Dry Rye Martini

I want to say right up front that I don’t approve of the trend of calling everything in a conical glass a Martini. Let’s call things by their own names. A Martini is a gin-vermouth combo. I’m prepared to call any added dashes and splashes a matter of taste, but the Martini has to have gin and vermouth—unless the gin tastes like rye, as in Dry Rye Gin by St. George Spirits, in which case, you would do better to call it a Dry Rye Martini. And if instead of dry vermouth you made it with Cocchi Americano—say a fair amount of it—you wouldn’t have a Dry Martini—though it could still be a Dry Rye Martini. Except that it wouldn’t be dry—only the Dry Rye would be dry. And the Dry Rye is gin, and dry, but not like a London dry gin. But it’s just as dry—you follow me?

Now don’t think for a moment that this is a Martini because it’s not. Except that it is. There’s the gin—but Dry Rye isn’t what I’d call a Martini gin. Except, I suppose, if you used it in a Martini recipe, which this is. You got the gin and the vermouth. And orange bitters. You don’t hear much about orange bitters in Martinis anymore. Why would that ever go away? But it seems to be coming back. I’m glad. Anyway, here’s the recipe. Have at it.



Dry Rye Martini

• 2 oz St. George Spirits Dry Rye Gin
• 3/4 oz Cocchi Americano (or Lillet will do)
• 2 dashes Regans’ Orange Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Lemon twist.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

You can twist the twist and drop it in, or discard it if you find that your twist keeps ending up in your mouth near the end of the drink. But if that happens, you’re probably gulping. I won’t tell you not to drink too fast. That’s your own affair.

B&E Manhattan

We drink a lot of Manhattans here at the Fogged In Lounge, so when a new whiskey arrives, I can’t help but try it with a little vermouth and bitters. Breaking & Entering is a bourbon blended by the folks at St. George Spirits. They call it that because they didn’t distill the booze themselves but carted a bunch of barrels back to Alameda from Kentucky. We like local stuff, and when I tasted it back in December, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d start playing with it.



B&E Manhattan

• 2 1/2 oz Breaking & Entering Bourbon
• 1 oz sweet vermouth (Carpano Antica)
• 2 dashes Jerry Thomas’ Decanter Bitters
• 1 dash Angostura Orange Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Orange twist.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

My first pass at this was with the Fee Bros Whiskey Barrel Aged Bitters I had been drinking all winter with my Buffalo Trace, but it turned the cereal notes a little too soft and round. No flab in the Manhattan, please. Orange bitters worked much better, bringing out some cherry and tasting almost like a Brooklyn Cocktail.

Meyer Moon

A White Lady should be drunk by the light of the moon.
Four White Ladies should be drunk by the light of two moons.

—Cornelia Otis Skinner, The Importance of Cocktails

A friend was talking about making limoncello, and I mentioned that a Meyer lemon version might be interesting. As it happened, a bag of the things suddenly arrived in her produce box. So with the promise that I’d have a drink recipe for her, she got to work.

In the meantime, I got the peeled fruit, and decided to make White Ladies. The White Lady cocktail is a hard drink to order. For one thing, the bartender might not know this classic. And someone nearby is sure not to know, and might think a guy’s spoiling for a fight. Besides, I have to say that for something fairly boozy, the flavor’s a little mild for me most of the time. Similar drinks like the Sidecar or the Aviation have more complexity or bite. So it’s nice to punch it up a little—and avoid getting punched by calling it something else.

Assertive gin usually helps when remixing the White Lady, so I brought out the Botanivore, an herbaceous St. George gin which has plenty of personality to stand up to the tangerine-like spice of the Meyer lemon.



Meyer Moon

• 2 oz Botanivore gin
• 1/2 oz Cointreau
• 1/2 oz Meyer lemon juice

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Meyer lemon twist.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

St. George Negroni Three Ways

As a number of earlier posts attest, I’ve been having a lot of fun with the new gins from St. George Spirits. I’ve been playing with the Dry Rye and the Terroir, and now I’ve found the Botanivore, a sort of super-gin of 19 botanicals. The least outrageous of the three, it’s elegant dry gin for classic cocktails made the traditional way. Thinking of this classicism, I decided it would be interesting to try the three gins in the same Negroni recipe to show their differences. The Negroni has a ton of personality—a perfect match for three personality gins.



For the Negroni recipe, I went with an ounce and a half of gin and three-quarters of an ounce each of Campari and Carpano Antica sweet vermouth, orange twist. I briefly considered the classic one ounce of each, but wanted to emphasize the gin, and like my Negronis drier anyway. I also opted for straight up, stirred, instead of on the rocks.

First up was Botanivore, and the resulting cocktail tasted, well, like a Negroni. A good one. I wanted to use less of the other stuff to taste the gin, which is what always happens to me unless the drink is made even drier than 2:1:1.

Next there was Dry Rye, and the juniper and black pepper notes not only overpowered the Campari, believe it or not, but crushed it. Tasty, but not much like a Negroni. I remade it later in the 1-to-1-to-1 ratio, which worked a lot better. Big and fruity.

Last came Terroir. This gin is about surprise and the Negroni made with it was no different. The Douglas fir and bay laurel came together with the citrus and spice notes from the Campari and vermouth in a uniquely aromatic feast redolent of frosty mornings, the mountains and Christmas. It was sort of recognizable as a Negroni, but with a highly distinctive green note. I’d like to try this in the equal-measure version as well, though it was good the way I made it.



All three St. George gins performed very well. For this recipe, the Botanivore was classic, the Dry Rye needed to be balanced differently, and the Terroir shone in a special way.

Telegraph Hill

I’m not sure what I was browsing when I found the Drakensburger in the CocktailDB, a white rum sour with Van der Hum sourced from the Café Royal Cocktail Book. I liked the 1930s look of it. The Rose’s Lime Cordial would make it far too sweet, but it was clearly a Pegu Club relative. I thought right away of the new St. George Terroir Gin with all its evergreen funk as a more complex base for the aromatics of the tangerine liqueur. In place of the Van der Hum, I used Mandarine Napoléon.



Telegraph Hill

• 1 1/2 oz St. George Terroir Gin
• 1/2 oz tangerine liqueur
• 1/2 oz lime juice

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

Autumn Fruit Gin Sour

More homemade stuff again—and not by accident this time. I don’t know what came over me, but I actually felt motivated enough to overcome my sloth and make cocktail syrup. Come to think of it, I was inspired by the spicy rye and peppercorn notes in St. George’s Dry Rye Gin, my new favorite thing on earth. It’s a natural for pairings with all the fruits of fall and winter—I could even see it with a large orange vegetable or two. But for this syrup, I used a combination of ripe pears, figs and apples, about 2-3 of each. The pear really stands out with the juniper and pepper. Whatever fruit you use, poach in rich simple syrup (2:1) until soft, as you would for fruit to use over ice cream. Remove fruit and reserve (for ice cream, of course). Pour through a fine mesh strainer and bottle. I added a splash of Lemon Hart 151 to mine to improve shelf life.



Autumn Fruit Gin Sour

• 2 oz St George Dry Rye Gin
• 1/2 oz autumn fruit syrup
• 1/2 oz lemon and/or lime juice

Shake with ice and train into an chilled cocktail glass.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

MxMo LXI: Local Color

Warm thanks to Lindsay of Alcohol Alchemy for hosting this month’s Mixology Monday. Her theme is Local Color, drinks based on regionally made artisanal spirits. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we’re home to some of the most distinguished craft distillers, Anchor Distilling in San Francisco and St. George Spirits in Alameda among them. I could go on about all the delicious things from both companies, but this post is about their specialty gins, featured here in two classic recipes.

DUTCH UP YOUR SAZERAC
That’s not a Cosmo in the picture, folks. As David Wondrich points out in Imbibe! Hollands gin, or genever, responds quite well to the Sazerac treatment, and while the results may look like candy from the bitters, this is serious drinking. Here I’ve used Anchor’s Genevieve, an unaged genever in the antique style.



Genever Sazerac

• 2 oz genever (Genevieve)
• 1/2 tsp absinthe (St. George—what else?)
• 4 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters
• 1 tsp simple syrup

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Lemon twist.
SOURCE: COMPOSITE, PROPORTIONS FROM CHUCK TAGGART, LOOKA!


CORPSES AND COPSES
Two of my neighborhood bottle shops less than a block apart have each decided on a different St. George gin to stock. Fine with me. The Terroir is the offbeat one: inspired by the botanicals of California wilderness, it has notes of Douglas fir, fennel, bay laurel and sage along with the juniper—a forest spirit. The housemate and I dig that kind of thing, and stood around the patio in the blowing mists, wearing our magic helmets and nipping the gin out of shot glasses. “Mm—arboreal!”

Whenever I get an unusual gin, I like to try it in a Corpse Reviver No. 2. It has the right degree of mildness to take on the personality of the spirit, and a botanical edge from the gin balances the sweet.



Corpse Reviver No. 2

• 3/4 oz gin (St. George Terroir)
• 3/4 oz Cointreau (Seniors Curacao)
• 3/4 oz Kina Lillet (Cocchi Americano)
• 3/4 oz lemon juice
• 1 drop absinthe (St. George Absinthe Verte)

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
ADAPTED FROM HARRY CRADDOCK, THE SAVOY COCKTAIL BOOK

There seems to be agreement that this is an equal parts cocktail (except for the absinthe, of course), but the volume tends to vary with the editor. Dr. Cocktail gives a full ounce, which makes for a fine bucket of booze, though maybe more than you’d want to suck down on a hangover. The CocktailDB, gaz regan and Erik Ellestad give it 3/4 of an ounce, which makes up to a nice size if a bit light for general purposes.

With an assertive gin like the Terroir, it doesn’t make much difference if it’s one drop or two (or three) of absinthe.

The Terroir is very successful here—slightly savory, which is nice with the lemon. Don’t wait until your next drinking misadventure to freshen up your corpse.


10:30 PM: NIGHTCAP!
I guess I oughta finish this thing off, but I can’t stop playing.

Over dinner, my housemate remarked that the St. George Dry Rye Gin I urged him to make a Martini with for himself last night turned out kind of odd. We had both tasted it neat, and it seemed like a suitable kind of juniperous stuff with which to make a Dry Martini Cocktail. “Like it had a splash of rye in it,” was how he put it. Like that’s a bad thing? I sniffed again: almost like a dry genever. The light came on: Eureka! I knew what to do.



El Camino Real

• 2 oz St. George Dry Rye Gin
• 1 oz Carpano Antica Formula Vermouth
• 2 dashes Creole Bitters

Sitr with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Lemon twist.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

This gin, with its splash of rye, as the housemate put it, has an intense juniper wallop that rings out clear over sweet vermouth and who knows what else you might throw at it. A great cocktail ingredient.

Firelit Coffee Liqueur

St. George Distillery’s Firelit is truly coffee brandy in the sense that it is a coffee-flavored, brandy-based liqueur, and a fairly dry one at that. There are no vanilla or cacao notes. Sampled side by side with Kahlúa, it’s clear that Firelit would be strange in a White Russian. Simply put, it tastes like brewed coffee—at first, anyway. It’s got the strong vegetal note of a plain black iced coffee but with the warmth of brandy under it. This liqueur has obvious applications in after dinner drinks and tropical fantasy items like Mr. Bali Hai, but it also makes me think of the all-too-neglected category of Brunch Cocktails for Serious Drinkers. Yeah, let’s have some gin with that French toast.



All Lit Up

• 2 oz Junípero gin
• 1 oz medium sherry
• 1/4 oz Firelit
• 2 dashes chocolate bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Lemon twist.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

Good any time of day except maybe before dinner. Coffee before dinner just seems weird. Hm—during dinner?



Mr. Bali Hai

• 1 1/2 oz unsweetened pineapple juice
• 1 oz lemon juice
• 1/2 oz sugar syrup
• 3/4 oz coffee brandy
• 1 1/2 oz light Puerto Rican rum
• 1 oz dark Jamaican rum

Shake with crushed ice. Pour into a Mr. Bali Hai mug. Or if you’re like me and pathetic enough not to have the desired mug, a large snifter or something will be fine.
SOURCE: JEFF “BEACHBUM” BERRY, BEACHBUM BERRY REMIXED

While I still prefer Kahlúa in my cocoa, Firelit is more successful for Mr. Bali Hai. I tried the updated instructions in Beachbum Berry Remixed, and the drier quality of the Firelit is exactly right. It also works a little better visually with this recipe.