Boozehound (12 page)

Lemon slice, for garnish

Fill a Collins glass with ice. Add the genever, lemon juice, and simple syrup. Top with the mineral water and stir gently. Garnish with the lemon slice.

The Fizz is also one of the great underappreciated cocktails—a palette on which to experiment. There are so many variations to play with, beginning with the basic Gin Fizz. A Fizz with egg white is called a Silver Fizz, one with egg yolk a Golden Fizz, and one with whole egg a Royal Fizz. A Crimson Fizz adds crushed strawberries, while a Green Fizz adds a teaspoon of crème de menthe. A Diamond Fizz eschews water for sparkling wine. An Apple Blossom is a Silver Fizz made with applejack. The Brandy Fizz replaces gin with brandy; a Sea Fizz replaces it with absinthe. A Purple Fizz uses sloe gin and grapefruit juice; a Pineapple Fizz calls for white rum and pineapple juice.

“What’s the difference, if any, between a Tom Collins and a Gin Fizz?” asks David A. Embury in his 1948 cocktail geek bible,
The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks
. “I insist a Fizz should actually fizz.” Embury suggests keeping in mind a basic formula: sweet (sugar, syrup, or liqueur), sour (lemon or lime juice), strong (the liquor), and weak (the sparkling water and ice). “If you keep these principles firmly in mind,” he writes, “you can ad lib ad infinitum.”

Here are my two very favorite Fizzes.

SLOE GIN FIZZ

Serves 1

2 ounces Plymouth sloe gin

1 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 teaspoon
simple syrup

Sparkling mineral water

Orange slice, for garnish

Fill a shaker two-thirds full with ice. Add the sloe gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup. Shake well, then strain into a chilled highball glass filled with ice and top with the mineral water. Garnish with the orange slice.

NOTE:
I occasionally like to substitute 2 dashes of Angostura bitters for the simple syrup if I want a slightly less sweet drink.

VIOLET FIZZ

Serves 1

1½ ounces gin

1 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice

½ ounce crème de violette or Crème Yvette

1 tablespoon egg white

Sparkling mineral water

Fill a cocktail shaker halfway with ice. Add the gin, lemon juice, crème de violette, and egg white. Shake vigorously for at least 1 minute. The egg white should get frothy. Strain into an ice-filled Collins glass and top with the mineral water.

NOTE:
If you have a sweet tooth and absolutely must, you may add ½ teaspoon of sugar.

CHAPTER 4

ROMANCE: THEY POUR IT ON

TRUTH IS BEAUTIFUL, WITHOUT DOUBT; BUT SO ARE LIES
.

—
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I
WAS IN COLLEGE
in the early 1990s, when drinking shots of Jägermeister was in the early stages of popularity. You’d go into your local bar and a bevy of so-called “Jägerettes” in hot pants and tank tops would be pouring this weird brown liqueur with a fierce herbal-cinnamon-licorice kick. It came in rectangular green bottles bearing an almost biblical image of a cross shining over an elk’s horns. It was like nothing else we had ever been served. If you happened to be a student at the University of Vermont in the early 1990s, as I was, you too may have sucked down many a Jägermeister—generally the last drink of the night in a certain basement bar in downtown Burlington—before stumbling upstairs and into the snowy night en route to Nectar’s for fries and gravy, which you had to eat steaming hot on the walk home before the gravy congealed in the subzero night air.

Anyway, rumors quickly spread about the obscure German booze with secret ingredients. Some said it contained elk’s blood. Others said that what we were getting in America was a watered-down version of the original. Or that the real stuff—available only in Germany—contained special herbs (maybe opiates?) that gave it an even more special kick.

When my friend S. and I were backpacking in Europe one summer—in our Phish T-shirts and Birkenstocks—the first thing we did upon crossing the border into Germany was to buy a bottle of Jägermeister. We sat on a bunk in the hostel, took sips from the bottle, and looked at each other. “Do you think it’s different?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think so. I think I feel different.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I feel different, too.”

We also believed the rumors that the gold flakes in another popular liqueur, the cinnamon Goldschläger, would make microscopic cuts in your throat and stomach when you drank it, thus allowing the alcohol to directly enter the bloodstream for maximum intoxication. What’s more, S. and I believed we could travel through four countries as enlightened hippie-platonic travel companions, sharing a bed, and there would be no drama. Ah, the naïveté of youth!

Until I started writing about spirits for a living, I always wanted to believe the corporate storytelling that accompanies so much booze in the marketplace. The genre is well established: miraculous tales of rustic peasants gathering some obscure ingredient, a secret recipe from the Middle Ages zealously guarded by monks who have taken a vow of silence, the stern family patriarch carefully sampling every barrel before bottling. Who doesn’t want to believe these stories? There is, as we all know, so little magic left in the world.

“Quintessential liquor industry puffery!” That’s what Rob Cooper called it, in his booming voice. We were talking on the phone, only about two months into my job at the
Post
. “I guess you could say it’s romantic and that it allows the consumer to dream. Or whatever. But it’s just a lie. They need to have a compelling story of some sort. A lot of companies probably feel that pressure.” Cooper added, “I’m over the whole puffery thing.”

Now, this was a somewhat contradictory statement. If you remember, Cooper is the man who promised a room full of people at Tales of the Cocktail that he would bring Crème Yvette—nostalgic, lavender-hued, part of the “holy trinity of lost spirits”—back to market. During this particular phone conversation, Cooper and I were discussing another new liqueur he was launching: a spirit called St-Germain that is allegedly made of elderflowers from the Alps. St-Germain’s compelling, romantic story sounded like a doozy. A classic of the genre.

According to the lavish marketing material when it launched, St-Germain uses only fresh, wild elderflowers picked high in the French Alps. Immediately after harvest, the flowers undergo a “highly secret” maceration process that extracts flavor “without bruising the flowers.” It is “a carefully orchestrated sequence of events, which must be completed during the short three- to four-day span when the blossoms peak.”

So, with only a few fleeting days to gather all the elderflowers needed for an entire year’s production, one might reasonably wonder: what method, what technology, do they employ to harvest the elderflower crop? According to the company’s tale,
“bohémien”
farmers—adorably quaint and wearing berets, no less—handpick the elderflowers. “After gently ushering the wild blooms into sacks and descending the hillside, the man who gathers blossoms for your cocktail will then mount a bicycle and carefully ride the umbels of starry white flowers to the market,” read the marketing material, which included photos of a mustachioed man in a beret, his bicycle loaded down with satchels of white flowers.

Said St-Germain, “You could not write a better story if you were François Truffaut.” Indeed.

Other spirits industry insiders, on the other hand, remained a little more skeptical. When I recounted the St-Germain story to Frank Coleman, a lobbyist for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, he rolled his eyes and said, “Guys on bikes? Yeah, right.”

Maybe I was still naive, but I sincerely wanted this story to be true, and I asked Cooper if I could meet his
“bohémiens”
on bicycles. The annual elderflower harvest happens in early May, and I would to be in Europe then, so I offered to drive down from Geneva into the Haute-Savoie region to check out the elderflower harvest.

After some back-and-forth, Cooper flatly rejected the idea. “I will not divulge the name of the town where the elderflowers are grown,” he said. “I want to protect this brand.” And in regards to his secret maceration process, he said, “I’m not going to show you. I’m not going to show anyone. Ever.”

The elderflowers grow on public land, Cooper said, and he worried that a huge multinational liquor company—say, Diageo or Pernod Ricard or Bacardi—would swoop in on the action if it learned the location. I questioned that business model. What if the elderflowers didn’t bloom one year, or what if he lost availability? People in the Alps certainly pick elderflowers and use them in cooking and making drinks. You may even be able to find some kind of elderflower spirit made in someone’s barn. But that’s a long way from supplying fresh elderflowers for a liqueur that’s having an expensive, nationwide U.S. rollout, supported by ads in nearly every food and beverage magazine.

I pressed further. I offered to keep the town anonymous. I told him that I’d visited numerous distilleries and had never once completely figured out secret methods or recipes. Still, Cooper would not budge.

Instead, he offered to send a mysterious-sounding man named “Yves” to meet me at my hotel in Geneva. From there, I would be driven into the Haute-Savoie, to a destination he would not disclose. It all sounded very James Bond. “Are you going to blindfold me or throw a sack over my head, too?” I asked.

Cooper chuckled. “Maybe we should!”

Even then, I would still be forbidden to see St-Germain’s team of guys on bicycles, and he would not show me his production facility. What exactly would he do? It was unclear. “Yves” and I would apparently drive around the mountains, have lunch, and then return to Geneva. I declined.

A few months later, at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, Cooper hosted a tasting room for St-Germain. During his PowerPoint presentation, he showed the same photos of the same mustachioed man in a beret, harvesting and stuffing his bicycle basket with elderflowers. During the Q&A segment, as the photos flashed in an endless loop, a woman raised her hand and said, “Is this a true story? Because I am from France, and I have lived in France my whole life, and I have never heard of anything like this.”

Cooper promised that day, and pretty much every time I’ve seen him since, that one day he’ll invite members of the press to meet his elderflower pickers in berets. Three years on, that has never happened. So the story of Frenchmen on bikes, handpicking fresh elderflowers in the Alps for St-Germain liqueur remains a good tale. The liquor itself, on the other hand, has become so ubiquitous in contemporary cocktail recipes that some refer to the elderflower liqueur as “bartender’s ketchup.”