There is, in the inestimable Ultimate Bar Book, a cocktail called The Parisian (p. 200).  It’s equal parts gin, dry vermouth, and créme de cassis.  In other words, it’s a martini with sweetness.

It was OK, but I thought it could be better, and so we now have…

THE FRANCO-AMERICAN

• 1 oz gin
• 1 oz Cocchi Americano
• 1 oz créme de cassis
• 1 dash lemon bitters

Stir, don’t shake.  (The rule is that if the admixture has citrus juice in it, shake.  Otherwise, stir.)

Cocchi Americano is a vermouth itself, one of those endless parades of aperitifs that will clutter your bar if you start down that path.  It’s very tasty in and of itself.

Not bad at all.  You could lessen the sweetness by cutting the cassis to 3/4 oz, and/or by adding lemon juice.  (But still stirred, not shaken, Mr. Bond.)

It pairs particularly well with a salty goat cheese, which is what we were knoshing on when I mixed this up.

I’ve been busy.

First of all, you may recall that I blogged about re-jiggering [see what I did there?] the recipe for a margarita calling for árbol chile tincture, among other twee ingredients.  I am now calling it “Dale’s Magic Margarita” and it’s still tasty.  I double-checked it yesterday.  Okay, I triple-checked it.  It was delicious.

I have planted an árbol chile plant in my herb garden, and it’s started producing.  The internet says that the eftest way to dry the chiles is to put them in your fridge, so I’m trying that experiment.  When the summer is over, I shall have enough chiles to make a lot of the tincture, so…

Guess what everyone’s getting for Christmas?

Side note: I ordered a dozen of the 5 oz bottles.  They’re called “woozy bottles” from the what-else-should-we-call-it cap insert, that little plastic thing with a hole in it that you squirt bitters out of.  However, I just discovered yesterday that these are just the bottles, sans woozies.  I found the woozies at specialtybottle.com, where I can see that I will be spending more money in the future as I pursue my new interest in tinctures, syrups, infusions, and bitters.

Today, I set about making a dandelion & burdock syrup.   D&B, as it is not called in Great Britain, is a soda flavor, and I found a recipe for the syrup.  Easy-peasy, and it’s done.

The reason I wanted to make this stuff is to recreate the Root Daiquiri, an especially delicious cocktail from my favorite bar anywhere, Sovereign Remedies in Asheville, NC.  Their recipe also includes sarsaparilla, but oddly that is not immediately available in Newnan, GA, so my first attempt is without it.  More work is required.

It is nonetheless quite tasty.

Root Daiquiri

• 1.5 oz rum
• 1 oz lime juice
• .5-.75 dandelion & burdock syrup

Shake, pour, and serve.

(By the way, the D&B bottle has chalkboard tape on it you guys!  You can find it—along with whiteboard tape—at Office Depot.  Besides being just cool as beans, it’s also temporary: you can remove it from most surfaces.  In the photo above, I’ve trimmed the edges with deckle-edge scissors because hipster.)

My next venture will be to create a tincture of lovage, a cool herb that is kind of a peppery/celery flavor, from which I will make a lovage bitters.  Don’t ask me how I will use it.

For some time now I have been wanted to get organized about my cocktail recipes.  I have several go-to books (Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails and The Ultimate Bar Book), but then I’m always inventing cocktails and downloading recipes from places like liquor.com, et al., and those especially were beginning to clutter up the kitchen in my “lab” space.

I have a notebook, of course:

It was given to me almost as a joke, but I immediately put it to use:

Now the joke was that the only recipes in it were in the Drinks section.

But I needed something better.  What I wanted was a Moleskine-type notebook with tabs in it so I could organize the drinks by name or by liquor, along with some indices in the back.

Of course, no such thing exists in any way.  Much web-searching plus visits to Barnes & Noble turned up nothing.

Finally I was struck with a brilliant idea: design stickers that would cover the tabs in my Patio Daddy-O book!  I did that thing, making about thirteen tabs for different liquors, plus two sections for “Dale’s favorites” and “Ginny’s favorites.”  But I was stopped dead in my tracks: the book didn’t have that many tabs.

Back to square one, i.e., nothing.

Finally, I went back to Barnes & Noble to see what was available and how I might make it work.  I ended up with this little beauty:

It’s about the size of a Moleskine notebook, leather-bound, nice paper, and a lot more pages than a Moleskine.  (That was a factor—who wants to run out of space and therefore cocktails?)  So it fits handily on the bar and in the hand.

I settled on numbering the pages, then reserving pages in the back for an alphabetical index by name, and an ingredient index by liquor plus the two “favorites” sections.  That way, I can add drinks willy-nilly as I go along, but always be able to find a specific drink when I need it:

The asterisks by the title indicate a cocktail that I invented.

One thing remained: a cover title.  Back in the day, I stamped students’ initials onto the back of their aluminum Accelerated Reader Point Club tags.  It made them more personal as well as sometimes coming in handy when a child lost one.  I still had the punch set; in fact, I had used it to stamp BOOK OF THE LABYRINTH on the cover of said book back in 2012.

One of the issues involved in doing this is keeping the letters in a straight line, a problem I solved—brilliantly, I thought—by using a rubber band:

Not only did it provide me with a straightedge, but it kept the book from slipping around as well.  (Notice the little black dot on the rubber band: I also could measure and mark the center of the cover.)

Clever little device, with the punch heads magnetically insertable/removable into the holder.  Each one has an engraved dot indicating the bottom of the letter, which is supposed to help you keep the letters aligned vertically.  I guess that’s the theory, because in practice I’ve never been able to keep them upright.

Still, wabi sabi and all that: it’s done, and it’s mine.

Have I extolled the glories of the Sidecar recently?  What a wonderful little cocktail.

It’s simplicity itself:

Sidecar

• 1-½ oz brandy or cognac (cognac is better)
• 1 oz Cointreau or other orange liqueur
• ¾ oz lemon juice (fresh is better)
• sugar rim optional

Shake the ingredients with ice, pour into a sugar-rimmed cocktail glass.

That’s it.  The fun is substituting other substances for the Cointreau.

Here we see one variation, which uses apricot brandy instead of orange liqueur.  Quite tasty.

There’s also my own Swedish Sidecar, which uses Swedish Punsch.  It may interest long-time readers to know that I solved the problem of how to make salted caramel sugar for that particular cocktail.

That is all.  I have nothing profound to say, just liking this cocktail right now.

update: And just playing around, here’s another one:

Holiday Sidecar

• 1-½ oz brandy or cognac
• ½ oz orange curaçao
• ½ oz Allspice Dram
• ¾ oz lemon juice (fresh is better)

This one has a bright, spicy flavor that just tastes holiday-ish.  A plain sugar rim really adds to it.

And one more:

Blue Chocolate

• 1-½ oz brandy or cognac
• ½ oz blue curaçao
• ½ oz Allspice Dram
• ½ oz crème de cacao
• ¾ oz lemon juice (fresh is better)

This one was a real surprise.

I have probably mentioned what a rabbit hole the study of cocktails is, what with all the odd liquids and liqueurs that one accumulates.  I have the additional problem of people giving me stuff they come across that looks interesting, tasty, or just plain weird.  (Pro tip: avoid the liqueur called Hog Master.)

The latest is my “father-of-the-groom” gift from my son: Zirbenz, Stone Pine Liqueur of the Alps.  It’s a product of Austria, and it tastes like a pine tree.  Not unpleasant, but certainly not an easy taste to get used to.

I happen to be awash in some fine tequilas at the moment, and so I wondered if one could use the Zirbenz in a margarita.

Spoiler alert: yes, you can, and it’s yummy.

El Pino Margarita

• 1.5 oz tequila, in this case a very nice one indeed
• 1.5 oz lime juice (I usually use Rose’s Sweetened Lime Juice)
• .5 – 1.0 oz Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur
• splash orange juice

Pour it all in, give it a stir.  Salt, of course, and on the rocks.

The pine gives a nice tang to the mustiness of the tequila, a complex layering of flavors.  The splash of orange juice mellows the whole thing out.

I have a spiral bound recipe journal, one of those cutesie retro things. The only thing in it is cocktail recipes, a mix of favorites and my own concoctions.  Go figure.

One of the earlier entries is a drink called the Burnt Orange.  I forget where I found it.

Burnt Orange

8 pt. vodka
1 pt. bourbon
1 pt. triple sec

Shake with ice, strain into cocktail glass.

I’ve made it with varying proportions depending on my mood.

The other night, I had all this fresh lemon juice that I had squeezed and, not wanting it to go to waste—naturally—I explored cocktails using lemon juice.  There was one, kind of a sidecar, but it was overwhelmingly citrusy.  My lovely first wife suggested adding a little bourbon, which I did, and it worked.  It reminded me of the Burnt Orange, so here is the Burnt Lemon:

Burnt Lemon

5 pt. cognac
3 pt. Cointreau
2 pt. lemon juice
1 pt. bourbon

Shake with ice, strain into cocktail glass.

It’s still pretty tart, but the bourbon mellows it out quite some.

There’s also a drink I worked on earlier in the week, but I will have to report back later after I’ve had time to make another one and get some taste tests around here.

I thought I had blogged about this, but searching the blog turns up nothing.

Back in April, I came across a fancy schmancy version of the margarita.  It involved such twee efforts as a vodka/saline spray instead of rimming one’s glass with salt, and an arból chile tincture.

Apparently I’ve spared you the details of tracking down the arból chiles and soaking them in Everclear™ for two weeks, then creating the spritz, but let me just say that the final results were… lackluster.  Perhaps the essential ingredient is fresh key lime juice rather than the bottled, but I am so not going there.

In any case, I was now possessed of a pint of arból chile tincture.  It will keep indefinitely, so I expect to spend the summer playing with it.

This afternoon, I revisited the question of the margarita.  I used mezcal instead of the tequila blanco in the chichi recipe, and my saline solution was made from smoked sea salt.  It is tasty.  Very very tasty.

A Margarita

• splash blood orange bitters
• smoked sea salt solution
• 1.5 oz tequila or mezcal
• 1.5 oz Roses™ lime juice
• 1 oz Grand Marnier
• 1/2 tsp arból chile tincture¹
• orange juice

Rim your glass with salt.  Splash the blood orange bitters into the bottom of the glass; spritz with your sea salt solution.  Add ice.

Add the rest of the ingredients except for the orange juice to the glass.  Splash with orange juice, stir slightly.

It’s not for weaklings.  Adjust ingredients to your tastes and your cabinet.

(I had to make a second one—had to, I tell you—in order to take a photograph.)

—————

¹ Put 20 arból chiles in a clean glass container.  Add 1-3/4 cups of grain alcohol (such as Everclear™) to the container.  Cap.  Shake daily for two weeks.  Enjoy.

I know, it’s a horrible name no it’s not it’s adorable.

For our Easter luncheon gathering, I was requested to come up with a “signature cocktail.”  I was going to be lazy and steal something from the intertubes, but I didn’t like the sound of most of them.  Have you ever considered dissolving jellybeans in vodka?  Someone has, and it’s not a pretty sight.

The idea of a jellybean cocktail was appealing, though, and so I set about creating one.

Lyles’ Guideline #1 for Cocktail Creation is simple: go first for whatever has been flicking about your consciousness.  That would be orgeat, an almond syrup which shows up in several forgotten cocktails but which is not available at most of your Krogers.  When I came across some at the Decatur Package Store (of course), I snagged it.  (The linked article suggests it’s easy to make, but anything involving three layers of cheesecloth automatically becomes “involved” in my book.)

What does one use it for?  Mai Tais and other tiki drinks—of which I am not a fan—use it, and so does the very old Japanese Cocktail, a very tasty concoction.

Long story short: a serendipitous excursion to the grocery store for supplies and a couple of trial runs later, I had the Jellybeanitini.  I’m as proud of the name as I am of the drink.  (A quick googling reveals that the name already exists, so I can only be proud of coming up with the name independently.)

The Jellybeanitini

• 1.5 oz brandy
• 1.5 oz cranberry/blueberry/blackberry juice (yes, that’s a thing)
• .5 oz orgeat
• .5 oz lemon juice
• almond/lemon sugar
  • to make the sugar: 1/4 cup of sugar, 1 tsp almond extract, zest of 1 lemon

Rim the martini glass with the sugar.

Combine all ingredients in the shaker with ice, shake, and pour.  Garnish with a lemon slice or lemon peel.

It’s kind of a hybrid between a Cosmopolitan and a Sidecar.  Yes, it’s sweet, but it also has the citric acid overtones that the really good jellybeans have, plus the mystery of the almonds.  It’s worth having two.