#few rye

4/3 GSN Review: FEW Spirits

If you look closely at the FEW logo, you’ll notice that each letter is separated by a period. There’s a reason for this.  The company is named after Frances Elizabeth Willard who lived in the distilleries’ hometown of Evanston, Illinois.  If you’re thinking that she was a women distiller, you’d be completely mistaken.  In fact, she was the head of the WCTU, or Women’s Christian Temperance Union. …

Experimenting with the new vermouth I decided to make another drink. This time a rye manhattan

50ml FEW rye whiskey

25ml Sacred English spiced vermouth

5 dashes Bitter Truth old time aromatic bitters

Here's tonight's experiment:

25ml FEW Rye

25ml Cynar

25ml Punt E Mes

A couple dashes peychauds bitters

Served over ice in a tumbler. 

Result? Not bad. Pleasant even. The Cynar dominates too much though, leaving it a fairly bitter drink. It's deliberately modelled after a negroni, but somehow the bitterness is more objectionable here (or possibly I've just gone off negronis. I've not had one in a while). I also hadn't let it dilute enough, so it was quite strong.

I decided to tinker a bit more and see if I could fix it with the simple expedient of cutting it half and half with soda water. Surprisingly, I could! 

I don't know why, but with the soda water added a lot of the bitterness disappeared. The bitterness is still present, but greatly reduced. It becomes a quite mild sweet and herbal drink, with some spiciness from the rye coming through. It reminds me a little bit of good root beer, though it's not nearly as sweet of course.

In conclusion, this won't be a regular as it currently stands but there might be something worth exploring in it.

I did a very nice tasting of FEW Spirits with the London Cocktail Society the other day, and came away with two spirits I felt I had to buy (and several more I'd be perfectly happy to drink), so the next day I placed an order with Master of Malt for a bunch of different spirits. Specifically their rye and their navy strength gin. 

I... may have gone a little overboard. Once I'd ordered the FEW spirits I added one or two other things to the basket. All told the resulting order was

FEW rye whiskey

FEW navy strength gin

Bitter Truth pimento dram

Laphroiag 10 year old

Bitter Truth old time aromatic bitters

Ava Tahiti ginger eau de vie

Anyway, the spirits arrived at about 8:30 this morning, and I've been patiently awaiting the point where it would be socially acceptable for me to start drinking so I could try some of them out.

Here are the first two things I tried with them:

Manhattan

30ml FEW rye whiskey

5ml Punt E Mes

2 dashes Bitter Truth old time aromatic bitters

1 maraschino as garnish

Stirred with ice, etc. You know how to make a manhattan. If you don't, you can look it up.

This was very nice, but that was mostly because the FEW Rye is very nice. It's extremely flavourful and dominated the drink to the point where I hardly noticed the Punt E Mes or bitters except as a slight softening. I think it could easily stand up to more of both.

Almost Scotch

Summer Fruit Cup did a post on cocktails using the pimento dram a while back, and one of the winners from that was the "Almost Rye", which is just rye and pimento dram. I thought about doing this with the FEW rye, but was worried that it would dominate again, so opted for a different whiskey. However I don't have any other ryes (I know. I'm sorry), so I decided to go for my Johnny Walker green, partly because the bottle is nearly empty and shelf space is at a premium right now. That being said, it's actually a very nice blended scotch, so I'll probably replace the bottle at some point.

25ml Johnny Walker Green

5ml Bitter Truth pimento dram

Built in glass, served with two ice cubes and no garnish (because I was lazy).