100 Cocktails

This head-to-head is a good example of why these kinds of competitions are ridiculous. I didn’t really understand that when I started this year-long Drink Off, but it is abundantly clear that pitting drinks against one another – even drinks with the same base spirit – is a fool’s errand.

However! It’s still fun, even if it’s silly, so onward!

Martini

½ cup gin (Bombay Sapphire straight from the freezer)

1 capful Noilly Prat dry vermouth

olives

(recipe feeds 2)

Gin Julep

8-10 fresh mint leaves muddled with

¼ oz lime juice

¼ oz lemon juice and

1 tsp sugar, then add

2 oz gin (Bombay Sapphire straight from the freezer)

fresh mint sprig

My husband pointed out what a hard comparison this is because the drinks are so incompatible. Yes. But, as my husband also said, “they’re both good, but I can’t bring myself to vote against a martini.” I had a strict rule of presenting the drinks without saying what they were, but a martini is a pretty obvious drink, so he figured it out probably just by looking at it, but definitely within the first sip. Martinis are one of the world’s great drinks, and Gin Juleps are one of the world’s good drinks. Ergo:

I’m not even sure why we bothered with this particular matchup – oh, wait! I remember now! So we could drink mint juleps, duh.

Mint Julep

fresh mint leaves muddled with

1 tsp simple syrup (1:2 water:sugar)

then add

2 oz bourbon (Maker’s Mark)

fresh mint sprig

Mr. Jefferson’s Brambles

1 ¼ oz applejack (Laird’s)

¼ oz apricot brandy (Marie Brizard Apry)

¼ oz Raspberry Shrub

The Brambles was “cough syrupy. Really good cough syrup, but still,” said my husband. And the Mint Juleps were “an amazing sensory experience.” So that’s that.

Hoo boy, I am not a speedster at reporting this. Which bums me out! I have lots of new cocktails I want to write about, but I have to get these old ones out of the way!  So, here we go:

Golden Delicious

1 oz applejack (I used Laird’s)

½ oz Goldwasser

½ oz lemon juice

dash Peychaud’s bitters

Barnum (Was Right)

2 oz gin (Bombay Sapphire)

1 oz apricot brandy (Marie Brizard Apry)

½ oz lemon juice

2 dashes Angostura bitters

These two drinks were not dramatically different, so the judging was harder. Also, the classic Coke v Pepsi problem asserted itself: initially the sweeter drink seems better, but once you taste them for the third, fourth, fifth time, you stop liking the sweet so much.

The Golden Delicious wins because it was brisker and less cloying. The Barnum (Was Right) gave a good noseful, and initially had a bit more going on, but ultimately was too sweet. (Apry will do that to a drink.)

I am, ahem, somewhat behind in posting these results (unless you happen to be the type of person for whom 17 months late doesn’t really count as late), so I will limit myself to the recipes and the comments I recorded at the time of drinking. I gotta get these posted so I can move on to new drinks!

Old Fashioned

muddle:

1 teaspoon white sugar

½ slice orange

1 Luxardo cherry

9 dashes Angostura bitters

then add

2 oz bourbon (I used Maker’s Mark)

Canis Mingo

1 oz Cointreau

½ oz limoncello

½ oz apricot brandy (I used Marie Brizard Apry)

1 ½ oz lemon juice

dash Pernod

Comments on the Old Fashioned: “lovely, dark and deep,” and “tastes like a serious-ass drink; it’s not trying to be friendly.”

Comments on the Canis Mingo: “that’s good!” and “it’s somehow so fruity, yet really refreshing; sweet but not cloyingly so.”

My husband voted for the Canis Mingo, in point of fact, but that’s obviously nonsense. My analysis – which is clearly the correct one* – is that the Canis Mingo is Pepsi and the Old Fashioned is Coke. Taste tests have demonstrated that if you take one sip of both of those drinks, Pepsi wins, but if you have to drink the whole can, Coke is what you prefer.

WINNER: Old Fashioned

We drank these of a Sunday afternoon with our delightful real estate agent who made us buy our apartment in the spring of 2013. I had not loved the apartment (to put it mildly) when I walked in the first few times, but the combination of desperation and a dawning realization that we could not afford any other apartment with a similar amount of space led me to reconsider. I’m glad we bought it, although the things I disliked about it (long, extremely narrow hallway and terrible bathroom layout) have somehow still not endeared themselves to me. Ah well. At least I’m back home in New York!

Pimm’s Julep

1 oz Pimm’s No. 1

1 oz bourbon (I used Jim Beam)

1-2 teaspoons of muddled mint bourbon

2-3 oz fizzy lemonade

squeeze lemon wedge

mint sprig garnish

Corpse Reviver #2

1 oz gin (I used Half Moon Orchard)

1 oz Cointreau

1 oz Lillet Blanc

1 oz lemon juice

drop or two of Pernod

Comments on the Pimm’s Julep: “more going on,  I love the mint,” and  “a mint julep gone wrong.” Wait, what? Gone wrong? The reasons for that comment are lost to time (these drinks were drunk 17 months prior to me writing these words) (I know, I know, ease up), so I’ll never know why a delicious drink was described as having gone wrong. Oh well.

As for the Corpse Reviver #2: “wow, this is exciting,” “on the Riviera in summer,” “going to the races.” I mean, yes, Corpse Reviver #2s are delicious and exciting, so this makes sense, but, in spite of the Riviera-invoking qualities of the drink, it did not prevail.

That evening felt like it might be the last warm evening of the season, so I figured the G&T was up for the competition.

Gin & Tonic

gin to taste (I used about 1 ½ oz Bombay Sapphire)

tonic to taste

lime

Friday the 13th

1 oz Southern Comfort

½ oz Aperol

½ oz lemon juice

The Friday the 13th was much sweeter, so it seemed better on the first sips, but over time, it became cloying. Cloying is not a good drink attribute. The drink was invented as a result of a 2 parts spirits + 1 or 2 parts sweet + 1 part citrus equation experiment, and it was a perfectly fine drink, but not tremendous.

The G&T is one of my all-time favorite drinks. My husband doesn’t like it nearly as well as I do, so it was a bit of a surprise that he voted for it, but there you have it.

A classic, classic drink against an old-style, no-one’s-really-ever-heard-of-it drink.  So of course the classic loses.

Negroni

2 oz gin (I used Bombay Sapphire)

1 oz Campari

1 oz Carpano Antica

orange slice

Nicky Finn

1 oz brandy

1 oz Cointreau

1 oz lemon juice

1 dash Pernod

My husband said about the Negroni “It tastes like it has all these things that in theory I like,” right before he voted for the Nicky Finn to win. The components of the Negroni are some of the best possible ingredients for a drink: I adore gin, Campari adds a tremendous pop to drinks, and the Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth is the best there is. Still, they couldn’t hold up to brandy, Cointreau and Pernod. I think that’s probably due to the magic of Cointreau (seriously, that stuff is amazing the way it richens up everything it touches) and the gorgeousness of the Pernod aroma (I could spend an hour with my nose stuck in a Pernod bottle, just smelling it).

Some bigger-picture competition notes: the sweeter drink almost always wins (unless the drink is dessert-sweet, and then it doesn’t).  Also, the seeding/ranking/ordering of these drinks was very suspect and upon even the slightest stress test, completely falls apart. Get over it.  Also, classic drinks are almost always classic for a very good reason (one exception: the Rusty Nail cuz it’s yuck), and if the classic loses, it’s for reasons that don’t have much to do with the drink.

Therefore, all that said, the Negroni, one of the all-time greats, loses to a goofy little drink called the Nicky Finn.

These two drinks were invented close in time to each other, and close in time to our very stressful move in 2013. I see their names and shudder a bit, remembering that low point. Although then I remember how happy I was to have my bar back, so it’s all good.

Four Bottles

1 oz Irish whiskey (I used Jameson)

½ oz Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth

 ¼ oz Marie Brizard Apry

2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

The Bar Is Unpacked

1 oz rum (I used 4-year-old Barbancourt)

¼ oz Carpano Antica

¼ oz Aperol

¼ oz Cointreau

¼ oz lemon juice

The Apry (an apricot brandy sort of thing) dominates the Four Bottles. It’s one of those drinks that’s best on the first taste, and then as you go on (or it warms up), it gets less interesting. The Bar Is Unpacked is nicely balanced between sweet and tart. “It’s slightly more refreshing than the Four Bottles,” was the best comment my husband could muster up. Neither of us felt particularly comment-y, so that’s all I got.

A friend from western Massachusetts was visiting, and we forced a drinks competition on her. And by “forced,” what I mean is “she said she wouldn’t visit unless drinks were involved.”

Pimm’s Cup

3 oz Pimm’s No. 1

3-4 oz fizzy lemonade

cucumber spear

lemon slice

Berries N Rye

4 blueberries muddled at the bottom of the shaker with

1 teaspoon brown sugar and

½ oz berry vinegar reduction*

1 oz rye

Our visitor said she was “usually not crazy about bourbon, but she liked” the Berries N Rye. It’s not made with bourbon, I gleefully pointed out. Oh snap!

This was a surprise. I adore Pimm’s Cups; they are one of my favorite drinks in the whole world. But that night, the Pimm’s Cup just wasn’t as right as the Berries N Rye. I used a nice limonata as the lemon fizz, so that wasn’t the issue, and the drink had its usual lovely cucumber nose, so that wasn’t the problem either. I guess it was just that it couldn’t stand up in comparison to the richer Berries N Rye.

And this is noteworthy: drinks competitions are fraught. Everything depends upon your current mood, what the temperature is outside, what you’re eating, who you’re with, what happened to you that day, etc. In fact, I would argue that those external things are way more important, collectively, than the quality of your drinks in determining which is the “better” drink. It’s not like a 100 meter dash where the winner is determined by a pre-set metric: the first across the finish line wins. In a drink off, the drink the majority of drinkers prefers at that moment and in that situation wins. So on a hot summer afternoon with a plate of tacos, a Manhattan is unlikely to defeat a margarita. But on a cold night snuggled up by the fireplace, a frosty margarita is nowhere near as delightful as that mellow Manhattan.

All this to say: even though excellent drinks have lost and will continue to lose in this competition, it turns out: it’s not really about those drinks. It’s about me! Well, me and my drinking companions and what we’re in the mood for.

This is the first Round 2 drink!  Very exciting!

Gimlet

2 oz gin (Bombay Sapphire)

¼ oz Rose’s Sweetened Lime Juice

lime twist

Frothy Coco Pom Tiki

1 oz rum ¼ oz maraschino liqueur ¼ oz Cointreau 1 oz pomegranate juice 1 oz pineapple juice squirt of Coco Real splash of Rose’s Sweetened Lime Juice ¼ oz lime juice 1 oz fizzy coconut water dash cranberry bitters cocktail umbrella

One of the last two drinks of the first round became one of the first two drinks of the second round because collecting all the ingredients for the damn thing is such a pain. Fortunately, this is the last hurrah for the Frothy Coco Pom Tiki for this competition. It’s a good drink, but it has too many ingredients and is too much of a pain to make very often.

Plus, and this is the critical bit, the Gimlet is a better drink. The Frothy Coco Pom TIki “is really good, but it’s more a special event thing than a cocktail,” said my husband. “There’s no loser in this bunch,” he went on. Well, the first bit is true, but not that second part. There is a loser, even though it is a perfectly good drink, and the loser is the Frothy Coco Pom Tiki.

The Gimlet is limey and refreshing and delicious. “What I like about it is you get sucked in with the Rose’s, but can still taste the gin.” Exactly.

(originally posted on 100cocktails.net on December 6, 2014)

I like the storyline that I saved the sparkling wine drink for the last of the first round drinks so I could celebrate! But that’s not even remotely true. Instead, I was putting off making the Frothy Coco Pom Tiki (a #13 seed) because it’s just a pain to make.

Pimm’s Royal 1 ½ oz Pimm’s No. 1 4-5 oz sparkling wine lemon twist strip of cucumber peel

Frothy Coco Pom Tiki 1 oz rum ¼ oz maraschino liqueur ¼ oz Cointreau 1 oz pomegranate juice 1 oz pineapple juice squirt of Coco Real splash of Rose’s Sweetened Lime Juice ¼ oz lime juice 1 oz fizzy coconut water dash cranberry bitters cocktail umbrella

The nose on the Pimm’s Royal (a #4 seed) is just delightful – I love me some Pimm’s! But the taste of this particular drink was too sharp. I tasted the cava by itself, and it was fine, so I’m not sure what went screwy. Unless, and this is happening over and over again, the drink only tastes sharp because it is in comparison with the sweet sweet sweet Frothy Coco Pom Tiki (a #13 seed). But, really, I think in this case there was some weird chemistry between the Pimm’s and the cava.

The F.C.P.T. was sweet and tasty, like a good tiki drink should be. “I do love drinks with coconut in them!” enthused my husband. Yes. Because they are delicious. Although, perhaps, they are not really cocktails but instead, dessert.

(originally posted on 100cocktails.net on December 6, 2014)

I do love drinks with floats! One of these days I might actually get good at them.

Pink New Yorker 2 oz bourbon 1 oz grapefruit juice red wine float

Berries N Rye 4 blueberries muddled at the bottom of the shaker with 1 teaspoon of brown sugar and ½ oz berry vinegar reduction* and then shake with 1 oz rye

Failed at the float again. I blame the angled side of the glass. The taste of the Pink New Yorker (a #7 seed) was also a fail – I think the red wine I chose was too tannic.

So yay Berries N Rye (#10 seed)! And it didn’t win just because it was less-bad than the Pink New Yorker – it was actually a good drink. I really like the shrub flavor. When done correctly, vinegar can be really quite good in a drink. Here’s the reduction cooking:

My husband said the Berries N Rye was a little sweet for him, but “not cloying, and it’s full and rich.” He said it was “the magic of rye,” and I think he’s right.

WINNER: Berries N Rye

(originally posted on 100cocktails.net on December 6, 2014)

More friends! More Maine! More delightful!

We had headed to the coast to hang out with other friends, this family being one of my husband’s high school friends, her mother, her husband, their daughter, and their dog (v adorable; in fact, almost as cute as my doggie).

This group was more of a cocktails crowd than the last one, so I had to bring a couple of good ones.

Purple Judas

1 ½ oz bourbon

½ oz Aperol

¼ oz orgeat

¼ oz blood orange juice

1-3 dashes orange bitters

dash Rhubarb Rush

lemon twist

Gin Julep

8-10 mint leaves muddled with

¼ oz lime juice and

¼ oz lemon juice and

1 teaspoon sugar then add

2 oz gin

fresh mint sprig

I thought this one would be good because the husband prefers bourbon drinks, but the wife leans strongly to gin. Head to head battle!

But then I went and screwed it up by adding WAY too many (too much? what is the correct comparative?) bitters to the Purple Judas (a #8 seed), so the drink just was only meh.

The Gin Julep (#9 seed), however, was a delight. Our friends kees a huge garden with a zillion herbs, so I used superfresh mint and it was delicious. I had also picked several other herbs, and after we did the official taste testing (and the Gin Julep officially won), I threw some basil and tarragon into our glasses and that made the drink even better. “It’s like drinking the garden,” said my husband.

The Gin Julep was everyone’s clear favorite, even the bourbon-loving husband. Damn you, heavy bitters hand! Ruined a perfectly good bourbon-v-gin competition.

WINNER: Gin Julep

NOTE: After we got home from the trip, I made us another round of Gin Julep-y drinks by muddling a bunch of different herbs (basil, tarragon, sage, and mint) with maple syrup instead of sugar, and then added the juices and gin. So. Good. That version is called the Dump Road (cuz our friends live on the dump road) and it is even better than the Gin Julep.

(originally posted November 2, 2014)

My husband and I were heading to Maine with the dog for a few days while our son was at camp. It was a marvelous, and marvelously efficient, long weekend. We saw four different sets of friends in four days; I’m very grateful to our friends for acquiring vacation properties so conveniently located to each other.

Set-of-Friends Number One: a very close family friend (she and my mother met in what they call The Malibu Days: four 22-year-old recent college grads living together in a 2-bedroom beachfront rental in Malibu in 1959; oh my God, that is totally a sitcom) and her husband have a lake house which they bought as a place for their kids and grandkids to come and summer. It is a magical place.

Wonderfully enough, their oldest kid and I have been friends since we were babies, and we try to get together once a year, either at the lake or in her hometown (she doesn’t come to me all that often, since she has three kids younger than mine).

This year it was the lake! My husband and I had a fantastic time hanging out with all of them cooking, swimming, kayaking, motorboating, eating ice cream, biking (that was my husband, not me), and making cocktails (that was me, not my husband).

Pimm’s Cup 3 oz Pimm’s No. 1 3-4 oz fizzy lemonade cucumber spear lemon slice

Extra Botanical 1 slice lemon cucumber muddled with 1 teaspoon agave and 1 leaf of basil then add ½ oz lemon juice shaken with 1 oz gin

I chose this competition for these friends because a Pimm’s Cup was the house cocktail offered at the wedding of their younger daughter (in England to an Englishman). I don’t think anyone but me remembered that detail, though. I remember the drinks, and leave the unimportant stuff to others to remember.

In a contest of a sweet-ish fizzy drink against a slightly-herbal alcoholic wallop, sweet fizz wins every time. The Extra Botanical was “a little acerbic,” said my husband. ?? “I mean, a little astringent.” Yes, that. The Malibu Days Girl’s husband just hated it. And there was decent reason to dislike it. I made it in the wrong kind of glass: the herbs were muddled at the bottom of the glass for a while with the agave, and then the gin was added. Because of the shape of the glass though (see above), the sweetened herbs never really made it into the gin. So the first two thirds of the drink were basically a gin shot. I love the flavor of gin, but not as a shot.

Pimm’s Cups, however, are a delight. The lemon and cucumber, just by themselves, are awfully tasty, and then the sort-of-sweet Pimm’s No. 1 adds a layer of loveliness that to me is summer in a glass.

(originally posted on 100cocktails.net on September 3, 2014)

This is one of the Campari-loving Harvard professor’s favorites of the drinks I made in 2012, matched against a perfectly good cocktail I invented in 2013. If only the Harvard professors had been here to help us taste these! Sigh. I miss them. Why o why don’t they become the Columbia professors?!?

Corpse Reviver #2 1 oz gin (I used Half Moon Orchard) 1 oz Cointreau 1 oz Lillet Blanc 1 oz lemon juice 1-2 drops Pernod

Enhanced Pear 1 oz pear brandy (I used a Poire Williams) ½ oz lime juice ¼ oz orgeat 2 shakes Angostura bitters shaken in, plus 2 more on top

“Poire Williams is strong within this one,” as my husband said Yoda might say about the Enhanced Pear, a #14 seed. I didn’t love the dominance of the Poire Williams, although it was a good drink. (I couldn’t find any of the Rare Pear Brandy that I had used to create the first go-round of the Enhanced Pear, though, and that might have made all the difference.)

I really like Corpse Reviver #2s (what is the correct plural of that, anyway?). “It tastes like a straight drinky-drink,” said my husband. “It’s pleasant and well-proportioned.” And even though he found the Enhanced Pear to be “a little more interesting, the Corpse Reviver #2 [a #3 seed] is a higher-level drink.” Yes. And the Campari-loving Harvard professor would agree, I’m sure.

(originally posted on 100cocktails.net on July 5, 2014)

Oh, dear, the year is half over and I am not to the halfway point with these drinks! It was a whole lot easier to make only one cocktail a night for the first two years of this experiment. Making two different ones each time is a bit more of a pain than I had expected. Also, having to redo drinks that, to a certain extent, are un-redo-able is kinda kicking my butt.

For example, in the original Cold Mulled Gin, I used gin that my friend the Maid of Honor had infused. I followed her recipe, but even so, the variables are enormous – what kinds of pears and apples? how ripe were they? how much is “one stick” of cinnamon? what if the cloves were bought in 2008? etc. The mulled gin which I made tastes nothing like what I remember of the mulled gin she made – my mulling made cinnamon-flavored gin, where I recall that her mulling made apple-and-pear-and-cinnamon-and-clove-flavored gin.

But, them’s the breaks and the experiment must go on. And here’s a pro tip: cinnamon flavors gin strongly and quickly – when in doubt, use less rather than more.

Cold Mulled Gin 3 red grapes and 1 chunk of crystallized ginger muddled with 2 dashes of blood orange bitters 2 oz infused gin (infused with 3 apple slices, 3 pear slices, 8 cloves and 3 sticks of cinnamon) 1 stick of dried pear

Has Spring Sprung? 1 oz applejack (I used Laird’s) ½ oz apricot brandy (I used Marie Brizard Apry) ½ oz Cointreau ¼ oz Campari ½ oz lemon juice

“Velvety,” my husband said about the Cold Mulled Gin (a #2 seed). It tasted thick and very cinnamon-y. “I love this as sort of a thing, but [the Has Spring Sprung] is actually a better drink.”

I have to agree. I really wanted the Cold Mulled Gin to win, since I loved it when I first made it last fall, but my infused gin was not remotely the same as my friend’s, and so the drink was diminished. The Has Spring Sprung (a #15 seed) was a good standard drink. Well balanced and with a nice flavor, it is perfectly fine. It would not have defeated a Cold Mulled Gin made with gin that was not overly cinnamoned, but my mulling errors made its day and the Has Spring Sprung survives to the next round.

As a side note, this experiment is really demonstrating how challenging it must be for purveyors of food and drink to present consistent products. When something is as variable as an apple, for example, how does someone make a specialty apple pie, and get famous for that apple pie? How do they make it taste the same each time, given that the apples will always have differences, given what time of year it is, when the apples were picked, where they were grown, and so on. Or something like beer: how does Budweiser make its beer taste the same all the time? It seems perverse, but that must actually be quite difficult. Vinters have it easier, in that each year is expected to taste different, but still, every barrel from a given year in that vineyard should taste much like any other barrel. My congratulations to all the same-taste-makers out there.

(originally posted on 100cocktails.net on July 5, 2014)

No friends over, no events to commemorate, no tribulations to try and get through; just my husband and me wanting to have a couple of nice cocktails. (I should point out here, by the way, that I always serve only half of each cocktail. I give the full recipe for one drink, but then I only make that one drink (if it’s two of us; two if it’s four of us, etc.) and split it between us. I don’t want to drink two full cocktails each time I do this – two half cocktails is just about right.)

Von Salmon 1 oz gin (I used Bombay Sapphire) ½ oz Carpano Antica 1 oz orange juice

Fruity Rye ¾ oz rye (I used Old Overholt) ½ oz pear brandy (I used G.E. Massenez Poire Williams) ½ oz Cointreau slice of peach

The Von Salmon (a #7 seed) was a little bland in comparison to the sharpness of the Fruity Rye (a #10 seed). As my Faithful Reader knows (although? is he still my Faithful Reader? I have not been keeping up my end of the writer-reader bargain very well, so probably not), my husband claims to prefer more serious drinks. Or, as he put it, “I try to give the benefit of the doubt to the drink with the kick.”

In this case, the Fruity Rye is more serious, and has the bigger kick. It just feels like a more substantial, complex drink. And that’s with a slice of really hard peach. When I make it again in the next round, I hope peaches are more in season; it would be nice to try this drink with a peach-flavored (as opposed to rock-flavored) peach in it.