For an upcoming Troll-themed larp I wanted to try to make liqueur from fresh fir shoots. I asked on my Facebook page and in the end 3 different friends volunteered enthusiastically to infuse vodka with light green early shoots for me.
Here is one of the three batches.
For this batch, the yield after straining away the fir shoots was about 600ml infused vodka, and I took them out after about 5 weeks of infusing.
Tasting as I went, I ended up with
600ml (20 oz) infused vodka
15ml (½ oz) of 66 brix (ie 2:1 by weight) rich light muscovado syrup
250ml (8 oz) of 50 brix (1:1 by weight) simple syrup
On its own, it is a very light and tender liqueur, with distinct forest flavors. I'm looking forward to using it in cocktails!
I have been on a bit of a gin history trip lately, getting interested in Old Tom gins, and (for various reasons) going to the Portobello Road Distillery Ginstitute, where a lecture and a tasting is followed by a blending session where you design your own London dry gin.
So tonight I decided to do a comparative tasting: the same martini recipe, made with a London dry, an Old Tom, and a genever.
Recipe
1 oz gin
½ oz Lillet Blanc
Gin
Ketel One Jenever. Seems to be a fairly mainstream palate designed liquor.
Boatyard Old Tom. From Ireland, a classic Old Tom (pot still, malted base, post rectification sweetened), aged in Pedro Ximenez casks and sweetened with Pedro Ximenez. Deep, complex, probably my favorite gin right now
Ginstitute "Afternoon Tea" London Dry. This is the composition I put together at the Ginstitute. 14 botanicals, with tea (Yorkshire gold and Lapsang Souchong) and Sevilla orange as the emphasized flavors - evoking tea and marmalade.
I mixed the liquors in glasses with a single ice cube, and tasted as the ice melted.
London Dry
Early on, the vermouth rather emphasized the bitter and citrus notes of the gin, making it almost get medicinal notes. Not the best martini I've had.
Once the ice was fully melted, the flavor mellowed and produced that fresh mountain stream clarity and freshness that I associate with really good martini versions. The orange was still there, but not as overwhelming.
Old Tom
Probably my favorite among the three. Early flavors showed the complexity and depth of flavors I knew from the pure gin without the jarring imbalance I saw in the London Dry (which admittedly was designed for intensity of flavor).
Once the ice was fully melted, it displayed that same characteristic clear mountain stream sensation, but fuller, deeper.
Jenever
The Ketel One, much as expected, never really presented a deep and complex flavor profile. I know the brand from good and very clean vodka expressions - this is a similarly clean, thin flavor expression. The juniper is there, as expected, but I cannot call it a particularly complex liquor.
In early expression it was possibly the most drinkable of the three. In combination with Lillet Blanc it was almost as if the Jenever emphasized the vermouth rather than the other way around.
Late, with the ice melted, the same clear and fresh tones, more purely expressed than in the other versions I'd like to claim.
Conclusion
If there's anything I'm taking from this experiment, it's that I'd like to try a really ambitious Jenever at some point. The London Dry was designed for punchy and loud flavors, the Old Tom was a deeply nerdy product from an enthusiastic producer. I am interested in seeing what that kind of enthusiasm might bring to the Jenever side of things.
I'm also more and more enjoying and leaning towards Old Tom rather than London Dry for cocktail making. Probably connected to my overall sweet tooth, but it seems to settle nicely where used.
Next weekend is the Eurovision final, and we have friends coming over to watch with us. I spotted a drinking game official enough to have its own domain and twitter account (ie, not very official, but certainly interwebs savvy) - and that they recommended their rum punch.
...but I didn't much like their punch recipe.
So I looked around for alternatives, and ran into Ferdinand and Isabella's Punch. This looked a lot better to me, but still I wouldn't want to make it without a few tweaks here and there.
So I tweaked. And for some ingredients that I didn't have at home, I replaced, or I went with DIY.
I plan to go back and edit this post as I settle on some of the amounts, and possibly add more spices than currently planned to the falernum.
Velvet Falernum Batavian Falernum
Since I didn't have any falernum at home, and want to largely avoid purchasing extra booze at this point, I decided to make my own falernum.
And since many historic punches used Batavian Arrak, and while I don't have any white rum at home, I do have Arrak, I decided to build my falernum on that instead.
So, here comes the Batavian Falernum. Based largely on the DIY recipe from Serious Eats.
Ingredients:
1/3 cup raw almonds
30 cloves
2 sticks of cinnamon (added by me)
30 allspice berries (added by me)
1 inch ginger (added by me)
1 cup Batavian Arrack (changed by me)
8 limes
520 g Demerara sugar [actually used: palm sugar + white sugar] (changed by me)
130 g (~1/2 cup) water
Day 1:
Coarsely chop and toast the almonds in a dry (non-stick) pan over medium-high heat until fragrant but before they burn (approx. 5 minutes).
Place almonds, cinnamon and cloves in a tight-sealing jar, cover with arrack. Steep for 24h.
Day 2:
Add allspice berries. Steep for 24h.
Day 3:
Finely zest 8 limes, with as little pith as possible. Put limes in ziploc bag in fridge to juice them later for the syrup and even later for the punch.
Thinly slice ginger.
Add zest and ginger slices to infusion. Steep for 24h.
Day 4:
Juice 4 limes (from the fridge stash), strain into pot. I got 130 g juice from this. Add water (equal amount, so 130g) and sugar (quadruple that, so 520g, to make it 2:1 sugar to liquid by weight), and cook a 66 brix (rich) sugar syrup, until sugar is fully dissolved.
Let it cool, then strain infusion and combine infused arrak and syrup in 1:2 proportions by weight.
Shake/stir until fully combined, strain through coffee filter, and let it rest for 12h.
Ferdinand and Isabella's Batavian Punch
Ingredients
1 lemon
2/3 cups sugar
2-3 tbsp Imperial Earl Grey
1/2 bottle (375ml) Ron Zacapa 23
1/2 bottle (375ml) aged Malmsey Madeira (changed by me)
1/2 cup lemon juice (squeezed from reserved fruit)
1/2 cup lime juice (squeezed from reserved fruit)
1 tsp Angostura Bitters
1/2 cup Batavian Falernum (see above)
Extra additions chosen day of:
Not enough Madeira: swapped half for Lillet Blanc
1 tbsp rich gomme syrup
1/4 tsp 4:1 saline
1/2 tsp Fee Brothers Black Walnut Bitters
1/2 tsp Fee Brothers Molasses Bitters
1/2 tsp Angostura Orange Bitters
Day 1:
Peel or zest the lemon, avoid the pith. Combine with sugar, muddle slightly and let it rest to produce oleo saccharum. Put the zested lemon in the fridge in a plastic bag to squeeze later.
Fill baking tray or bundt pan partway with water, put in freezer to produce ice block for the punch bowl.
Day 2:
Steep 1.5 cups of boiling hot water with the tea leaves for 3 minutes. Strain and set aside to cool.
Squeeze lemon and lime from the fridge and measure out the required amounts. (if not enough, fill it up with the Meyer Lemon super juice in my fridge)
Combine rum, madeira, lemon juice, lime juice, and the oleo saccharum. Stir to combine, and then strain to remove lemon zest from the mix. Pour into punch bowl.
Add tea to punch bowl.
Add ice block to punch bowl.
Garnish with lemon and lime wheels studded with cloves.
Experiments with flash-infusion and flavor thesauri
Today we're hosting friends, and I'm planning a rhubarb/apple crumble. So I checked out my Flavor Thesaurus (by Niki Segnit) to see what rhubarb might pair well with.
Came up with, among other things, juniper, saffron and almonds. So from this I'm getting some cocktail plans: build something for both martini-variations and highballs, using gin flash-infused with rhubarb, and with Strega and Amaretto as sweeteners. (and then use the gin-infused rhubarb pieces in the crumble too)
Flash-infusion
To my ISI cream whipper, I add:
88g rhubarb in pieces
just under 1 cup (161g) of Barr&Hill honey gin (it's what I had left in the bottle!)
just over 1/2 cup (112g) of Illusionist purple gin (emptied out that bottle as well)
about 1/2 cup (98g) of Hernö Old Tom gin (because I was aiming for 2 cups of liquor for this)
Release one charge of NO2, swirl for a little while (15-20s, while puzzling over the noises and wondering where the leak is) and slowly release the pressure.
Release two charges of NO2, swirl for about 30s and then slowly release the pressure.
Strain out the rhubarb pieces (and reserve for the rhubarb crumble).
The Cocktail
With this, I then proceeded to mix a roughly martini-inspired cocktail batch:
2 cups flash-infused gin (see above)
1 cup (or so - I emptied the bottle) Lillet Blanc
2 oz Strega
2 oz Disaronno Amaretto
5 dashes Black Walnut bitters
5 dashes Molasses bitters
Stir on ice, strain and serve up, or with an ice stick and Topo Chico as a highball.
The Outcome
The resulting cocktails (served up, or as a highball) were delicious. Definitely helped along the way by pouring the batch on a bottle and stashing in the freezer after stirring the entire batch on ice.
The rhubarb flavor came on a short visit in each sip, but vanished quickly again. The cocktail was very gin-forward - not one to hide the gin flavor at all - but in the end a very nicely harmonious blend of flavors that tasted almost syrupy sweet without being syrupy sweet.
Today I made myself some Butterfly Pea Flower simple syrup (50 brix), and a gin sour using that syrup.
I'm imagining this to be a good way to get the effect of using Empress 1908, but with the freedom to use whatever gin flavor you want (I'm partial to Barr Hill and their honey gin)
The color changes as you go from syrup to sour to shaken sour are quite fun, and the drink itself I already know to be delicious!
Butterfly pea flower simple syrup
To 1 cup boiling water, add dried butterfly pea flowers (I got mine from Amazon for not very expensive). Stir and let infuse for several minutes, until the liquid is a nice deep indigo. Put a bowl on a scale and tare it. Pour infused tea through a Melitta filter or a cheesecloth to strain out the flowers, squeezing them a little for maximum yield. Remove filter and read scale to find weight of the tea. Tare the scale again and measure the same weight sugar into the bowl. Stir until completely dissolved.
I started with a cup of water, and got 192g of stained tea, so I added 192g sugar.
Shaken gin sour
4cl gin
2cl syrup
2cl lemon juice
1 egg white
Add the ingredients together (and admire the color change when you add the lemon), then shake in a cocktail shaker with one large and a few small ice cubes until the shaker starts slightly hurting your hands from the cold. Pour through a strainer into a cocktail glass (a nice coupe would be great for this) and let the drink rest for a while to build up a nice frothy head of foam.
I add the egg whites and the ice to the metal half of a Boston shaker, and build the rest in the mixing glass half.
I repeated the milk punch experiment, with a new selection of liquors. I'm curious to see how much of infusions and flavorings carries through the clarification process.
So today I made a clarified milk punch on: (serves 3-4 I guess?)
100 ml kraken spiced rum
100ml plantation pineapple rum
100ml pineapple juice
50ml cinnamon syrup
100ml milk
The cinnamon syrup is from when I soaked cinnamon sticks in simple syrup several years ago. They've been sitting in my fridge just soaking ever since...
The result has that ethereal and supply character that most milk punches seem to get. The wine tones I disliked with my first attempt are gone, and with the syrup in there the sweetness of the result is far more agreeable.
It's still not up to the subtlety and complexity I see when ordering these things in bars - but the recipe still is pretty simplistic. Maybe I do need to start infusing stuff myself more to get there.
I've been on a few cocktail obsessions this summer, fueled by geography (my Mai Tai obsession came from spending time in Hawaii) or interesting articles feed to me by the Facebook ads algorithms.
One of the latter category has been clarified milk punches. The basic structure of a clarified milk punch is this: when you mix milk and an acid solution below pH 4.1, the milk curdles. The curds are made out of coagulated milk proteins, primarily casein, and happen to really bind to the same flavor compounds that make teas and oak-aged beverages taste dry and bitter. So by filtering the curdled mess, the curds pick up a LOT of complex compounds from the solution, and the resulting whey comes out clear, with a silky smooth mouthfeel and a much mellower flavor.
So far the theory.
I got my first taste of a milk punch at A Bar Called Gemma in Stockholm, where they have a carbonated clarified milk punch on whiskey and plum wine they call Näck With It. It's a pale yellow, translucent, incredibly refreshing and surprising drink, and it made me return to Gemma several times in order to order it again.
Later on I tried to different clarified milk punches at Pharmarium in Stockholm: the one with miso was an unfortunate combination, served in an awesome glass pitcher shaped like a milk carton, but the saltiness really didn't work. Their other milk punch, with rum, arrack, coconut cream, vanilla, lavender and lemon, called the Cry Baby was utterly delicious and also had me coming back for more.
Back in NYC I tried the pineapple milk punch at the Dead Rabbit, which will probably become my go-to drink for future visits there.
DIY
Having seen several milk punches I really enjoyed, the obvious next step is to make it myself. And yesterday so I did.
After futzing around with a spread sheet to work out pH levels of mixtures of different solutions so I could gauge in advance whether a planned drink would be sour enough, I put together my very first milk punch:
100ml rye
100ml tawny port
100ml pineapple juice
100ml whole milk
Start by mixing the three non milk ingredients in one vessel, pour the milk into another vessel, large enough to hold all the liquids.
At this point, slowly pour the mixture into the milk (not milk into mixture: if you do that, the milk curdles on impact and the curds end up irregular in size and not as good at filtration as we want). Stir a little, then let the mixture rest.
After testing for a while, the curds and whey will likely have separated a little bit, and it's time to filter the punch. People suggest cheesecloth and coffee filters - I decided to go with an artifact of my childhood: a "saftsil" - a fine woven cloth bag hanging in a scaffold made to balance on top of the rim of a pot so that you can filter out the solids when making cordial.
The curds quickly glom up the fabric and start capturing everything that passes through: the first little bit that passes through will still be cloudy, but after a bit the dripping filtrate will be clear. At this point you can pass the initial but through the filter again to avoid clouding the result.
The result is a clear, pale yellow liquid - the actual clarified punch.
I quickly discovered, though, that this recipe is not sweet enough. You need to go for bold and exaggerated flavors in the pre milk mixture since the filtering mellows everything so strongly. Here, it meant that without additional sweetener, it tasted admittedly refreshing, but with a weird wine-y time from the port that ultimately didn't really please my palate.
The next day (ie today) I tried adding a little bit of Creme de Violette as sweetener. The result was difficult to photograph - the purple of the Violette with the yellow of the punch came out as a weird brownish color, but was a bit more purple in person. Flavor wise it was all the difference! The sweetened milk punch is a subtle, light, deceptively easy to drink beverage that retains tones from its components without any of the textural or flavor wise harshness that can show up in both rye and tawny port.
Final verdict? Great and relatively easy technique, that with a few hours waiting times produce a drink wholly unexpected in flavor and texture.
Next up I want to try
Infusing or macerating spices into the liquor or into the milk
Sweetening before mixing
Adding teas. An intense Earl grey, or a very oversteeped lapsang Souchong should both be interesting to clarify
Mocktails: the alcohol does not actually do much in the mechanics and chemistry of this technique - it should be possible to make interesting mocktails this way!
Continuing our previous post with is grand tour of Hawaiian (mostly Honolulu) Mai Tai versions, we were just talking about foam topped Mai Tais.
Finally, the third foam topped Mai Tai I got on Maui, at the Monkeypod Kitchen in Ka'anapali. They make their own macadamia orgeat, and to their Mai Tai with a grapefruit foam.
This pretty much wraps up my grand tour of Hawaiian Mai Tai. I did try a bunch of other drinks too, as well as several mediocre Mai Tai I haven't bothered describing in detail here: one fascinating feature with Hawaii is that every bar and most restaurants all offer Mai Tai, and they are often pretty decent. Notable exceptions include the first one I got, which was a pint glass half filled with three times and half with fruit juices, no orgeat or Curacao in sight. But even the diviest bars tended to beastly outperform this first and disappointing version.
In NYC I started exploring tiki, full of inspiration from the Hawaii trip. In NYC, it turns out, all tiki are pretty run down dive bars. One of the bartenders I met there pointed me to Maison Premier in Brooklyn add the best Mai Tai in NYC. Maison Premier is an oyster and absinthe bar with a great fondness for Rhum Agricole, and their Mai Tai features the different agricoles. This is what happens when people pay attention to the Martinique rum in the third recipe.... And none in NYC or in Stockholm puts any floats on their Mai Tai versions, whereas everyone in Hawaii did.
This summer we spent almost all of June in Hawaii. I took this opportunity to get up close with the Mai Tai and explore the variations of the drink and the various approaches different bars take to it.
The Mai Tai, the story tells, was invented by Victor Bergeron (aka Trader Vic) in 1944 at his tiki restaurant in Oakland CA. There are arguments that it might be seen as a variation of Don the Beachcomber's QB Cooler, which was invented earlier. In 1953, Trader Vic was hired to oversee the cocktail menus at the Royal Hawaiian hotel and the Moana Surfrider hotel, situated right next to each other in the beach in Waikiki. There, the recipe evolved and added orange and pineapple juice to the mix.
The basic structure of the Mai Tai is a rum sour, with lime and possibly other juices, with Curacao, and with orgeat.
My first observation from it all, and from trying Mai Tais in NYC and Stockholm as well, is that Hawaiian Mai Tai differ from elsewhere in that the Hawaiian versions pretty much all had a float: either dark rum or a flavored eggwhite foam laid carefully on top of the drink. I haven't seen anyone outside of Hawaii do this, and it makes quite a large difference to the experience of drinking it.
Beyond that, the Mai Tai varieties split neatly into on the one hand attempts to recreate Trader Vic's 1944 version (with only lime juice, Curacao, orgeat and rum - originally a 17yo Wray & Nephew from Jamaica, then when that ran out a 15yo Wray & Nephew, when that ran out, a mix of a Martinique rum and one from Jamaica.
The presence of Martinique in this final recommendation from Trader Vic has meant that many turn to Rhum Agricole when trying to recreate the roots of the Mai Tai. Personally, I don't like most agricoles, and find this am unfortunate trend.
So what did I find on my exploration then?
Let's start with the winner: the best Mai Tai I have tasted. This position I bestow on the modern recipe at the Royal Hawaiian, which features Pineapple and orange juice, orange Curacao, orgeat, and two different rums from the Lahaina distillery on Maui.
The flavor is complex and enticing, with a clear pineapple tone (I really like pineapple....) and noticeable nuttiness from the orgeat. I ended up spending most of my time trying to see if anything lived up to this experience.
I tried their 1944 version as well - with the same Lahaina rums, and keeping to the lime recipe. The different 1944 versions I've tried blend together a bit in my memory, and very many places took pride in offering a 1944 Mai Tai.
Along the beach in Waikiki, there are four hotels side by side each with long history and a beach bar with high ambitions. The Royal Hawaiian was one, with the Mai Tai Bar on the beach. Next to it is the Sheraton, with the Rumfire bar. I was excited about visiting Rumfire - but due to the global logistics problems they (and many others) were running a reduced menu. Instead of having 6 different Mai Tai versions on the menu (including one based on Zacapa!), they ordered 6 cocktails total. One of them was a Mai Tai, with a dark rum float, and quite competent. Quite a bit more boozy than the Royal Hawaiian.
Further along the beach comes Duke's, where the Mai Tai almost felt like a caricature of the bad reputation that tiki had earned. Their Mai Tai is served in a gigantic clear plastic tiki mug, and is the least interesting in this stretch of hotel bars. Not the worst I had on Hawaii, but really not all that amazing.
Finally along the beach hotel bar stretch comes the Moana Surfrider, with their Beach Bar under the Banyan: the hotel is built around a huge and ancient Banyan tree, and the hotel bar is nestled right underneath the tree. It was certainly one of the most scenic bars I went to.
They were out of their dedicated Mai Tai souvenir glasses, so served the drink in simple plastic single use glasses instead. They also drizzled aperol on top, which made the drink too bitter to really enjoy. When writing about it I called it the worst of the beach bar Mai Tais.
Moving on from the beach bars, I found several bars that took off in different unexpected directions. Worst among these was the brewery tap house that decided that an angostura float was a good idea. It made the drink so bitter that the one with aperol seems like a good idea in comparison.
At Agave and Vines in the Ala Moana shopping center, they take a cute from their margaritas and serve the "Hi Tai": a pretty classic, lime forward recipe, but in a glass that is ruined with salt and ground macadamia nuts. The result was very odd but in a good way.
One of the bars I had anticipated visiting the most was the exclusive and fully booked months in advance Bar Leather Apron in downtown Honolulu. I managed to get in by being there when they opened and promising to leave before they would need my chair for an actually booked party. They rinse the glass with absinthe and orange peel oils, and smoke the Mai Tai with kiawe wood chips. Then they top it with a thin angostura float. Unfortunately, the smoke dissipated quickly and the angostura made the whole drink taste just like an overly bitter lime rum sour. Their presentation is amazing, but the flavors didn't really deliver.
Three places used foam toppings. I don't have a photo of the Mai Tai I got at the Tikis Grill and Bar, which was tired with a passion fruit eggwhite foam. But the one at Bevy turned out amazing, topped with a grapefruit and ginger foam and with a tart and lime-y flavor profile.
Tumblr sets a 10 image limit on their pets, so I will continue this your in my next post!
For Terra Warman’s birthday party recently, we were asked to invite a handful of drinks - on three given themes.
Here are my contributions.
Violet
2 pt gin (Barr & Hill honey gin)
1 pt lilac liqueur
1 pt lemon juice
butterfly pea tea ice cubes
Stir liquids on ice, pour and serve with a butterfly pea tea ice cube.
The pea flower tea is an acid indicator, so the deep purple ice cubes slowly color the drink pink as the ice cube melts and the lemon juice shifts the color.
Black Forest
1 pt single malt (Mackmyra)
1 splash of Luxardo maraschino cherry syrup
1 Luxardo maraschino cherry
5-10 dashes of Aztec chocolate bitters
Stir and serve with ice.
The cherry should be black with a heavy black syrup - no neon cherries for this drink!
Morgan Le Fey
2 pt dark rum (Don Papa aged rum)
1 pt Praline (pecan liqueur)
1 pt allspice dram
1 pt lemon juice
5 dashes Molasses bitters
Absinthe
Coat glass with absinthe.
Stir everything except the absinthe on ice, pour straight up.
Float a teaspoon of absinthe, light on fire and serve.
For our Hawai'i-themed christmas party this year, we've stocked up on orgeat and on DonQ Cristal in order to make mai tai for all our guests.
Looking at the IBA ingredients on the Wikipedia page, and counting up from there, I'm settling on the following recipe for a large volume mai tai base:
800 ml white rum (a bottle and a bit)
300 ml orange curaçao
300 ml orgeat syrup
200 ml lime juice
Makes a base of 1.6 litres. Pack a glass with ice, fill with mai tai base, top with dark rum and garnish. Add crushed ice and let sit for a bit for a less boozy version: replacing the shaking step with an in-glass ice melt.
My brother gave me a tip on a new favorite rum of his. At €30 for a 50cl bottle, and with his strong and descriptive recommendation, I went out and bought a bottle undrunk.
And I liked it. Ron Quorhum is a 23 year old solera rum from the Dominican Republic, and while it doesn't unseat the ruler of my rum heart — Ron Zacapa — it certainly shoves Pyrat XO out of the way for 2nd place. It's a thick, pleasant, layered flavour with a lot of natural spice and some molasses. It is a delightful sipping rum that I will be keeping in my bar cabinet.
Looking around for something to drink today, I had a hunch and googled for combinations of Gin and Absinthe. I ran into a drink list at the Ginologist, featuring cocktails with gin and absinthe.
I mixed myself an Earthquake:
Equal parts Gin, Absinthe, and Bourbon. Serve on the rocks.
using Four Roses Bourbon, Valkyrie Absinthe, and Bombay Sapphire.
Both Bombay Sapphire and the Valkyrie Absinthe have a wealth of herbal notes, and for the gin especially, unlocking the herbal notes is critical for getting any sort of mileage out of the drink. This concoction was a very pleasant experiment: herbal notes rich and present, louching continuously as the ice melts. The photo above was from just after mixing; as the ice melts, it comes closer and closer to a fully louched absinthe, flavors mellowing and merging.
Vana Tallinn: a surprisingly good European spiced rum liqueur
This past weekend I was in Tallinn, Estonia. There I ran across the pride of the city — Vana Tallinn, a spiced rum liqueur with a variety of recipes that is sold and drunk ALL across Tallinn. (probably outside as well; we didn't leave the old town…)
The liqueur tastes like a spiced rum, slightly sweeter. It comes in 40%, 45%, 50% (abv), a Winter Spice edition, and Cream Liqueur editions — one "standard", one with coffee aroma and one with chocolate.
So far, I've tried the 40% and the original cream liqueur; but I liked what I had so much that for my trip back I bought one 50cl bottle each of everything but the flavored Cream Liqueurs.
Standard way of drinking it seems to be as Estonian Coffee: like an Irish Coffee, but flavored with Vana Tallinn instead. If you like cream in your coffee, the Cream Liqueur is a nice replacement. If you don't drink coffee, the natives will suggest it for tea — which makes a really nice Estonian Toddy.
One apparently non-standard use that I really enjoyed was what I'd dub the Must ja Tormine: a Dark 'n' stormy on Vana Tallinn and Ginger Ale. I have yet to try it with a really spicy ginger ale, and/or with an added slice of ginger, but my first experiments were REALLY promising.
All in all? A really nice addition to the rum family; and something to return to every time I get back to the baltics.
Tonight's mix: Rebellion Spiced Amaretto Hot Chocolate
At tonight's board game night, a guest asked for something nice to drink. A conversation about what culminated in “Something on Disaronno Amaretto, please.”
So I produced some Ibarra Hot Chocolate, and to a cup of hot chocolate I added 15ml (1/2oz) Rebellion Spiced Rum, 30ml (1oz) Disaronno Amaretto, a good spoon whipped cream, and dusted the concoction with freshly ground cardamom.
The result is a frothy and spicy hot chocolate with a pleasantly strong almond tone that emerges just after the head.
A good Amaretto Sour tends to include a bit of Bourbon or something, to give it some extra kick. Seeing as I just received my latest Masters of Malt order, I felt like trying out my brand new Rebellion Spiced Rum.
I first met Rebellion Spiced at [kil-der-kin], where I tried it in a Daiquiri and immediately liked it. And seeing as I have recently tried and really enjoyed Amaretto Sour, the combination was inviting.
At a sip? Decent. It is a halfway-point between Amaretto Sour and Daiquiri, and the spices blend nicely with the lime and the almond flavors.
Recipe:
1oz Lime juice
1oz Rebellion Spiced Rum
2oz Amaretto Disaronno
A sprinkling of sugar
Shake sugar with lime (to avoid having to dig out simple syrup), then add ice and booze. Shake until fingers are numb. Strain, serve.
