The Gift of Sparking Cocktails

What gift can I give to the readers who have everything? Sparkling cocktails, of course!

There’s always room for new spins on sparkling cocktails, and this time of year bubbles are a fun addition to Christmas and New Year’s gatherings. Last year we had fun mixing them up with friends at our New Year’s Day brunch. I’m bringing some Champagne with me for a Christmas visit to family in CT, who knows how we might finish the bottle!. I even remember mixing up a New Year’s classic with sugar cubes, Korbel and Angostoura bitters over 10 years ago at Kori & Monica’s place. Even if you don’t like bubbly you it's hard resist a sparkling cocktail.

I picked a bottle of Gloria Ferrar Blanc de Noirs California sparkling wine for my cocktail mixology. White wines from Gloria Ferrar are always consistent, offering solid performance and value. My thanks go out to my friend Marie for sharing this bottle from samples she received.

The pictures I ended up with are pretty bad. I used whatever lighting I could throw together and it didn't work as well as I had hoped. Blame my cold, or the fact that I'm not known for my photos.. I did get shots of some of the effervescing in the glass, which is interesting in itself. I hope the drinks live on well beyond their photos here.

The first cocktail I’m calling Special Punch, and is a riff on the punch The Fatal Bowl from the open house over the weekend. It is very reminiscent of the punch and the added bubbles only take it to better places.

Special Punch

2 oz cognac

1oz spiced simple syrup

3 dashes citrus bitters

Sparkling wine

Lemon peel

Mix the cognac and spice syrup. Add the bitters and pour into a flute. Top with the sparkling wine and garnish with a lemon peel.

“I will call him Mini Me”. This drink is a lighter version of the punch from the weekend and exactly what it would taste like if the sparkles were added to the punch bowl. The spices come out in force and tartness from the lemon and the wine help keep the sweetness in balance. I would make this again, frequently.

The second cocktail is the Sparkling Fruit Salad using Pimms #1, ginger syrup and fruit to make a flavored spirit a day ahead.

Sparkling Fruit Salad

10 grapes

5 strawberries

1 apple

Peel of 1 lemon

1 cup Pimms #1

1/3 cup ginger simple syrup

Sparkling wine

Slice the grapes, berries and apple, adding them to a sealable jar. Pour over the Pimms and the syrup. Cover tightly. Gently shake to mix. Allow to macerate overnight in the refrigerator. Use 2 ounces of the base in a flute to make 1 drink. Top off with the sparkling wine. Slices of the fruit and lemon peel can be used as garnish.

This was the winner for me on complexity. The sweetened up Pimms is full of dehydrated fruits, nuts, roots, etc and it really did taste like a day old fruit salad that has begun to mix together. And it's bubbly!

I finish my gift with the Sour Apple Sparkler. I still need to work on this drink. The flavors were not quite right.

Sour Apple Sparkler

1.5 oz Calvados

1 oz sweet cider

½ tsp Meyer lemon tincture

½ oz honey

1 cinnamon stick

Sparkling wine

Mix the Calvados, cider, lemon tincture and honey well. Pour into a flute. Top off with sparkling wine. Add the cinnamon stick for garnish.

Very tart and sour apple, and something not quite in balance. I haven’t decided quite what I am going to do next with this drink, but with the other two around I’m not uniquely motivated to get right on it!

I hope you enjoy your gift. And even better is it one you can re-gift without any regret!

Cheers!

Jason

I’m Going to Punch You for the Holidays

You were naughty this year and I’m going to punch you right in the mouth! Not literally of course, but you might just choose to put some punch in your mouth this holiday season after reading this post.

Punch is an age-old tradition and one my experience tells me we’ve nearly lost with our contemporary desire for designer cocktails. And when I say punch I don’t mean that stuff we used to mix up in the big trash can in the basement of my fraternity house with every skanky bottle of liquor laying around, fruit punch mix and ice. Yuck! I mean real punch based on five simple ingredients that harkens back to 17^th century and Navy-men sailing the seas with cargo holds full of rum.

The five basic ingredients of punch:

• Spirits
• Sugar
• Citrus
• Spice
• Water

Starting with those ingredients as a guide the directions one can go in are vast, and trust me people have gone in all of them!

There is no way I can run down the variations of each of those ingredients in historical detail, but I know somebody who can. David Wondrich, a very well known cocktail historian and imbibing expert. His book Punch: The Delights (And Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl has all the historical details, a breakdown of the ingredients, finishing with recipes for a great many variations of punch. You can also find Wondrich’s imbibing wisdom in Esquire Magazine and several other books on both music and drinking.

Punch is also social tipple by nature. Have you ever wondered why the cups that come with punch bowl sets are so small? That’s because the small servings were meant to bring people back to the punch bowl for another pour and some good conversation. What better time of the year to channel that sensibility than during the Christmas and New Year holidays?

What I am going to do is take a couple different recipes for a test drive to experience them for myself and pick one to serve at my upcoming holiday open house.

The first one I selected is The Fatal Bowl which was published in Esquire Magazine in December 2007 just into time for Christmas that year.

  

This take on punch uses brewed black tea which was quite common during the heyday of punch.

The Fatal Bowl

4 lemons

1 cup demerara sugar

4 tea bags

1 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice, strained

2 1/2 cups cognac

1 1/2 cups dark rum

Fresh nutmeg

The instructions for this recipe start off with direction to prepare your ice for your punch bowl, by freezing a large bowl of water, ahead of time. This step shouldn’t be skipped and assuming you can substitute ice cubes instead will produce an undesirable result, watered down punch. I plan to use several large plastic bowls to prepare blocks of ice a day ahead of time.

Using a vegetable peeler thinly peel the lemons avoiding as much of the pith as possible. Reserve the lemons. Place the peels in a large heat-proof bowl. Add the sugar and muddle the sugar and lemons together to release the lemon oils and blend them with the sugar.

Boil one quart of water and use it to steep the tea bags for five minutes. Remove the tea bags and pour the tea over the lemon peels and sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar.

Add lemon juice, cognac and rum. Stir well to mix. Place in the refrigerator to cool for a couple of hours.

( That's what it looked like before putting it in the fridge. )

To serve your punch, assemble your block ice in your punch bowl, pour over the punch and grate the nutmeg on the top. Allow guests to dish their punch into small glasses with a punch ladle. Hang out near the punch bowl for all the holiday gossip.

To take this recipe for a test drive I cut all the ingredients down to ¼ of the full recipe. This will net somewhere around twenty ounces of finished punch, enough to sample and share before we commit to the whole hog.

The tea makes this drink for me. The complexity of each sip goes way beyond many modern day cocktails and the sweetness is firmly in check with the sour. The more I go back in time and try drinks of the days past the more I realize how much knowledge is rolled into the simplicity of many of them.

In cocktail terms I would liken this drink to a less sweet mashup of a Manhattan and a Side Car.

“Is there alcohol in this?” was Margot’s initial response. She also said that this is what she always thought scotch should taste like. The naked edge of a spirit like scotch is no match for the smooth, sweetness of this drink.

My second pilot punch comes from the Wondrich’s book Punch and is simply called Canadian Punch.

Canadian Punch

4 750ml bottles rye whiskey (19^th century Canadian whiskey was rye based)

1 pint Jamaican rum

8 lemons, sliced

1 pineapple, sliced

3 ½ quarts of water

1 ½ cups white sugar, additional to taste

Ice

Don’t forget to prepare your ice. See above.

In a large container place the sliced lemon & pineapple with the whiskey and rum. Allow to infuse for six hours. Don’t squeeze the lemons or pineapple.

Dissolve the sugar in three quarts of the water. You can heat the water slightly to ease this process, but allow it to cool if you do.

Combine the spirits & fruit with the sugar water, remaining water and refrigerate for several hours.

Serve in a punch bowl, fruit and all, with block ice.

You’ll notice there is no added spice in this recipe. The spice compliment should come from the rye whiskey, a key difference between rye and some other forms of whiskey. I also altered the recipe presented here to incorporate the information in a note from the book about additional citrus and increasing the amount of rye when using standard proof alcohol. If you have cask strength rye you will want to decrease by one bottle of whiskey and substitute three cups of water in its place.

This is a pretty big recipe so I cut it down by 1/8^th for a pilot batch. That still makes about one quart of punch to test drive. This is very difficult work!

This drink can’t hide the alcohol and that makes it less universal to me. It tastes pretty good, but is unbalanced and comes on too strong. Margot took one sip and passed it back to me.  I don’t feel the influence of the citrus and fruit comes across well at all. Squeezing the lemons into the punch liquid and chopping up the pineapple right before serving might be a worthy procedural change here.

I’m also going to try an add some spiced simple syrup to what I have left over and see if that takes the edge of it and brings it back to a more enjoyable place. (Post publishing note: pineapple juice and the spiced syrup to taste after a good mix. It taste tropical!)

The winner was the The Fatal Bowl, and that was even before we tasted the Canadian Punch. It really is that good. I was worried that these drinks would both channel the spirits too much, like the Canadian Punch, and that Margot’s perception of them would worry me about serving them to a wide range of drinkers. With that fear set aside I sure hope a little history and some socializing around the punch bowl resonates with my friends on Saturday. If not, there will be plenty of punch for Margot and me to drink while we clean up from the holiday whirlwind!

Cheers!

Jason

We're Nominated for a Foodbuzz Blog Award

Margot and I are so happy to announce that the Ancient Fire Wine Blog has been nominated in the Best Single Topic category for the 2011 Foodbuzz Blog Awards!

Our focus here is alcoholic beverages, like you didn't know, and the stories about how and where we find them. This includes wine, beer, cider, mead, spirits and cocktails. We make some of our own, sample commercial products from far and wide and share how we integrate these beverages into our own lives. We also explore what the local beverage producers are doing, try our hand at pairings and travel the world looking for the stories of how others are drinking well.

My wife and I also give back. In 2003 I was diagnosed and successfully treated for testicular cancer. In the 8+ years since our scrappy team of volunteers and fundraisers have helped raise over $82,000 for the American Cancer Society and Lance Armstrong Foundation!!! I'm going to ask you to vote for me below, but if you only have 5 minutes I would ask you first to make a donation to Making Strides Against Breast Cancer. Voting for me in the Foodbuzz Blog Awards is pretty cool, but fighting back against cancer makes you someone's hero. You can donate using the link below.

http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR/MakingStridesAgainstBreastCancer/MSABCFY12NewEngland?px=1344507&pg=personal&fr_id=36164

I hope you'll consider casting a vote for us, a unique blog with a great story from the ranks of the Foodbuzz Featured Publishers. I'll be at the Foodbuzz Festival in November where the winners will be announced, so no matter who wins I will be there to cheer on all the nominees and winners.

A listing of all the categories, nominees and a link for voting can be found at http://www.foodbuzz.com/pages/awards.

Congratulations and good luck to everyone who is in the running!

Thank You!

Jason

Inspiration for a Rum TweetUp!

On January 26th, 2011 from 4-6 PM PST there will be a cocktail TweetUp and the topic this month is rum! Use the hashtag #drinkup on Twitter to share your experiences and follow all the action. We will be celebrating rum cocktails, rum history, rum adventures, new products and stories about vacations planned in the search of rum! Check in with @MyMansBelly for @AncientFireWine for more information.

In preparation for our TweetUp I offer some inspiration in the form of a rum based hot toddy, the Hot Buttered Rum.

Ancient Fire Hot Buttered Rum
(Makes two drinks)

2 oz dark rum
2 oz gold rum
6 oz water
1 tsp spiced simple syrup (recipe below)
1 tsp dark brown sugar
6 drops vanilla
1 large cinnamon stick, broken in half
1 Tbsp butter, cut in two pieces

Place the equal portions of cinnamon stick and vanilla in 2 heatproof mugs. Heat the rum, water, simple syrup and sugar in a saucepan until almost boiling. Remove from the heat and pour into the mugs. Put the pieces of butter on top of each and let it melt into the mixture.

Spiced Simple Syrup

2 cups water
4 cups sugar
2 cinnamon sticks
6 cloves
6 allspice berries

Heat water to boiling. Add spices. Remove from heat. Allow to steep for 1 hour. Return water to boiling. Add sugar. Mix over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat. Allow to cool. Store in the refrigerator for up to 1 month.

*** Bonus – I first made the spiced syrup (above) for a drink I entered into the Woodford Reserve Well

Crafted Manhattan competition. I didn’t win and the person who did made a ginger infused drink. The drink doesn't contain rum, but that doesn’t mean I can’t share the recipe with you!

The Applesauced!

2 oz Woodford Reserve
2 oz fresh sweet cider
1/2 oz spiced syrup
1/4 oz ginger liqueur
splash of lemon juice
2 dashes orange bitters

Combine, stir and serve. Add a cinnamon stick and orange twist for garnish

Cheers!

--Jason