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.

Last  Christmas, my son gave me a bottle of Root, a liqueur.  Lovely bottle, chic label design. The flavor was, as described on the bottle, very root beer-like, not at all unpleasant although I’ve never been a fan of root beer.  Still, as a mixer, it was a puzzle: such a strong flavor didn’t really call out for anything else to enhance it.

Friends gathered at our house this weekend for eating and drinking purposes—and by that I mean came on Saturday and ate and drank for 24 hours—and on Sunday morning I was pulling out all kinds of liqueurs for tasting and testing.  We came upon Root, and all agreed that it was tasty, but what to do?  Several combinations that I attempted were poured down the drain without even being offered to the group.  It was a tough one to crack. (The liqueur’s own website seems a bit at a loss as to how it might be used in a cocktail.  Their suggestions are kind of slack.)

Then one of us applied his analytical skills to the problem: what does one do with root beer anyway?  A root beer float!

And thus the problem was solved.  Behold, the Milk Root!

The Milk Root

• 1 oz Root liqueur
• 1 oz brandy
• 1/2 oz Tuaca or other vanilla liqueur (optional but recommended)
• 2 scoops vanilla ice cream (we prefer Kroger’s Private Selection Double Vanilla)
• 2-3 oz milk

Put it in the blender, smoosh it up, and serve.

(You’d probably be mixing more than one at a time, of course.)

We debated about whether it needed anything else, but finally agreed that it was lovely just as it was.