Boozehound (15 page)

1 dash orange bitters

Preserved or maraschino cherry (
this page
), for garnish

Lemon peel twist, for garnish

Fill a mixing glass two-thirds full with ice. Add the Chartreuse, gin, vermouth, and bitters. Stir vigorously, then strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with the cherry and lemon peel twist.

A more contemporary use of Chartreuse can be found in the Chartreuse Swizzle, which is a mash-up of Old World and New World. In this case Chartreuse replaces rum in the Swizzle, a Caribbean standard.

CHARTREUSE SWIZZLE

Serves 1

1¼ ounces green Chartreuse

1 ounce pineapple juice

¾ ounce freshly squeezed lime juice

½ ounce falernum, preferably John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum

In a Collins glass packed with crushed ice, combine the Chartreuse, pineapple and lime juices, and falernum. Swizzle with a bar spoon or swizzle stick until the outside of the glass frosts, adding more crushed ice as needed to fill the glass. Serve with a straw.

Recipe by Marcovaldo Dionysos, created for Clock Bar, San Francisco

St-Germain: Beyond the Romance

As much as I tease St-Germain about its fantastic story of men in berets on bikes harvesting the elderflowers, the liqueur itself is tasty and has many uses in great cocktails. It’s become so prevalent among top bartenders that it’s been called “bartender’s ketchup” by some wags.

ELDERFASHIONED

Serves 1

This is an elderflowery take on the classic Old Fashioned
.

2 ounces bourbon

½ ounce St-Germain elderflower liqueur

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Orange peel twist, for garnish

Fill an old-fashioned glass with ice. Add the bourbon, St-Germain, and bitters. Stir gently. Garnish with the orange peel twist.

Recipe by St-Germain

BORIS KARLOFF

Serves 1

This is an elderflowery take on a gin fizz
.

¾ ounce gin

¾ ounce St-Germain elderflower liqueur

1 ounce freshly squeezed lime juice

1 tablespoon confectioners’ sugar

1 egg white

1 ounce club soda

Pinch of grated lime zest, for garnish

Pinch of freshly ground black pepper, for garnish

In a shaker, combine the gin, St-Germain, lime juice, sugar, and egg white. Shake well without ice. Then fill the shaker with ice and shake well for another 30 seconds. Strain into an ice-filled Collins glass. Add the club soda and stir. Sprinkle the lime zest and pepper over the top.

Recipe by Todd Thrasher of PX, Restaurant Eve, and the Majestic, Alexandria, Yirginia

Tuaca: Made in Italy, for Americans

Tuaca has much more complexity and potential as a cocktail ingredient than as a shot in a college bar. There are actually several citrus-vanilla liqueurs on the market, including Licor 43 (or Cuarenta y Tres) from Spain and Navan from France, but I like Tuaca best of the bunch. I think Navan (with a cognac base) tastes like Dimetapp, but I enjoy Licor 43 very much. In fact, I often use it interchangeably with Tuaca. Licor 43, like Tuaca, is an old spirit: it claims a heritage that stretches back two thousand years to the ancient Carthaginians and derives its name from the forty-three secret ingredients used to make it. Like Tuaca, Licor 43 is also fast becoming a trendy staple on bar menus around the country.

I find that Tuaca mixes best with whiskey. I’ve made several variations of a Manhattan, my favorite of which I call a Livorno, for the town where Tuaca is made.

LIVORNO

Serves 1

1½ ounces bourbon

¾ ounce Tuaca

2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

Preserved or maraschino cherry (
this page
), for garnish

Fill a mixing glass two-thirds full with ice. Add the bourbon, Tuaca, and bitters. Stir vigorously for 30 seconds, then strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with the cherry.

Another Tuaca favorite mixes it with Scotch on ice, then tops it with tonic water and a squeeze of lime. Think of this Scottish-Italian tall drink as a sort of Tuscan-influenced Rusty Nail with the refreshing addition of tonic. I recommend using a lighter Scotch (not too smoky or peaty) with notes of vanilla and sherry, such as Glenfiddich or Glenkinchie.

UNDER THE TARTAN SUN

Serves 1

1½ ounces Tuaca

¾ ounce Scotch

3 ounces tonic water

1 lime wedge

Fill a highball glass with ice. Add the Tuaca and the Scotch, then top with the tonic water. Squeeze in the lime wedge, drop it into the drink, and stir lightly.

Beyond Jägermeister:
The Redheaded Slut Revisited

It has become a tradition in New Orleans to hold a jazz funeral—with a coffin and a procession through the French Quarter—for a truly bad, embarrassing cocktail that the bartenders who attend the annual Tales of the Cocktail event believe should die. The first year, they laid to rest the Appletini, that girls’-night-out stalwart based on neon-green Sour Apple Pucker schnapps. The time had come. If bartending was ever to move forward as a respectable craft, then sacrificing one of the 1990s faux-tini drinks seemed reasonable. Very few tears were shed.

The following summer presented a slightly different scenario. A funeral was held for a well-known shot with a rather off-color name, served in so many college bars: the Redheaded Slut. Consisting of equal parts cranberry juice, peach schnapps, and Jägermeister, the Redheaded Slut is meant to be taken in one gulp, usually after shouting something like “Woo hoo!” At first I thought, Yeah, good riddance, Redheaded Slut, with your nasty mix of herb, licorice, cinnamon, and cloying artificial “peach” odor. But later, I started to think its burial might have been misguided.

Please understand: I am by no means here to defend the Redheaded Slut. I think anyone who serves one of those 1980s shots-with-a-naughty-name—Sex on the Beach, Slippery Nipple, Screaming Orgasm, Dirty Girl Scout—should be forced to listen to an iPod that plays only Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” over and over again.

When I look at recipes for this drink genre in a book I own called
Big Bad-Ass Book of Shots
, I am struck by how often the drinks are based on a very small group of ingredients: Jägermeister, peach schnapps, Bailey’s Irish Cream, Southern Comfort, cranberry juice. Sometimes more than one of them. Sometimes all of them. Clearly, more time was spent on coming up with a risqué name for most of these than on the formula for the drink itself.

But then I think, I’m not being fair. Perhaps hundreds of years from now when the history of our era in bartending is written, this type of shot will represent a primitive but significant stage of the craft. Sort of like cave paintings. In the 1980s and 1990s, most bartenders were working with what they had, without access to the sorts of obscure flavors and ingredients we now enjoy. What bar in 1984 had Old Tom gin or maraschino liqueur or crème de violette? Maybe, I thought, instead of an RIP for the Redheaded Slut, I should turn my attention to helping it evolve. So I spent a lost summer weekend trying to reengineer it.

It’s not as if the shot did its job well, anyway. We all know the purpose of a shot, and Jägermeister at 70 proof and peach schnapps at 30 proof aren’t exactly high-octane. I’d suggest one slug of 101-proof Wild Turkey if a real shot is what you’re looking for. So my plan was to shift the Redheaded Slut from shot to proper cocktail.

I wanted to get rid of the peach schnapps, cranberry juice, and Jägermeister yet still retain some memory of the fruit, the herbs and spices, and the color, which is a sort of ginger color like … red hair. The first ingredient was easy. I hate peach schnapps and it happened to be peach season, so I was going to use fresh yellow peaches in whatever I made. The second ingredient was also a cinch to lose, because the cranberry juice wasn’t doing much of anything in this drink except adding color. The third was trickier. I actually like Jägermeister now and then. But maybe Jägermeister as a mixer isn’t always a good idea. It can overpower.

Still, Jägermeister has a flavor profile similar to the Italian amari that so many trendy “mixologists” use. And I’d read about an interesting experiment using peaches and Punt e Mes vermouth on a blog called Cocktail Notes. Punt e Mes’s flavor lies somewhere between sweet vermouth and Campari. I liked it, but Punt e Mes is brown, and I wanted this drink to be red. So I mixed sweet vermouth and Campari with muddled peaches. Once I had my vermouth-Campari-peach mixture, I was in business. I combined this mixture with all sorts of spirits, but found it worked best with brandy or bourbon.