#murlarkeygin

Yellow Fingers

This is a fun, funny dessert drink cocktail with a tropical accent. Banana liqueur and blackberry brandy are the sweetener for this creamy cocktail. But banana liqueur tastes so fake and sugary. I was glad to use the richly flavored MurLarkey Banana Whiskey. Coupled with their gin, you get a dessert drink with traction. Whiskey flavors as well as real dried banana and a mouthful of gin botanicals bombard your senses. For the blackberry brandy, I used my homemade blackberry brandy by dissolving blackberry preserves in cognac and fine straining out the liquor.

Favorite / Why Not?

This is one of many apricot brandy, lemon juice and gin cocktails--a combination that is so popular that a drink by the name Favorite is no surprise. These cocktails differ by proportion, however. This one leans more heavily on the apricot brandy and dry vermouth and less on lemon and gin. Indecently, this is the same exact recipe for the drink called Why Not? except that that one calls for only a quarter teaspoon of lemon juice. It's basically the same thing, though.   I always have MurLarkey ImaGination gin handy, so it was an obvious base. And I have to say that it is noticeably spicy and rich beneath all that fruitiness of the other ingredients. The other thing that helped was Rivata dry vermouth. With a whole ounce of the stuff, it adds character where this drink might fall flatly like a sugar bomb. I didn't even bother to juice a lemon, and rather squeezed a wedge lightly over the shaker to get the half teaspoon required for the recipe.

Thunderclap

The Thunderclap is a wallop of a cocktail, as the name suggests. It's four ounces of booze and it comes across as a whiskey cocktail since that is the main ingredient. To make it I used MurLarkey spirits. MurLarkey in Bristow, Virginia, makes both whiskey and gin. Their Heritage whiskey is a bourbon-style mash with some barley in it. It tastes like a mix of Irish and bourbon whiskey. They also make Imagination gin, a New Western style gin with less juniper but fun flavors like kafir lime leaves, lemongrass, ginger, rosemary, celery gentian root and szechuan peppercorns. With all that spice, a round Christian Brothers brandy calms the thunderclap down.

Twin Six Cocktail

There's something very classic about this cocktail. It has a bitterness and a lovely foam that reminds me of a whiskey cocktail. I'm a little puzzled why it is named after a pair of gunfighter's guns, but this cocktail is classic old style American. It makes sense to use an American gin like Imagination, a New Western style gin. Juniper is not welcome in such a silky drink with vermouth bitterness. This gin is made in Bristow, Virginia.

Ulanda Cocktail

The idea behind the Ulanda Cocktail is a spirit-forward herbal cocktail with bitter spice and orange flavors. It was very well balanced and easy to drink, though having no fruit juice means it packs a punch and requires a good bit of slow sipping to get through it. MurLarkey ImaGination gin gave the Ulanda a classic gin cocktail taste--very American, with rich botanicals to balance the richness of the splash of Pernod's anise. The recipe calls for triple sec, and I can see using a sweet one like Leroux, but Cointreau is cleaner tasting. I have even drier triple sec than Cointreau, and I am certain that it wouldn't be sweet enough to carry the drink off.

White Way

The White Way is an outmoded term describing the main business strip, the street of a city that is electrified at night. The term could only be used seriously in the early Twentieth Century as cities were switching to electric power. The cocktail is still true to it's name--brilliantly white and fresh. It also makes use of white creme de menthe, a liqueur that was very fashionable in the metropolises of the19th and 20th century.

2 oz. gin (MurLarkey ImaGination used)

1 oz. white creme de menthe (Leroux used)

Coco Chanel

This cocktail is named after the famous fashion designer. I have trouble believing that Coco Chanel would drink such a rich cocktail, however. The recipe is simple, almost too easy, with almost three ingredients. I changed it up, however because I chose MurLarkey coffee whiskey instead of Kaluah. Since the coffee infused whiskey has no sugar, I added a tsp. of black tea and demerara sugar simple syrup that I had left over from making Swedish Punsch. Since I've not posted the Punsch recipe, I'll give a description of my syrup: Make a cup of hot black tea and dissolve a half cup of demerera sugar into it. Allow it to cool and store it in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

Old Etonian

I'm reposting the Old Etonian cocktail as one of the rare classic drinks that use creme de noyaux. This is not even one of the cocktails in the New York Bartender's guide, but it is one of my favorites and I wanted to try it with my new bottle of creme de noyaux by Tempis Fugit. This creme is very classic itself. It goes back to the days when cremes were consumed by themselves--they were twice as strong then, as Tempis Fugit cremes are today--and were not thought of as cheap liqueurs that seldom get used. This cocktail had its origins in England and pays tribute to Eaton College, a boys boarding school for those with wealth and influence.