Below are the tweets sent out as I was recording every drink I had at Tales of the Cocktail for the second year in a row.
The totals are:
Wednesday: 18
Thursday: 41
Friday: 28
Saturnday: 19
Compared to last year, this looks like a ton more drinks. But really I kept it to small sips and tastes for the most part. I came home feeling less poluted than usual, so don't let the numbers terrify you. Tales is for amateurs too!
Thursday was the big day again, due to the Diageo happy hour event. I had the same number as last year, 25, but it looks like more drinks before and afterward.
Below are the individual drinks from my Twitter feed, many with pictures. Note they're in reverse order.
The next step in the Solid Liquids project is to look at the various methods people are using to dehydrate liqueurs down to sugars. After searching the interwebz, here are some techniques I found.
I don't think the original DrinkBoy forums are online anymore- at least I can't find them- but that's where this technique first came to my attention several years ago. Bartenders in Australia were dehydrating Campari and other liqueurs and making powders out of them.
Oven Baking
Pour the liqueur on a baking pan, perhaps with a silicone matt on it (for easier removal of solids) and bake at a low temperature overnight. Damon Dyer wrote that his initial method (copied from the Australians) was:
"The process as I learned it was to pour the Campari into a shallow baking sheet, then slowly bake in the oven at low, low, low heat. The Campari eventually loses its water and alcohol, and solidifies. Then it's simply a matter of scraping the solid Campari "brick" off the baking sheet, crushing it into a powder, and enjoying a cocktail.
"However, the revised process that Donbert came up with [see below] is much more efficient."
Microwaving
Way back in 2007, Don Lee took up the issue (in this thread on eGullet), and remembering a tip from the French Laundry Cookbook, he dried out liqueurs in the microwave. He was able to boil Campari down to a sludge in about 4 minutes, then further pulverize this into a poweer.
On refining the technique, his observations were:
In the initial cooking stage, the alcohol is boiling off so the boiling is quite violent. Use short heating bursts during this stage.
Also use short bursts of heat at the end, because then the thick sugary liquid can caramelize if you're not careful.
"For Maraschino (Luxardo) I had to use 20 sec intervals for the first 1.5 minutes, then could let it go for 3 mins straight before going back to 20 sec intervals until 303.5F was reached. The result when cooled is an easily removable "puck" of Maraschino."
Using this method, Damon Dyer said he had success dehydrating Torani Amer, Yellow Chartreuse, Peychaud's, Herbsaint, Maraschino, and Canton Ginger.
Liquid Nitrogen
Douglas Williams of Liquid Alchemy consulting used liquid nitrogen to make solid Campari. This is really frozen Campari, and thus will melt again. So it's not a useful technique for my purposes.
But in any case, check out this video of it happening:
Williams told me about some other ways to get alcohol into solid form – sometimes without burning off the booze. I am not completely clear on how it works, but apparently you can use tapioca malodextrin and that will bond with anything fatty. This technique can apparently be used to trap booze into a solid form.
I doubt I'll have time to get into the molecular mixology stuff during the duration of this project, but it would be fun to try.
I've spent some time researching powdered/dehydrated liqueurs online to see where and how they've been used. Turns out: all around the world. Below are the few I found.
It seems that for the most part these dehydrated liqueurs are used as a powdered rims on cocktail glasses, as garnishes sprinkled on top of egg white drinks, and in one case as a popcorn flavoring.
The bar Mea Culpa in Ponsonby, New Zealand, had the following drink on their menu: ANGEL DUST - Cherry & orange macerated Rittenhouse Rye, Liquore Strega, White creme de cacao, Benedictine foam, Campari powder
This drink from Josh Pape of Chambar Belgian Restaurant in Vancouver, BC contains toasted cashews, gin, pink grapefruit cordial, sherry, apple juice, egg white, and has Campari powder on the rim.
Eau de Vie in Sydney offered, according to this post, "The Countessa, a reimagined Negroni with Aperol, served up in an exquisite coupe, on the side a half time slice of orange, dusted with Campari powder and caramelized with a blowtorch behind the bar. "
At Elements in Princeton, New Jersey, they make The Skål! Cocktail with akvavit, Pedro Ximénez sherry, dry vermouth, lemon juice, and lingonberry preserves. Garnished with a rim of dehydrated Chartreuse.
What other drinks have you seen? Any other liqueurs besides Chartreuse and Campari?
For the Solid Liquids Project project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
The aim of the Solid Liquids Project is to research the best way to dehydrate liqueurs and use the resulting flavored sugar in creative ways. This page is the project index that will link to all the posts.
By far the most famous type of fernet is Fernet-Branca, but there are other fernets on the market. So what is fernet, generally speaking?
(Thanks to commenter Scott who wrote in on the "Shhh It's a Secret" seminar at Tales of the Cocktail write-up for asking the question that I never thought to ask.)
I asked John Troia, co-founder of Tempus Fugit Spirits. They have a fernet coming out, Angelico Fernet. Here's what he says.
I’m sure there may be varying degrees of opinion, but we feel that the following is reasonably consistent with our research and that of others:
Although categorized under Italian Amari (Bitters), Fernet is its own bitter category and is most often listed underElixir/Elisir in Italian liquor manuals, when not simply called ‘Fernet’.The extremely bitter (amarissimo is an apt description) concoction has its origins most often attributed to Bernadino Branca, who commercialized it in 1845, but conflicting data conjectures its creator(s)as : a mythical doctor/collaborator of Branca from Sweden named Fernet (possibly as an off-shoot of the older and better tasting ‘Swedish Bitters’); Maria Scalia, the wife of Bernadino Branca who was a master herbalist and self-taught doctor; a monk named Frate Angelico Fernet who may have been responsible as the origin of many herbaltonics and elixirs (Fernet being a historical French Burgundy surname – pronounced Fair-Nay- and which underwent many spelling transformations); and a modern Italian liquorist text-book reference to it having originated somewhere in Hungary.
Fernet was most likely created to counteract the effects of Cholera and Malaria, but went on to be used for everything from a laxative to hangover cure. Today, as in the past, there are many Fernet producers (with the largest making so much of the world’s production that some actually believe Fernet is a brand-name), but mostly made in tiny quantities for local rural Italian consumption. The various known recipes most typically share ingredients such as Aloe, Saffron, Quinquina, Gentian, Anise, Angelica, Mint and the odd Larch/White Agaric, a type of tree-bark loving mushroom (once also known as Spunk) rarely used or even found commercially outside of Italy. This latter ingredient (along with Saffron) seems to define and create the backbone of the best Fernets; Agarico mondo has an odd, bitter taste that becomes lightly mentholated on the mid-palate and was used to treat night-sweats.
According to Abruzzo’s local doctor, pharmacist, wine-maker, distiller and bitter-maker Marchese Dottore Egidio Niccolo Antonio d'Alesasndro di Trasmondi, the best Fernets have little or no sugar in them as it impairs digestion.
This is turning into a pretty good month. Alcademics was just given a Best of the Bay Award in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
BEST LIQUOR LOWDOWN
Why is it that we like to read about food and drink so much on the Web? In no other Internet area, except maybe porn, is the meeting of the weightlessly virtual and the essentially physical so addictively fruitful. And while crackerjack local liquor expert Camper English's Alcademics site doesn't tear off your panties with glossy cocktail shots, his entertainingly detailed descriptions of the latest drool-worthy liquors will have you practically licking your screen. Over the past four years — besides visiting more than 70 distilleries, blending houses, and bodegas in 14 countries — Alcademics has helped refine the Bay Area's cocktail-blogging niche with some much-needed worldliness and a willingness to look deeper at what's in our highball. (English's degree in physics helps here.) Now you can drink to feel smarter!
For years, the only piscos available were the single-grape quebranta and the blended acholado, often with quebranta at its core.
Now we can find all eight approved Peruvian pisco varietals and several different acholado blends. In my latest story for the San Francisco Chronicle I talk about the wide range of piscos now available and a few cocktails in which to try them.
Cocktail recipes that call for pisco almost never specify details on the spirit the way that whiskey might require. But as a slew of new piscos appear, with widely divergent flavors, bartenders and their customers are going to need to be more specific.
"In Peru there are five different pisco growing regions, there are 42 valleys, there are eight approved (grape) varietals and there are 500 producers. So with that you can see the gamut of what you're going to get," says James Schenk, owner of Pisco Latin Lounge in San Francisco.
I was in New Delhi all last week working both on reporting on the Diageo Reserve World Class Global Finals here on my blog and helping Simon Difford and his (ass-kicking) crew write a special edition of the online magazine and produce the official book that will come out later. Still working on that, actually.
Over at DiffordsGuide.com, take a look at the write-ups on:
I've brought up one side of this topic before here on Alcademics, but now both sides are in a magazine.
In today's Los Angeles Times Magazine I have a story on tequila, looking at how brands are being produced and marketed – some like vodka; others like scotch.
As our preference for 100 percent agave tequila grows, it’s no surprise that brands are now popping up to take advantage of that trend. But what is really interesting are the niches tequila is carving out: Some are being bottled in sleek vessels complete with the same marketing and mystique that seems to be inspired by premium vodkas, while other new tequilas are promoting the artisanal, historical and romantic notions of the agave spirit, akin to scotch whisky—even if the brands were created within the last week.
It's a whopping 1,000 word story. Please give it a read and let me know what you think.
