Boozehound (11 page)

I visited Dirkzwager Distillery for a classic illustration of how tradition gives way to contemporary tastes. Dirkzwager has long been the producer of a popular genever, Floryn. In 2000 it produced its first flavored vodkas, imported to the United States under the name Van Gogh. What began as a sideline has taken over. In the early 2000s, Dirkzwager bottled vodka about once every other month. Now, three of every four weeks are spent bottling flavored vodka. Van Gogh exports about twenty flavors, including wild apple, pineapple, double espresso, and, yes, mojito mint and açai-blueberry.

I spent some time in the flavor laboratory with master distiller Tim Vos, who has been making spirits for twenty-five years. “There’s a big difference in taste between Americans and Europeans,” he said, not surprising me. Vos, for instance, had a difficult time creating an orange-flavored vodka. He’d been using Spanish oranges as his model, and the product wasn’t testing well with Americans. One day, he suddenly realized that Florida oranges have a decidedly different flavor.

Oranges are one thing, but what about açai-blueberry? “Americans like bold taste, overwhelming taste,” he said, chuckling. “We don’t have this taste in Europe.”

During my visit, Vos told me Van Gogh’s next vodka would be “absinthe-flavored,” and he let me taste it, along with some other flavor ideas he has been working on, including ginger, cucumber, and grapefruit. There were also interesting mash-ups of fruits and plants: pear-geranium, violet-cherry, lavender-yuzu. After the tasting, Vos and I had lunch at a restaurant that was inside a windmill, where we drank a beer and an oude genever—a kopstoot.

Later that afternoon, I paid a call to another distiller, UTO, a few blocks away, past the windmill. UTO makes the Sonnema VodkaHerb that had been marketed heavily at Tales of the Cocktail. It’s tough to edge into the U.S. vodka market. At UTO, I tasted a beautiful oude genever, Notaris, which was aged like whiskey. I also tasted Sonnema’s Berenburg, a dark, bitter herbal liqueur, akin to an Italian amaro, that’s extremely popular in the Netherlands. Sonnema uses a bit of the Berenburg formula of seventy-one herbs in the secret recipe for VodkaHerb.

I asked Edwin Holleman, UTO’s commercial director, how well Sonnema VodkaHerb sells in Holland. “There is almost no premium vodka market here,” he said. “People can buy a liter of genever for eight or nine euros. No one in Holland is going to pay twenty-nine euros for a vodka.”

There’s always America, I guess. Actually, after I left Schiedam, I’d developed a vague theory on the flavored-vodka thing: it’s a European conspiracy foisted upon unwitting American consumers to see just how far we’ll go into the realm of the absurd. I imagined a distiller (perhaps wearing a beret, or lederhosen, or wooden shoes) snickering as he chatted with his importer: “They drank mojito mint? Really? And espresso vodka? Dude, seriously? It was brown! Yeah,
that
was a good one. Okay, well, here’s one that’ll really give us a laugh. Let’s send them bubble gum and see what happens!”

A Round of Drinks:
Unearthing the Past

It’s mind-boggling how many fascinating spirits disappeared during Prohibition—and equally mind-boggling how many of these have been “rediscovered” and become available in the last years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. So much more cocktail acumen—more historical insight, finer technique, cooler tools—exists in the world now than did in, say, 2007. It feels as though it took us seven decades to move from the Dark Ages of Prohibition to the Early Renaissance of Cocktails. Then, in a matter of months, we leapt from the Renaissance to the baroque and the rococo.

Remember, until 2007, many of the spirits I’m writing about simply were not available except, maybe, if you went abroad. For example, now that real sloe gin can be had in the United States for the first time in generations, creative bartenders have made the old new again. That was the case with the following cocktail, which was on the menu at the gone-but-not-forgotten Washington, D.C., speakeasy Hummingbird to Mars.

PHILLY SLING

Serves 1

1 ½ ounces applejack

1 ounce Plymouth sloe gin

¾ ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice

¼ ounce
simple syrup

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Fill a mixing glass halfway with ice. Add the applejack, sloe gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, and bitters. Stir vigorously, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Recipe by Derek Brown of the Passenger and the Columbia Room, Washington, D.C
.

When I first began writing about cocktails in 2007, I published a recipe for the Aviation cocktail, a classic drink from the early twentieth century and one of my favorites. At the time, I called for gin, freshly squeezed lemon juice, and maraschino liqueur, all stirred over ice and served in a cocktail glass. I also wrote that no one really knew why this drink was called the Aviation. Well, it turns out I was all wrong. It’s not totally my fault. I gleaned my misinformation, and adapted my recipe, from the august body of cocktail knowledge to which I had access in May 2007. Specifically, I relied on
The Savoy Cocktail Book
—one of the bibles of its genre. My error perfectly illustrates a couple of points about the swift evolution of cocktail making that happened at the end of the 2000s. As cocktail geeks delved further into dusty, out-of-print cocktail guides, we soon learned that our Aviation was missing a key ingredient: the purple, floral liqueur called crème de violette. Adding a tiny amount of it to the gin, lemon juice, and maraschino results in a sky blue drink. So the name Aviation suddenly becomes self-explanatory. Today, of course, you can find any number of speakeasies that will serve you a historically correct Aviation. But that’s a recent development—crème de violette didn’t become available until 2008.

AVIATION

Serves 1

1 ½ ounces gin

¾ ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice

½ ounce maraschino liqueur

¼ ounce crème de violette or Crème Yvette

Fill a mixing glass halfway with ice. Add the gin, lemon juice, maraschino liqueur, and crème de violette. Stir vigorously, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Maraschino, absinthe, and curaçao were among the first liqueurs to make their way into cocktails in nineteenth-century America. Much of the time, they were paired with genever. The Bols genever we have in the United States is a special formula created specifically for the American market, but it mimics very closely a traditional oude genever style, and those who may have enjoyed a taste of it in Amsterdam will recognize it as the real thing. Beyond Bols, real Dutch genever is not widely available in the United States. Some brands, such as Boomsma and Zuidam, are here but hard to find.

When you track down your genever, try this classic adapted from the legendary nineteenth-century bartender Jerry Thomas’s 1876 bar guide. In those days, there were three standard cocktails for brandy, whiskey, or genever: Plain, Fancy, or Improved.
Fancy
meant you got a dash of curaçao.
Improved
meant you got dashes of both absinthe and maraschino liqueur.

IMPROVED GIN COCKTAIL

Serves 1

2 ounces genever

1 teaspoon
simple syrup

½ teaspoon maraschino liqueur

2 dashes Angostura bitters

1 dash absinthe

Lemon peel twist, for garnish

Fill a mixing glass halfway with ice. Add the genever, simple syrup, maraschino liqueur, bitters, and absinthe. Stir vigorously for 30 seconds, then strain into a cocktail glass. Twist the lemon peel over the drink, rub it around the rim of the glass, then use it as a garnish.

Another Round of Drinks:
Fizzes and Collins

If I told you that mixing a drink required you to squeeze the juice from a lemon into a glass and add a tablespoonful of sugar or some simple syrup, it wouldn’t seem so difficult, right? It would be somewhat less complicated than, say, driving a car while chatting on your cell phone? Or, if you worked as a bartender, perhaps less complicated than, say, drawing a Miller Lite from a tap while chatting up an attractive bar patron about her new lower-back tattoo?

Well, then, allow me to be blunt: I harbor a major dislike of bars that sidestep that simple maneuver by using commercial sour mixes made from concentrate or powder. Most of us have by now shaken that mid-twentieth-century love of artificial and processed foods and drinks. We don’t see a lot of Tang being served these days, or Salisbury steak TV dinners in aluminum trays, or squeeze-tube Velveeta, and I think most of us have given up the Jetsons fantasy that we’ll someday get all our flavor and nutrients from a little pill served by a robot. Why, then, during this supposed golden renaissance of cocktail making does commercial sour mix persist?

This mix usually sneaks up on you, like a mullet seen from the front. And you usually spot it too late, once you’ve settled onto the bar stool. It’s a hot day, and you’re maybe thinking about a Tom Collins, and suddenly you hear someone down the bar order an Amaretto Sour or a Long Island Iced Tea, and out of the corner of your eye you see the bartender reach for the artificial sour mix in all its glowing-yellow, high-fructose glory. And then you start thinking a whiskey neat might be the safe way to go.

It’s because of commercial sour mix that certain basic drinks—even though everyone has heard of them—rarely are served the right way. Prime among those are two hot-weather favorites, the Collins and the Fizz. The two are very similar. Both use a base spirit, fresh lemon juice, and a little bit of sugar or simple syrup, and are topped with soda water or sparkling water (I like using Apollinaris brand, with its flavorful minerality and small bubbles). Very simple, very cool, very delicious. The key differences are that a Collins uses slightly more gin and is built in an ice-filled Collins glass, while a Fizz is shaken (sometimes with egg white) and strained into either an ice-filled Collins glass or an iceless highball glass.

The Tom Collins is the simpler of the two, and it is always clear. It originally was made with Old Tom gin, and its cousins were soon to follow: Mike Collins (Irish whiskey), Jack Collins (applejack), Pedro Collins (rum), Pierre Collins (cognac), and, of course, John Collins.

JOHN COLLINS

Serves 1

3 ounces genever

1½ ounces freshly squeezed lemon juice

½ ounce
simple syrup

Sparkling mineral water