Boozehound (8 page)

BIANCO MANHATTAN

Serves 1

This is the only Manhattan variation in which I’d skip the bitters
.

1½ ounces bourbon

1½ ounces bianco vermouth

Lemon peel twist, for garnish

Fill a mixing glass two-thirds full with ice. Add the bourbon and vermouth. Stir vigorously for 30 seconds, then strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with the lemon peel twist.

Now, I realize the world seems to cleave into Martini People and Manhattan People. But really, isn’t there enough division in the world already? If you actually consider both cocktails—about the ratios of base spirit to vermouth, the dashes of bitters, the effects of stirring and shaking—there are way more similarities than differences between the two.

So, my having professed my love of Manhattans does not mean I am not also a fan of the martini. I am, and if I’m making one I will use a ratio of three parts of juniper-forward gin, such as Beefeater’s or Tanqueray, to one part Noilly Prat vermouth. I also like a dash of orange bitters and I garnish with a lemon peel twist. I am also a fan of martinis that would have been standard at the turn of the twentieth century, which call for equal parts vermouth and Old Tom gin—a more robust,
slightly
sweeter gin that has undergone a recent revival after a century of obscurity.

I count Washington, D.C.’s star bartender, Derek Brown, as a friend—even though he was one of the principals behind the Hummingbird to Mars speakeasy that I outed, and thus was resolutely not speaking to me for a while. Since then, he’s moved on to other great bars like the Gibson and the Passenger.

In making his dry martinis, Brown goes for a 1:1 ratio of dry gin to dry vermouth, with a dash of orange bitters and a lemon twist. He is a big proponent of high-end vermouths like Dolin, which is imported from France and based on an 1821 recipe, and Carpano Antica, which may be the original vermouth, created in eighteenth-century Italy. (These are also about three times pricier than Martini & Rossi or Cinzano.)

Brown also uses Old Tom gin in resurrecting a nineteenth-century martini variation called the Martinez—which some theorists believe is the original martini, hailing from Martinez, California. I disagree with this crazy theory, but the Martinez does shed light on the link between martinis and Manhattans. In O. H. Byron’s 1884
Modern Bartenders’ Guide
, these are the directions for making a Martinez: “Same as Manhattan, only you substitute gin for whisky.”

While Brown has nailed the cocktail’s historical accuracy, he also insists that the martini is not a historical document. “It’s intellectually interesting,” he says. “But on a certain level who cares? Does it or does it not make a good cocktail?” That answer would be yes.

MARTINEZ

Serves 1

1½ ounces Old Tom gin

1½ ounces sweet vermouth

1 teaspoon maraschino liqueur

2 dashes orange bitters

Orange peel twist, for garnish

Fill a mixing glass halfway with ice. Add the gin, vermouth, maraschino liqueur, and bitters. Stir vigorously for at least 30 seconds, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with the orange peel twist.

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

One final note: You’ll notice that both the Martinez and the Red Hook call for maraschino liqueur, and some of you may be wondering what that is. Never confuse, and never replace, maraschino liqueur with the juice from a jar of maraschino cherries or with other cherry spirits. The sharply sweet and fragrant Luxardo maraschino liqueur—in its telltale straw-covered bottle—is widely available, and it’s what you want to seek out. The original Luxardo distillery, with its recipe dating to 1821, operated in Zara, on the Dalmatian coast of what is now Croatia, until it was destroyed during World War II. Giorgio Luxardo emigrated to Italy and rebuilt the company in 1946 at its current site, near Padua. Giorgio’s descendants still make the same product. Their maraschino liqueur is distilled from a special variety of sour cherries called Marasca Luxardo, which are grown near the Luxardo family’s distillery. The cherries are infused with distillate and aged for three years in Finnish ash casks, which adds no color to the clear liqueur.

As recently as a century ago, maraschino liqueur was used to preserve marasca cherries. But today, maraschino liqueur has nothing to do with the generic, glowing spheres you find in jars in American supermarkets. When I met Franco Luxardo in Italy, he had a laugh as he recalled first encountering the ersatz “maraschino” cherries while in the United States as an exchange student in the 1950s. “I remember being surprised by this strange, bright red cherry they served me,” he said.

CHAPTER 3

LIQUOR STORE ARCHAEOLOGY

THE PROBLEM WITH THE WORLD IS THAT EVERYONE IS A FEW DRINKS BEHIND
.

—
Humphrey Bogart

M
Y BROTHER TYLER AND I
—long past our forays at the Jelly Belly store—used to play a game we called Liquor Store Archaeology. The aim was to make a pith-helmeted-like visit to older, neglected liquor stores—the sort of family-owned shops that perhaps were once prosperous and now do business mainly in pint-size flasks or liters of cheap wine or beer by the can. Inside, we’d scour the dark bottom shelves and dank back corners of the place, looking for forgotten bottles that had been languishing, perhaps for decades. That’s one of the special things about booze. Unlike just about every product in the world, distilled spirits almost never have to be rotated. More often than not, we turned up something rare or just plain strange. Our finds spanned the world: caraway-flavored kümmel from Germany, a wasabi-flavored schnapps, a brandy from Armenia called Ararat, a honey liqueur bottled with a real honeycomb.

It became rather competitive for a while, and it was funny to find the sorts of strange spirits that had been earlier generations’ versions of flavored vodka. I thought I had taken a slight lead in the game when I discovered a sweet, peachy aperitif called Panache—with a hippie-ish, 1970s faux–Art Nouveau label—that was made by Domaine Chandon but now is impossible to find. Then Tyler countered with a liqueur from Sicily called Mandarino del Castello. The label says it’s made from mandarin peels, and the oversaturated photo of the hilltop castle and too-blue Mediterranean sky suggests the mid-1960s, but about Mandarino del Castello we can find no information.

I figured I’d won when I unearthed a bottle of Cordial Campari. Though made by the same company, Cordial Campari is not to be confused with the more famous red Italian aperitivo. Cordial Campari is a clear, after-dinner liqueur with a taste of raspberries. I’d heard tales of Cordial Campari and seen it in a couple of old-man bars in Italy. It had been popular with the glamorous crowd that hung out on Rome’s Via Veneto in the 1950s and 1960s, but it’s never been widely available in the United States. Campari ceased production entirely in 2003. The bottle I found is probably decades old. It may have even been valuable—though probably not anymore, since my friends and I broke into the bottle during a party, and it’s now sitting half empty in my cabinet.

It was Tyler, though, who appeared to be the clear victor when he turned up something called, rather disturbingly, Peanut Lolita: a thick, peanut-flavored liqueur that once was produced by Continental Distilling in Linfield, Pennsylvania. The logo and fonts on the label suggest the early 1960s, but according to what little information we could unearth, Peanut Lolita was still around in the mid-1970s, when infamous presidential brother Billy Carter “often made drunken appearances” with the liqueur’s spokesmodel (this according to an essay by Christopher S. Kelley in
Life in the White House: A Social History of the First Family and the President’s House
). Due to the liqueur’s overwhelming whiskey-and-peanut taste and grainy texture—not to mention its unfortunate name—it is unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon. We may now own the only two bottles of Peanut Lolita left in existence. Tyler tried his best to create a semirespectable drink with the stuff: he layered ice-cold Peanut Lolita and raspberry-flavored Chambord in a shot glass and called it a PB&J. Tyler’s bottle is three-quarters full, and probably will remain so for some time. After tasting his, I’ve never opened my own.

The unique frustration of Liquor Store Archaeology (though I guess this was also part of its appeal) lay in its zenlike experience. What we found was never what we were looking for. The harder we looked for something, the more likely it was that we’d never find it. This became especially frustrating as I began to hear tales of more and more lost spirits being revived. Other than in boutique bottle shops in big cities, it was nearly impossible for several years to find all the rediscovered gins and rye whiskeys and vermouths and bitters that cocktail world insiders were buzzing about. With liquor store shelves taken over by the booze equivalent of suburban McMansions, there seemed even less room left for these idiosyncratic tastes. Though we’d been using the word
archaeology
facetiously, at a certain point it really did feel like we were trying to recover fragments of an ancient Rome or Athens from beneath the layers of newer, shinier cities.

We also had to be on the lookout for frauds during our archaeological digs. I became excited one day when I found a bottle of sloe gin, which I hadn’t seen in many years. For me, sloe gin evokes a youthful summer night long ago at a particular watering hole on the Jersey Shore that served pitchers of sloe gin fizzes and Alabama Slammers (that frightening mix of sloe gin, amaretto, and Southern Comfort), leading to a make-out session with a hair-sprayed Jersey girl in a Camaro in the Wawa parking lot. Ah, sloe gin, like Proust’s madeleine for a once-mulleted boy like me.

It was only later, when I was speaking with an affable British chap named Simon Ford, the so-called “brand ambassador” for Plymouth gin, that I learned my sloe gin of memory—as well as the dusty bottle I’d found—was not the real thing, but a poor imitation. “Full of artificial flavoring and artificial coloring,” he told me, with disapproval. “The kind that gathers dust in dive bars.” The syrupy facsimile sloe gin was the kind of thing you’d find in embarrassing drinks such as the Sloe Comfortable Screw (sloe gin, Southern Comfort, and orange juice), or the Sloe Comfortable Screw Against the Wall (which adds Galliano), or the Panty Dropper (a horrifying concoction of sloe gin, Kahlua, and half-and-half).

Real sloe gin comes not from some factory in the Garden State, but from England. It’s made from (who knew?) sloe berries (the sour, almost inedibly bitter fruit of the blackthorn, a relative of the plum) which are macerated for several months in real gin. In England, it is made mostly in family kitchens in autumn and carried in flasks during hunting season. “Sloe gin, to the English, is a little bit like limoncello is to the Italians,” said Ford. “In the countryside, everyone makes their own.” So for Ford, the tart, ruby-colored spirit reminds him of walking through the idyllic English countryside, picking ripe sloe berries from hedgerows with his grandmother, and sipping her homemade elixir on a cold day by a warm fire.

About ten years ago, Plymouth dusted off its dormant 1883 recipe for sloe gin and started producing very small batches of it. Sloe berries are in short supply, and it takes more than two pounds of them to make one bottle of the gin. By late 2008, Plymouth, at Ford’s urging, finally managed to produce enough to export a small amount over to us.

It’s fascinating how one liquor can inspire such different nostalgic connections for different people. For me, a sip of a Sloe Gin Fizz does take me all the way back to the Jersey Shore—even though it’s not made with the same sloe gin I’m remembering. I must say, it’s bittersweet and a bit disconcerting to realize that one’s coming-of-age memories are based on a lie. But this Proustian experience flows both ways. “I taste my grandmother’s sloe gin now, and it’s disgusting,” Ford told me. “But I don’t tell her. I always tell her it’s better than the one we do.”