Saturday, February 05, 2011

Put your dranking pants on!

I've come up with what may be an entirely new family of cocktails!

So, you know that there are families of cocktails, like something/vermouth/bitters... like gin/vermouth/bitters, vodka/vermouth/bitters, whiskey/vermouth/bitters. And then there's... well anyway that's one. I call it a family.

So, here we go:

2 oz Gin
.75 oz Brandy
.25 oz Falernum
.25 oz Liqueur that complements the brandy

It seems like a lot of booze, but this little formula will produce good drinks. The problem is that this is the right balance, imo, but a .25 oz component means that you can't downsize it w/out making it very difficult to measure with normal drink-making tools. Regardless, with some consideration you can come up with numerous combinations of spirits to produce something unique and wonderful. Here are three that I've come up with, in the order that I discovered them:

2 oz Small's Gin (this is an Oregonian gin with strong cardamom notes)
.75 Clear Creek douglas fir eau-de-vie (Clear Creek is from Portland, OR)
.25 Velvet Falernum
.25 Cointreau

Mmmm... The douglas fir e.d.v. is actually treated fairly, I think.

2 oz Small's Gin
.75 Framboise
(the brandy, not the beer)
.25 Velvet Falernum
.25 Cherry Heering

Completely different from the first one, but nonetheless fantastic cocktail, if I do say myself, and then finally...

2 oz Martin Miller's Gin
.75 Clear Creek Eau-de-Vie de Pomme
.25 Velvet Falernum
.25 Benedictine


Oh. This one is just gorgeous. Everything is balanced, and that peppery gin just shines like a new hinge.

Notice that every recipe here has at least one thing from Portland, and one thing from France. Huh.

Speaking of hinge... Have you ever noticed that at the beginning of Radiolab, at the end of their introductory sound collage, a woman's voice says "enge N P R." That's right, she doesn't say "and N P R," like you think she should be saying. The sound she makes sounds like - I can only describe it as "enge", because I don't know IPA, or any phonetic alphabets. "enge N P R." God it would be annoying, but it's not... yet. What makes it even more interesting is that an older (?), different version of that sonic mashup also features a female saying it, I think in a different setting, the same way! You can hear it on the "Voices in Your Head" podcast, and others. Maybe she just has a weird way of saying "and".