until the darkest years in American history (1920-1933). Prohibition forced most every skilled bartender who had not taken up another profession to expatriate to Europe and ply his trade. Even with the repeal of the Volstead Act, most never returned. The prevailing tastes devolved over more than a decade of contraband hooch as new cocktails were designed to hide the flavors of bathtub gin, and whiskey was rare because it required years of barrel aging, raising the likelihood of being busted.

The post-prohibition palate still wanted the strong, simple drinks to which it was accustomed, but after World War II, veterans who had been stationed in the South Pacific brought back a love of Polynesian drinks and launched a craze that consumed American pop culture through the end of the 1950s. Tiki featured fresh produce and culinary fusion in innovative drink design, which all factor heavily in the craft cocktail resurgence we are seeing now, but unfortunately, not much of value happened in between.

In the 1960s, vodka went from zero-to-sixty faster than an Aston Martin, thanks largely to the James Bond films; everything was served on the rocks in the seventies; and sweet, simple shots dominated the eighties. At some point in the nineties we began to renounce the sins of our fathers, and as the new millennium dawned, a generation of drinkers discovered classic cocktails.

Many contemporary cocktailians pay homage to Dale DeGroff, who was among the first to develop what he calls the “gourmet approach to recreating the great classic cocktails.” Around the same time, the seeds of California Cuisine blossomed into the New American culinary approach, with a focus on fresh, seasonal ingredients, and experimentation that stemmed from a reverence for classical French technique, pioneered by chefs like Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck.

This trend has been mirrored in the contemporary craft cocktail craze, rejecting sour mix for fresh-squeezed citrus, and jars of maraschinos have been tossed out in favor of fresh cherries marinated in brandy behind the bar. As often as possible, ingredients are made in-house and some purists won’t even serve a Cosmo because they refuse to carry bottled juice. Bar-tops are dominated by bowls of fresh fruits and herbs, hand-labeled apothecary bottles, and towering pillar juicers; cocktail menus change weekly or daily to make the most of what is available at the farmers market. Higher regard is being paid to all ingredients, and great debates rage over the optimal techniques and ingredients for individual drinks.

This trend can be traced most directly to bars in coastal American cities like New York and San Francisco but there are also distinct influences from Europe, where the development of cocktails was never interrupted by Prohibition. It is of little surprise that most every new concoction is a twist on a classic and its roots can likely be followed back to the Savoy Cocktail Book, printed in London in 1930, written by Harry Craddock, an American expat bartender.

The more specific developments, however, are harder to track. Contemporary trends no longer follow the distinctly linear paths they once did, and the driving forces in the beverage industry have become decentralized and multi-directional. With the rise of a DIY ethic in the arts and the ease of online information sharing, the necessary knowledge has been disseminated for modern mixologists to home-brew sodas and tinctures, infuse their own liqueurs , pickle garnishes, and even barrel-age a batch of Negronis, and no such gimmick has gone unexplored.

Just as culinary progress has spawned the recent molecular gastronomy movement, there have been parallels in the cocktail world. Molecular mixology brings science behind the bar to transmogrify traditional ingredients into jarring sensory experiences, such as drinks topped with Campari foam shot from a whipped cream canister, crystallized Chartreuse scattered as a garnish, grenadine suspended as a gellified sphere, or whole drinks being frozen with liquid nitrogen.

The story of the well-crafted cocktail embodies everything we honor about the American spirit, and its resurgence unsurprisingly hearkens back to simpler times.The historical influences of the movement are evident now, with a number of new bars designed in the fashion of saloons and speakeasies, with both punch and Tiki trending again, and as many top bartenders openly model their recipes (not to mention their facial hair) on the nineteenth century styles of the early mixologists.

BarSmarts Wired Is Free!

Quinn — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:16:09 +0000

I’ve mentioned BarSmarts, but didn’t go into detail, however I have completed the course and found it enlightening.

BarSmarts Wired is an online cocktail and spirits education program created by some of the biggest names in the business, and it is incredibly thorough, with superb content, expert-led videos, tests and a printable pdf manual that I still refer back to regularly. At the end of the program you can earn BarSmarts certification that shows you know your booze.

For the summer (through September 30, 2011), the BarSmarts Wired program is FREE, if you use the promo code summer2011.

I would say to tell them Quinn sent you, but it’s just a standard online registration form.

The Cheery Herring

Quinn — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:58:18 +0000

I had forgotten all about this recipe, which I posted on nermo.com before I wrote (or knew) much about cocktails, until I got an email today from a gal at Al Gore’s office asking if he could use my red herring Illustration in some of his presentations on the environment.

Permission granted and recipe reposted.

Cocktail Recipe: The Cheery Herring

May 9, 2009

The featured ingredient in this cocktail is Cherry Heering, hence the name. Heering is a smooth and not-too-sweet liqueur; the original cherry brandy as developed by Dane Peter Heering in 1818.

I was just going to call it Happy Fish, but I wasn’t sure that would be enough info to get the joke, so now I am over-explaining it. Meh, I can’t win.

1 ounce bourbon
1/2 ounce Cherry Heering
1/2 ounce sweet vermouth
1 ounce grapefruit juice

Shake with ice and serve up, garnished with a Swedish Fish

Note: Swedish fish candies are made to resemble herring and a red herring (like this one I drew) refers to irrelevant information given to distract someone from the main issue, rooted in an old superstition that when travelling, one could keep predators off one’s trail by dragging a red herring back and forth across the path.

Aromatic Garnish

Quinn — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 03:09:49 +0000

Last week I attended a tasting for Bloom Gin, a floral London Dry from the world’s only female master gin distiller (update: or so they claim. See Chad’s comment below), which is about to launch in the US. Among a flight of cocktails, there was something simple yet remarkable.

The Bloom G+T was garnished with half a fresh, ripe strawberry that totally changed the experience of drinking gin and tonic. It’s not something I order very often any more, but I expected it to taste like any other, and it probably would have, but for the interplay of rich strawberry fragrance with the crisp juniper, citrus and quinine flavors, making for a completely unique experience.

Like the strawberry, you can use an aromatic garnish to make a decent drink into an extraordinary experience. The scent of your garnish could complement or contrast with the flavors of the cocktail, crafting very different sensory adventures, so just play around with the possibilities until you find something that excites you. Some options include citrus zest squeezed to release its oils; a dash of bitters or a spray of absinthe from an atomizer atop a foamy cocktail; green herbs like mint or basil, clapped between your hands to extract the oils; edible flowers; and fresh cut fruits like apples, pears or berries.

Happy Bastille Day

Quinn — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:44:29 +0000

The Bijou is a strong, herbaceous and decadent cocktail, which gets its name from the french word for jewel.

It’s great to batch for your Bastille Day soiree, because all of the ingredients are shelf stable, so all you need to do at party time is measure three ounces over ice, stir and strain, or make them three-at-a-time with a 1-cup ladle.

Bijou

1 ounce plymouth gin
1 ounce sweet vermouth
1 ounce green Chartreuse
2 dashes orange bitters

No garnish; that would be totally bourgeois… or would it be gauche?

When Orange Rhymes with Boring: Limoncello

Quinn — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 01:09:13 +0000

I was invited to join a bevy of bartenders yesterday at one of my favorite watering holes for limoncello cocktails made by two of the best local barmen.

The key takeaway from this experience was that when you are looking for a little something different, limoncello can be substituted for citrus liqueurs such as tripel sec in a number of classic cocktail recipes. We tasted excellent examples of a margarita and a sidecar (with the lemon juice swapped for lime) both crafted this way, as well as a pisco punch incorporating limoncello.

The owner of Caravella Limoncello was also on hand to let us in on a few industry secrets.

“The lemons, they must suffer,” he exclaimed, supporting one of my favorite theories, that fruit develops the most intense flavors in severe conditions*, and he enriches his limoncello with only Sicilian lemon skins, which impart a vibrant flavor and an almost florescent yellow color that makes for naturally gorgeous cocktails.

He informed us that until he began producing limoncello over three decades ago, it was a cottage industry, brewed up only by housewives and in restaurant kitchens. In fact, limoncello has still not branched into the Italian cocktail realm, but persists simply as a digestif, served ice-cold after a meal, when often a restaurant owner will place a bottle on the table, encouraging guests to linger and drink.

Pisco Punch; Caravella’s Paolo Sperone;
Duggan McDDonnell and Shaher Misif shake cocktails at Cantina in San Francisco

* A theory I began to understand when I first bit into a flaccid California Macintosh apple expecting all the flavor of a Mac from my home in Vermont. Long, gentle growing seasons yield lazy fruit with no fear of extinction, but to survive in the harsh climes of places like New England, fruit must adapt by developing intense flavors to ensure that animals will devour them and release seeds in fertile piles to keep the family line strong. I’ve recently heard similar tales of Mexican agave, with with mezcal producers incorporating plants which struggle to survive on the side of a ravine with their traditionally farmed agave to improve flavor.