Mixology Monday - In Which I Actually Enjoy A Drink For A Change

This month's Mixology Monday (hosted at Southern Ash) was Highballs. Aka a "_____ & Soda". I drink quite a lot of high balls. I think this stems from the fact that I am a Drinker first, and someone that gives a shit about fancy drinks second. As a Drinker, it is quite helpful to have something that is moderate enough in alcohol that I can still face tomorrow after 4-to-10 drinks on a Tuesday. I make soda water in 5 gallon kegs and blow through about one a fortnight. Margarett likes me to make the soda water with around 5 volumes of pressure, which I think is double what commercial soda water is. I find that to be on the threshold of painfully fizzy, but it is worth enduring for the times when guests attempt to serve themselves, and the soda water rockets into their glass and sprays their drink all over them.

One of my favorite highballs is the Grapefruit Chuhai served at Tanuki, a weird bar place in Portland. Tanuki is the only place I've ever been close to a regular at, and it's a great place to go if you are able to slam 4 beers during happy hour and then eat 15 different ocean creatures while a giant tv plays videos of tentacle horror softcore. A Chuhai was originally a shochu highball, which through the Japanese love of packaging became a canned Mike's Harder-equse alcoholic soda / premium malt beverage. Tanuki serves theirs with a big whack of bitters in it, which is nice.

While shochu would be a great choice, I selected Taiwanese cooking 'wine' to stay truer to the canned Chuhai experience. Michiu is something like a kome shochu, a spirit distilled from rice. I say something like, because I really don't know much about it except what the label tells me and what light googling yields. I DO know that it costs $5/bottle and is 19.5% abv, and tastes pretty good. This version has no salt added which is HIGHLY IMPORTANT. Is there shame in drinking cooking wine? I say no. Good enough for teens good enough for me.

If you have grapefruit soda I bet that would work. I had a Florida grapefruit that someone mailed me for Christmas because they aren't aware that we have grocery stores in Oregon now. This was great, and I expect the first one will pair well in my stomach with the four that will be following it over the course of Robo Vampire.

WAN AN FARM & PASTORAL CO. LTD

1 half grapefruit
3 oz Wan An Farm & Pastoral Co LTD Taiwan Michiu
1/2 oz Palm Sugar Simple Syrup
Soda
Angostura

Slice grapefruit in half, place on pan and sprinkle on brown sugar. Broil in your oven for like 5 or 10 minutes, until it looks good and broiled. Juice the grapefruit, which should yield about 3 oz juice. Mix together juice, michiu, and simple syrup, shake with ice and strain into a relatively clean glass (a dirty glass will work if you can't find a clean one). Blast in some ultra carbonated fizzy water and top with a float of angostura.

The Fallacy Of Hope

Well another year has finally ground itself out, with the usual depredations on my hairline, joints, and conviviality. I marked a significant milestone in my descent-toward-middle-age when my girlfriend had to berated me to 'put on your Nice Pants' for her company holiday party rather than the stained jeans I had planned on. What will 2014 hold for me? Pleated front khakis? White New Balance 'Dad' shoes? Fortunately, in Oregon I have an alternative recourse should things grow so grim.

While I might sound a bit down about it, I typically look forward to the New Year. Mostly because I enjoy making New Years Resolutions

2010 - Eat More Hollandaise - Killed It.
2011 - Drink More Gin - Crushed this one.
2012 - Achieve Spiritual Enlightenment - I guess I failed this one, but I at least kept up the momentum on gin drinking from last year. Also, I did a lot of stretching.
2013 - Embrace Love Of Classic Rock / Drink More Wine Spritzers - Mixed - I must have listened to Inna-Gadda-Da-Vidda 40 times and this is being written to the dulcet strains of Space Truckin'. If you haven't made your NYR yet, go ahead and open THIS and hopefully it should become clear. I made some headway on wine spritzers but at about the midpoint of the year I subconsciously started substituting gin for wine.

I usually give myself a few weeks into the New Year before selecting one, but some options include

Drink More During The Day
Visit Weird Asian Fish Store Down The Street
Develop 'System' For Horse Track

....Well I wrote all that on Dec 31th, and now this morning with a partially shattered brain and a burning need to read more Judge Dredd comics in bed I am struggling for a conclusion.

The Dying, The Dead & The Damned
1 Mug 'Joint Comfort' Herbal Tea
1 Glass Lagavulin 16

May 2014 relieve your suffering, but hopefully not in the permanent way.

Mixology Monday - In Which No One Is Informed Of Anything

Well December seems to have arrived and ended itself with only a slight rumbling from Reasonable Industries. Have I been dead? Or merely busy? Were the previous months of faithful updating a trick to get you to add yet another amateurish blog to a Feedly list already swollen with abandoned premises? Fear not, despite my external silence like a dormant volcano my fearsome brain has been relentlessly churning beneath the surface, waiting to unleash potent liquids on the unsuspecting Pompeiians of the cocktail world. "'Tis man's lot to wait, and the just man's to wait with trust, the unjust man's with fear".

The Mixology Monday theme, hosted by drinkstraightup.com , was Anise. Based on my experience trying to sell ouzo at the distillery, anise seems to be a Love It Or Hate It spice. I am considerably ambivalent about it, I don't loathe it but I am rarely excited by it (in liquor).  I find its numbing flavor often insipid and domineering, the office boor shouting down its fellows. However, one of my absolute favorite drinks to have in the bathtub is the Absinthe Frappe, which is very cold sweetened absinthe.

 ...I'll be honest, for a long while inspiration failed to strike. I made a shrine to anise on the bar, anisettes huddled with absinthes, Aviation Gin looming over Peychauds, the 4 bottle gift pack of Raki samples in a jumbled pile. I prostrated myself before them, chewing anise seeds and waiting to receive some holy wisdom. Nothing. I used the coffee pot to make Star Anise hydrosol. I made Pernod sugar cubes. I consulted Maude Grieve (did you know aniseed is poisonous to pigeons?!). No fundamental truth about Anise revealed itself. 

Then salvation arrived, as it so often does, in a box of cookies sent by my Nana. Pizzelle (which I had to look up to spell despite having eaten them for 28 years) are anise flavored cookies which my Nana makes by the gross every year. I always called them waffle cookies and eat them two at a time with a thick slice of ice cream in the middle (usually the vanilla carved out of a Neapolitan package).  Once they arrived, all the pieces quickly tumbled into place, an excellent-yet-totally unreproducible drink sprang forth into the world, and I can return to my dormancy, Scotch & Yogurt in hand.

Beet, Anise, and Orange are a Flavor Bible approved taste combination which, although most often combined in a salad, work well in liquid form. Making beet juice is an option for getting beet into drinks, but I Don't have a decent juicer and Do always have Beet Port (sweet, fortified beet wine), Beet Bitters, or Beet Wine laying around some where. 

'Technically A Success'

2.5 oz Beet Wine (~12% abv slightly sweet, with strong beet aroma and raisiny body)

.75 oz Royal Combier (or other Orange Liqueur)

1 Whole Egg (Fresh)

Crumbs from Broken Pizzelle which your Nana shipped across the entire country

Pour together the Beet Wine & Combier in tin, add cookie crumbs and muddle thoroughly until totally dissolved. Add Whole Egg and ice, shake and strain through fine wire mesh.

This drink requires a few ingredients that might be hard to source, namely my Nana's cookies and my homemade Beet Wine. I was going to write up a detailed description of how to make Beet Wine, but the odds of anyone anywhere in any dimension ever caring seemed so low that I didn't bother. You can certainly make your own cookies and Beet Wine. Will you? No. So let's not pretend. As a consolation, here is a Holiday Greeting from my cat BORIS.

A Surfeit of Confidence, A Poverty Of Taste

At the distillery tasting room, I occasionally receive unsolicited cocktail suggestions. These I greet with sentiment ranging from gentle pity to outraged disgust. The customers' ideas are typically like a Pottery Barn catalog, something that comes to me undesired but with a frequency that makes me feel I must have through behavior or mere existence somehow requested it. Sure, I will flip through the Pottery Barn catalog if my bowels are suddenly stricken or I need to pass three minutes until Jeopardy starts, but my expectations for revelation are low. Similarly, I will listen to your terrible idea if there is still a possibility I can wring some money out of you. Some, like "my awesome Sazerac recipe" (Pottery Barn Equivalent - a cut-glass monogrammed decanter) don't harm me too much. Others, like the man who upon tasting a Pear Eau-De-Vie suggested that although he didn't enjoy it or brandy in general, thought it would work great in a cocktail he makes composed of Orange Juice, Galliano, Creme de Cacao, Creme de Menthe, and Heavy Cream. I'm not sure how the Pear Brandy was going to work into it, my attention had faded from him, and sped towards the nightmare scenarios in which such a drink might be inflicted upon me. His Pottery Barn drink equivalent is a $40 decorative throw pillow which says "Jingle".

I bring this up because I'm quite aware that someone reading the various entries on this blog might think that I need help with cocktails, desperate, bold lettered HELP. They are wrong. I am perfectly capable of creating delicious cocktails, I simply chose not to for reasons that are difficult to elucidate. However, unlike claims such as "I could've totally played in the NFL, man, I just didn't want to" I am able to back this one.

Genius Presented Flippantly
3/4 oz Strained Lime Juice
3/4 oz Letherbee Gin
3/4 oz Elicser Combier
3/4 oz Maraska Wishniak Cherry Liqueur

(If serving as a Fizz)
1 Eggwhite
Soda

Combine all ingredients (except Soda...) If using egg white, dry shake first, then shake with ice and strain.Top with soda if desired.

The astute might recognize this as a variant on The Last Word. It works both as an up drink, as well as a Fizz depending on what time of day your liver thinks it is. In the above picture, I elegantly removed my breakfast from the background and replaced it with a vivid representation of Inspiration Striking. Elicser Combier (possibly Elixir...) shares some character with Chartreuse, not as floral (or delicious) with stronger warm, Christmas baking spice notes. Wishniak is a Croatian cherry liqueur along the lines of Cherry Heering, but a bit stronger and less cough syrup like and about half the price. I tried several gins here, and Letherbee Gin from Chicago was the best fit with the Elicser Combier (available at Binny's).