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Lunacy Wine and Spirits

Friday and it's margarita time. Idk but I think there's one or two of you out there that likes the Tequila ! :lmao: :nod:

https://punchdrink.com/articles/bui...wn&utm_medium=Email&cid=121262&mid=1965747318


Build a Better Frozen Margarita
From proper dilution to uniform texture, here’s how to make the perfect blender drink.
JULY 7, 2020


Article-Nickel-City-Austin-Better-Frozen-Margarita-Cocktail-Recipe.jpg

Afrozen drink is only as good as its ingredients and the equipment it’s made with. But normal levels of texture, dilution and sweetness all go out the window when it comes to blended drinks, and nailing the optimal ratio can be especially tricky at home.

The frozen Margarita machine, converted from a soft-serve dispenser by Dallas restaurateur Mariano Martinez in 1971, provided the template for the equipment. Nearly 50 years later, Travis Tober, co-owner of Austin’s Nickel City (who also did a five-year stint as a corporate trainer for TGI Fridays), recommends going with a Vitamix or the “old-school, three-speed Hamilton Beach HBB908 commercial bar blender, the kind still used in Cuba’s best Daiquiri bars.”

Mike Capoferri, of Los Angeles’ Thunderbolt, and Kirk Estopinal, of Cure and Cane & Table in New Orleans, are also devoted to the Vitamix. Estopinal notes that Vitamix sells deeply discounted refurbished machines with a five-year warranty, but “a good Waring blender will also get you where you want to go.” (Mariano Martinez’s father, who codified the frozen Margarita in 1938, made his drinks in a standard Waring blender.)

Ice is another crucial variable. Many bartenders will say crushed is preferable over cubed because it breaks up easily and quickly, but it can also overdilute a drink. Oversized cubes are problematic because they take too long to break down, and can wreck a noncommercial blender. Estopinal likes to use pebble ice, which breaks down efficiently without risking overdilution. He recommends finding a Sonic Drive-In, which carries pebble ice made in a machine called a Scotsman. “When you’re not using a commercial blender, added water is not your friend, so it’s the ice size and amount that matter,” he says.

Tober, for his part, is less concerned with ice shape than he is flavor. “Because frozen cocktails are about 20 to 25 percent water when blended, you should never add anything to the build that doesn’t have flavor,” he says. Nickel City uses orange pekoe tea cubes in its frozen Margaritas, chai cubes in Piña Coladas and chocolate tea cubes in its frozen Irish coffee.

Besides ice, tequila can make or break a frozen margarita. Estopinal suggests using a spirit between 80 and 90 proof to keep the cocktail balanced. “My philosophy is to achieve a concentration of flavor, sweetness in balance with acidity and fruity aromatics from the citrus,” he says. Capoferri, meanwhile, recommends skewing sweet when making any frozen cocktail, to compensate for dilution. “You’ll always need more than you think,” he says, “so I generally use one part sweet to three-quarter parts acid.” (Martinez added simple syrup to his converted Margarita machine to help with freezing, too.)

At Nickel City, Tober uses a 3:1 blend of Persian and Key lime juices (both varieties are available at most Latin markets), and equal parts Cointreau and simple syrup to balance sweetness and acidity. For other frozen cocktails, Estopinal says pasteurized or store-bought juice is “okay, and sometimes way better” than fresh, depending upon the season and availability. “A lot of frozen drinks just taste like the sound of recording a band with the microphone next door under a cardboard box. A good frozen should have space and vibrancy.”

When building the drink, add the liquid components to the blender first, followed by the ice. Tober blends on the lowest speed for five seconds, then hits high speed for 10 seconds. “That seems to be the sweet spot,” he says. “Any longer and you’ll heat the ingredients, resulting in a watery drink.” He recommends pouring the mixture, with a “barely melted soft-serve” consistency, into a pre-chilled glass, preferably YETI’s insulated tumblers for backyard barbecues. At the bar, he prefers 15-ounce goblets. “You want something with thick walls to keep the drink cold.”

Garnished with a salted rim and lime wheel, the frozen Margarita is more than a happy hour staple or hot weather refresher: It’s an enduring symbol of carefree hedonism, no plane ticket (or mask) required.

The ideal consistency should be that of “barely melted soft-serve ice cream,” says Travis Tober, co-owner of Austin’s Nickel City. He recommends using a Vitamix or three-speed Hamilton Beach HBB908 commercial bar blender, but ice, he believes, is the most critical ingredient. “All frozen cocktails are about 20 to 25 percent water when blended, so don’t add anything to the build that doesn’t have flavor,” he says. He uses orange pekoe tea cubes to complement the Cointreau and add a touch of tannin. Blending Persian and Key lime juices with simple syrup balances acidity with sweetness. To build, he adds the liquid ingredients to the blender first, followed by ice. Serve in a pre-chilled insulated tumbler or 15-ounce goblet, garnished with a salted rim and lime wheel.


INGREDIENTS
  • 1 1/2 ounces blanco tequila
  • 1/2 ounce Cointreau
  • 1/2 ounce simple syrup
  • 1 ounce lime juice blend (3:1, Persian lime juice:Key lime juice)
  • 1/2 cup "Iced Tea" cubes (see Editor's Note)
Garnish: salt rim, lime wheel
DIRECTIONS
  1. Combine tequila, Cointreau, simple syrup and lime juice blend in blender. Add ice.
  2. Blend for 5 seconds on lowest speed, then blend at high speed for 10 seconds.
  3. Pour into goblet rimmed with salt, and garnish with lime wheel.
EDITOR'S NOTE
"Iced Tea" Cubes

Make a weak tea by steeping 1 bag orange pekoe in 32 ounces of water. Pour tea into standard ice cube trays and freeze.


If you want to max-out the lime flavor you can zest one (or half) of one of the limes with a microplane grater and put the lime zest in a fine sieve and then run the juice through it. I see a lot of recipes where people mix the zest with salt or sugar or soak it, etc. I've had luck with the above method... really takes up the lime to the next level.

I have some limoncello in the works but I just used a peeler - some people use a microplane. I might try that next time.
 
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Fog Cutter

Article-Fog-Cutter-Cocktail-Recipe-Easy-Tiki.jpg


In signature Trader Vic fashion, the Fog Cutter calls on a blend of three different base spirits (gin, cognac, rum) and a float of sherry. With so many different profiles competing, it’s a drink that can be difficult to balance. In the version Paul McGee serves at Lost Lake in Chicago, he tilts the axis of the drink more toward rum, in this case a lightly aged rhum agricole from Martinique rather than the “light rum” originally called for. A slightly amended version appears below, which simply loses the orange curaçao in favor of a hefty spritz of orange oil over the surface of the drink.
Reprinted with permission from Easy Tiki: A Modern Revival with 60 Recipes, by Chloe Frechette, copyright © 2020. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Photographs copyright © 2020 by Lizzie Munro.


INGREDIENTS
Serving: 1
  • 1 ounce aged Martinique rum, preferably Neisson Élevé Sous Bois
  • 1/2 ounce Cognac
  • 1/2 ounce London dry gin
  • 1 ounce lemon juice
  • 3/4 ounce orgeat (see Editor's Note, or Small Hand Foods)
  • 1/2 ounce amontillado sherry
Garnish: mint bouquet, orange floret, edible orchid, swizzle stick, straw
DIRECTIONS
  1. Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and add 1 cup crushed ice. Shake for 5 seconds.
  2. Pour into a tiki mug and top with another cup of crushed ice.
  3. Garnish with an orange peel, first expressing its oils over the cocktail, then twirling it into a floret, a mint bouquet, orchid, and a swizzle stick and straw.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Alternatively, combine all the ingredients in a drink mixer with 1 cup crushed ice. Buzz for 3 seconds. Pour into a tiki mug, top with another cup of crushed ice, and garnish.

Orgeat:
300 grams raw almonds (about 3 1⁄2 cups/ 1⁄2 pound)
Water, as needed
Sugar

Put the almonds in a bowl and add water to cover. Set aside to soak overnight. Drain the water, then weigh the almonds. Transfer them to a blender and slowly add an equal weight of fresh water while the blender is running on slow, for about 1 minute. Increase to high speed, until the mixture is opaque. Strain through a nut milk bag or a fine- mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth. Weigh the strained milk. Transfer to a medium saucepan and add an equal weight of sugar. Heat over medium, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and let cool. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.
 
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articl...-70392897&mc_cid=0f6379ce15&mc_eid=c6e43d0902


How a Viral Tweet Brought Back a Boozy Root Beer Called Cronk
Who said Cronk was dead?
BY ISAAC SCHULTZJULY 23, 2020

Thanks to Cold Garden Brewery, Cronk has entered the 21st century.

Thanks to Cold Garden Brewery, Cronk has entered the 21st century. COURTESY OF BLAKE BELDING

ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1883, A series of simple advertisements appeared in the Calgary Herald, placed between short paragraphs about tinsmiths, loggers, and hunters in the area. They were concise, staccato statements, mesmerizing in their rhythmic placement amidst the news of the day. Cronk is the drink. Dr. Cronk. Try Cronk. Cronk is good. And simply, Cronk.
The ads promoted a sweet, mildly alcoholic soda that once captured North America’s attention, much like Coca-Cola would do in the next century. Cronk was the drink, after all, and their hilariously compelling advertisements have recently prompted a revival for the extinct beverage.
“Cronk shows up around 1840,” says Paul Fairie, a researcher at the University of Calgary, who in his spare time parses old newspapers for interesting content. “By 1848, people are calling it ‘Dr. Cronk’s celebrated root beer.’ That’s when newspaper stories about Cronk start to appear.”

In June, Fairie posted a Twitter thread of the hypnotic Cronk ads, which appeared in newspapers until about 1920. The thread quickly went viral, with people reveling in the ad’s subliminal stylings. (One read, “Who said Cronk was dead?”) As a result, Fairie has now become the de-facto expert on the long-dead root beer.

These short advertisements for Cronk sparked Twitter hilarity.

These short advertisements for Cronk sparked Twitter hilarity. COURTESY OF PAUL FAIRIE


Twitter users soon started a Cronk investigation, focusing on two important details: the origin of its name and what it tasted like. Period newspapers soon revealed that like many soda pops from the 19th century, Cronk was merely sold by pharmacists. It wasn’t the invention of some sugar-loving medical professional, though it was advertised that way. Cronk’s inventor—Warren Cronk—developed the drink to capitalize on the supposed health benefits of sarsaparilla, a woody plant whose root reportedly reduced inflammation and joint pain, among other afflictions.

“The business was a franchise model—basically, you would get the rights to the recipe in your city,” Fairie says. “There wasn’t a big [Cronk] company that existed. And some of the franchisees were his family, so there’s a few Cronks who appear. I don’t think any of them were doctors.”

The drink proved tasty enough that some of the Cronks and non-Cronk franchisees of the beverage sold bootlegged or counterfeit Cronk. These crank Cronks were apprehended and reported on in the papers, notes Fairie on Twitter. Some of them ended up in jail for peddling non-franchised versions of the drink. And along with the grifters that came with Cronk’s soaring popularity, the drink also attracted detractors—Temperance advocates, mainly, who pointed to the numerous instances of Cronk-induced inebriation, causing conflicts like the Hippodrome War of 1853, a circus brawl in Ohio where the fighters used Cronk bottles as weapons. In 1857, a play premiered featuring Cronk as a devil’s drink, corrupting those who imbibed.

Americans and Canadians all sipped on Cronk.

Americans and Canadians all sipped on Cronk. PUBLIC DOMAIN

While Cronk fever faded by the early 20th century, Fairie’s tweets brought it back. “Cronk” started trending on Twitter in Canada, and the short and simple language of the ads made easy fodder for memes. Before long, a Twitter sleuth found a Cronk recipe in a 160-year-old handbook, written by an anonymous ‘American gentleman and lady.’ Cronk, as it turned out, was a mixture of sassafras, sarsaparilla, hops, chamomile flowers, cinnamon, and ginger, boiled together and combined with steeped tea, yeast, and a whole lot of molasses. Brewers would then ferment the liquid before consumption.

The discovery of the recipe sparked real momentum to revive Cronk. Within days, Calgary’s Cold Garden Brewery announced that they would create a commercial version of the beverage.

“There was a lot of buzz about it, and people were tagging breweries online. It became a big rallying cry for Cronk,” says Blake Belding, the co-owner and head brewer at Cold Garden. “I quickly realized I was going to brew Cronk whether I wanted to or not.”

Belding and his team got to work. Using the 1860 recipe, the brewery went about sourcing the ingredients and cooking up Cronk—likely the first batch brewed in a century.
“We followed the recipe exactly, except for the sassafras,” Belding says. “We didn’t know it at the time, but sassafras root is carcinogenic and illegal to use in commercial beverages. Now I have two pounds of sassafras I don’t know what to do with.”

Instead, Belding concocted different teas from burdock root, birch root, wintergreen, mint, and dried orange peels to find a sassafras replacement. After he decided on a reasonable alternative in mid-July, he set aside the new Cronk to ferment. Though it hasn’t finished fermenting, Belding has been sampling the soda-tea-molasses drink intermittently.

These two bottles from the mid-19th century once held Cronk.

These two bottles from the mid-19th century once held Cronk. COURTESY OF THOMAS KANALLEY

“Without giving too much away, it tastes nothing like what I expected,” Belding says. “Cronk was marketed as a blood tonic. If someone told me this would purify my blood, I’d believe them.”

The Twitter community has been waiting with bated breath for the debut of the antique drink. In the meantime, many have made Cronk merchandise, such as t-shirts, in anticipation of its arrival. But Fairie cautions that people should manage their expectations when it comes to actually drinking real Cronk. After all, its vintage flavor might not appeal to modern palates.

“Cronk was the drink, and people should give it a chance,” he says. “It’s now become about the actual beverage, but the initial thing was just that, ‘These ads are very convincing. I’m sold on Cronk.’

That’s not to say Fairie isn’t excited for the drink, of course. Since he lives close to Cold Garden Brewery, he’s practically first in line to try it.

“We’ll have a special bottle with [Fairie’s] name on it,” Belding says. “He’s the Cronkfather.”

Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.
 
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Is There a Better Way to Make a Martini?
To shake, to stir or to throw? Each method has a dramatic effect on how a Martini tastes. Roger Kamholz on the merits and limitations of each, with help from bartenders, cocktail experts and an MIT scientist.
JANUARY 20, 2017

story: ROGER KAMHOLZ

photo: LIZZIE MUNRO
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In his book The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto, Bernard DeVoto praises a deftly executed dry gin Martini as a muse that promises no less than “art’s sunburst of imagined delights becoming real” (which is significant, since he trashes most other mixed drinks, even a barroom darling of such stature as the Manhattan).

Of course, achieving these results doesn’t come easy. DeVoto insists his revered cocktail must be spec’ed to an exacting 3.7-to-one, gin-to-vermouth ratio; it should be crowned with oil expressed from a lemon peel (which does not go in the glass afterward); and never should more than one serving be made at a time.

Such is just one example of the peerless thicket of arcana that clings to the Martini. Can you think of another cocktail so widely embraced, yet so subjected to personal whim?

“It’s one of the few drinks out there that no one will ever agree on,” says Alex Day of Proprietors LLC. “Everyone has their version of it, and it seems to be a deeply personal thing for people.”

Consider the (misunderstood) story of Winston Churchill’s vermouth-less Martini, or of James Bond’s famous preference for vodka over gin. Ratios, garnishes, glassware, rocks or not, the ways we’ve found to bend a Martini to our will are as innumerable as our taste buds.

Even DeVoto, a stickler to be sure, makes a perhaps unintended nod to the malleability of the Martini through an uncharacteristic equivocation: He says a Martini can be either shaken or stirred. That part apparently doesn’t matter.

Or does it? Cocktail science has advanced a long way since the day of The Hour, which first appeared in 1948. We now know each technique for mixing a Martini possesses its own unique qualities, and can deliver tangible variations on the final product, while keeping all else equal. Below, a look at each preparation in detail, starting from a commonly accepted build: two parts to one, London dry gin to dry vermouth. According to Day, “That core assemblage is the essence of what a Martini is.”

Shaking
Though it’s fallen out of favor these days, shaking does excel at delivering a cold Martini, fast. “You chill something much more quickly if you shake it,” says Kevin Liu, bar owner and author of Craft Cocktails at Home, which deals a lot with the science of drinks. Shaking is also very good at diluting a Martini, namely because, as Liu explains, “you cannot having chilling of a liquid without dilution.”

Bartender and cocktail writer Dave Arnold has dug deeper into these principles, both via his book, Liquid Intelligence, and in an earlier series of experiments chronicled for the International Culinary Center. “Shaking is so violent that it accomplishes everything it needs to in about 15 seconds,” writes Arnold. “After 15 seconds, the drink won’t chill much more, and the drink won’t dilute much more.”

Whether this point of equilibrium coincides with the arrival at optimal taste is a matter of personal preference. Over-chilling, most would agree, isn’t so much of a danger. (According to bartender Toby Cecchini, “The one thing you want out of a Martini is that it’s arctic… like falling into a swimming pool on a hot day.”) But over-dilution, which results in a watery Martini, is a risk.

The agitation that comes with shaking not only aerates the drink, it also causes ice cubes to chip. And unless they’re double-strained out, those tiny crystals will affect the drink’s mouthfeel. As for the impact of the tiny air bubbles in a Martini, “it’s not going to taste bubbly, like Champagne, if you will,” says Liu. “It’s more likely that [the drinker will perceive] some very, very slight creaminess.”

For many bartenders, what’s “off” about a shaken Martini is perceptible, yet hard to articulate. “There seems to be something a bit disjointed about the shaken Martini,” says Alex Day. “I’m not going to use the word ‘bruised’ or anything like that, but there seems to be a great cohesion when the Martini is stirred as opposed to when it is shaken. And maybe that is [due to] placebo, or some sort of ritual, but that has been my anecdotal observation.”

Stirring
“Stirring is much more mellow than shaking,” Arnold writes. “To stir a drink to the same temperature plateau that a shaken drink reaches in 15 seconds, you might need to stir 1 to 2 minutes.”

Most bartenders prefer their Martinis stirred. “By stirring, you’re slowly introducing chill and dilution in a very controlled way,” says Jim Kearns of New York’s Slowly Shirley and The Happiest Hour, “so that when you reach the peak amount of chill and dilution—ideally at the same time by using the largest ice you possibly can—you get a really well-made Martini.” What’s more, stirring eliminates air bubbles from the equation. With this technique, says Day, “the entire point of it is to chill and dilute without intentionally adding texture to the cocktail.”

On a molecular level, stirring may also serve to both accentuate and retain some of the more evanescent flavors and aromas found in gin. “In the odor headspace of gin, there are what look like about a couple hundred compounds,” says MIT research scientist Shannon Stewart, noting that adding water to gin “can favor the release of certain molecules.” Typically, this isn’t a result of chemical change, explains Stewart. Rather, “[stirring] changes the delicate balance between water-based compounds, alcohol-based compounds and oil-based compounds, and it can make them more accessible to your odor-receptor neurons or your taste-receptor neurons.”

In other words, that hit of water allows gin’s more hidden botanicals to reveal themselves. But it’s a tricky dance. “What happens with these small organics… [is that] they’re really sensitive to heat [and to] agitation,” says Stewart. “They evaporate easily.”

Stewart notes, too, that shaking can essentially agitate these flavors right out of the drink, whereas stirring tends to bring them forward, but keep them present in the liquid. Why do fewer odors escape from a Martini while it’s stirred? “The surface area of a stirred drink is much lower than its volume,” Stewart says. The exit just isn’t that big, relatively speaking.

Throwing (aka Pulling or Rolling)
The age-old technique of throwing a cocktail—think of Jerry Thomas juggling the flaming contents of a Blue Blazer overhead—for a long time had lost its footing in America. But, as bartender Naren Young points out, custodians of the craft shuttled the throw from Spain to America to Cuba and back to Spain over the years. And now, a few bartenders in the U.S.—including Young, bartender and Managing Partner at New York’s Dante, and Keli Rivers of the San Francisco gin bar, Whitechapel—are revisiting the technique by way of the Martini.

Besides bringing what Young calls “a bit of theatre to the guest experience,” one of the main effects of throwing—whereby the liquid mixture is poured in long streams back and forth between two shaker tins, one of which contains ice kept in place by the bartender’s strainer—is a lot of aeration. Rivers opts to throw a Martini when employing a Navy-strength gin; the technique allows her to temper the amount of dilution while aerating the drink at the same time, in essence borrowing traits of both shaking and stirring. She can literally observe, with each lengthening stream, the minute increases in volume the drink takes on after contact with melting ice. “It’ll start to get a thicker ribbon of spirit going down,” Rivers says. Texturally, she likens the effect of throwing to whipping egg whites: “You’re giving it fluff.… It rounds your tongue, it gives it depth.”

For what it’s worth, with the aeration that comes with throwing, you’re also increasing the surface area available to your liquid ingredients dramatically, says Stewart, and therefore, you may sacrifice some of those more volatile odors to the air.

But all the science in the world can’t dispel, or explain for that matter, the effects that ritual can have on our perceptions of an experience, even when that experience is a drink—and especially when that drink is a Martini. “You get people engaged and involved,” Rivers says of her guests at Whitechapel. “It’s kind of a dance".
 
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In Search of the Ultimate Daiquiri
We asked 20 of today's top bartenders to submit their finest recipe for the Daiquiri—then blind-tasted them all to find the best of the best. Robert Simonson on the search for the perfect take on the classic, and what we learned about the drink along the way.
MAY 31, 2017

story: ROBERT SIMONSON

photos: LIZZIE MUNRO
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The Daiquiri is such an agreeable cocktail. From a consumer point of view, that is. Nobody in an uptight frame of mind orders a Daiquiri, and no one expects to be left more stressed after they consume one.



From where the bartender sits, however, there are few drinks more hotly debated. The cocktail is a simple proposition on paper: rum, lime, sugar. But perfectly aligning that triangle of flavors takes great skill. It is, therefore, a drink worthy of competition. So, on a recent Friday afternoon, the Punch staff decided to pit several versions of the rum sour, crafted by bartenders from Seattle to Boston, against each other.

Joining Punch were three visiting bartender critics—Joaquín Simó of Pouring Ribbons in Manhattan, Lynnette Marrero of Llama Inn in Brooklyn, and St. John Frizell of Fort Defiance, also in Brooklyn. Together, we blind-tasted 20 specimens in search of the best representation of the classic cocktail.

Among classics, the Daiquiri is arguably the sour held in highest estimation in cocktail circles. A child of Cuba (it takes its name from a beach near a coastal mining town), it took the tropical triptych of rum, lime juice and sugar and brought it to its apex. Credit, perversely enough, typically goes to an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox, who worked in Santiago de Cuba near the dawn of the 20th century and liked to entertain with pitchers of rum sours. Some local bartenders eventually helped to finesse the concoction.

The Daiquiri might well have remained a local quaff had Prohibition not sent boat- and planeloads of thirsty and curious Yankees across the water during the 1920s. Soon, it was the “best-known drink in Cuba,” according to writer Basil Woon in 1928. Another writer, Cuba-loving novelist Ernest Hemingway, did more than his fare share of publicity for the cocktail. By 1960, JFK was toasting Daiquiris to celebrate his election as President.

The cocktail spent much of the late-20th century in bars—and customers’ minds—as a frozen drink. But the version that has returned to the fore in cocktail bars in recent years is, thanks to pure-thinking young bartenders, served (for the most part) simply and sans slush.

On its face, the drink is simple enough, but it can split in infinite directions. Is the sugar raw or employed by way of syrup? Is that syrup 2:1 or 1:1? Is it made from turbinado, demerara or superfine cane sugar? Then of course, there’s the lime.

Marrero started by asking for a taste of the lime juice on its own to understand the baseline tartness of the citrus, something that can vary widely based on origin, season, type and ripeness. And this is to say nothing of the rum profile or the ratios of each ingredient.

“It’s the omelet of cocktails,” said Simó. “If you can’t make an omelet, you don’t know how to cook. Same thing with a Daiquiri.”

Best Daiquiri Recipe

In a blind tasting, the panel sampled 20 Daiquiris from today’s top bartenders.
But what, beyond balance, makes a great Daiquiri? For Simó, it is textural complexity—a heft to the body that jostles with the citrus. Marrero, meanwhile, is after the earthiness and subtle funk that both rum and cane syrup add to the drink to speak clearly. Then, of course, there’s the all-important thirst-quenching aspect of the Daiquiri. According to Frizell, the drink must have a right-from-the-bar vigor to it—something to “wash the dust out of your mouth.”

Few would argue that one’s rum choice isn’t, despite the other variables, the most important choice. While the panel was sympathetic toward using aged rums in a Daiquiri—particularly in the winter—in the end, it leaned toward white rums as producing the most traditional Daiquiri profile. Similarly, rhum agricoles—which turned up in a number of the entries—were not dismissed outright as poor choices for the drink. But neither were such rums, which are often grassy and herbaceous, fully embraced; they tended to be more volatile and bullied the other ingredients, making the drink harder to balance.

Not surprisingly, very few Daiquiris that strayed from the straight and narrow won the glad eye of the panel. Those, for example, that included the addition of bitters or crushed ice were considered unwelcome or just plain odd.

In fact, the cocktail with the highest score could hardly have been more traditional. Submitted by Pietro Collina of The NoMad Bar, it contained two ounces of Flor de Caña 4-Year Extra Dry rum, one ounce of lime juice and three-quarters of an ounce of rich cane syrup (2:1). It was the one drink that, during the first round of tasting, was immediately embraced by the entire panel as full-flavored and perfectly balanced.

“There’s enough happening here that you can keep thinking about it,” said Frizell, adding that such brainwork wouldn’t get in the way of his drinking it with due haste.

Coming in second was Frizell’s own entry. Made of two ounces of Denizen rum, and three-quarters of an ounce each of lime juice and simple syrup (1:1), every taster found a surprising depth of fruit flavor from the rum, which ranged from citrus to stone fruit. (“It’s like that perfect piece of grapefruit that you spoon out and pop into your mouth,” said Marrero.)

The number three cocktail came from Alex Day, of Proprietors LLC, which owns several bars, including Death & Co. and The Walker Inn. Day managed to sneak a quarter ounce of Neisson Blanc Rhum Agricole in the mix and still please the judges. This was balanced out by one-and-three-quarter ounces of Diplomático White Rum, one ounce of lime juice and three-quarters of an ounce of simple syrup (1:1).

Simó summed up the drink—and, by extension, the ideal Daiquiri—perfectly: “It’s speaking clearly,” he said, “but not loudly.”
 
Have mercy..... must have......

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I stumbled across this freezer at the local store, the whole freezer dedicated to frozen popsicles and frozen foo foo drinks !:rofl: They said the stuff was flying outta the freezer. 112 degrees out IDK why ? I can't drink/eat any cause of my ticker. But I will buy some for my wife (major points) and have the boss give a review. This could be good. I'll get back. :lmao:
 
This is my family's frozen margarita recipe. It's infamous for many reasons. :wink: This was made for partying so it's by the blender full. :biggrin: Idk how many drinks per blender ? I don't remember, maybe 4 ? or 2 nice ones. :rofl:
1 6oz can limeade concentrate, helps to be thawed. 1 6oz can full of gold tequila, don't use a good sipping tequila for making frozen margaritas. Sauza or Cuervo do just fine. 1/4 of a can triple sec or any orange liquor, and a squeeze of fresh OJ . fill your blender about 3/4 full of crushed ice (it melts quickly) and all the mix and blend to your hearts content . I start out with salt on the rims, but after one drink that becomes optional. Normally after a couple pitchers things go downhill rapidly and I end up just rippin off the bottle. Who needs those pesky mixes anyway ! :partyhat:
 
How a Homemade Blend Became One of America’s Most Coveted Bourbons
The hottest bourbon right now is a secret, homemade blend that can only be acquired via Facebook. Aaron Goldfarb on how "California Gold" became an underground phenomenon.
MARCH 9, 2017

story: AARON GOLDFARB

photo: LIZZIE MUNRO

To acquire the hottest bottle of bourbon at the moment, you don’t go to a store. You don’t head to a distillery either. You don’t even put your name on some secret list or enter some special lottery. What you do is convince one of your whiskey-collecting Facebook friends to introduce you to a guy named Danny Strongwater (not his real name) from Southern California.

I first became aware of “California Gold” at a private whiskey tasting I attended this past November. All the big bottles were present—the full Van Winkle line, every Buffalo Trace Antique Collection offering, John E. Fitzgerald Very Special Reserve and plenty of well-aged Willett ryes. What wowed everyone most, however, was a squat bottle with a white HP LaserJet label adorned with blurry clipart images of stars and arched olive branches and a sticker on the neck reading “CA Gold.” Extremely rich and complex, California Gold is a secret, homemade blend of commercially released whiskeys that has become an underground sensation.

“Well, it’s not a fair fight!” Strongwater tells me over the phone when I reveal what happened at that tasting. “You can’t compare a blend with a single-barrel bourbon from a single mash bill from a single distillery.” Still, Strongwater is perfectly aware that California Gold has been routinely winning taste-offs among whiskey drinkers over the past year.

A collector of high-end bourbons like George T. Stagg and William Larue Weller, Strongwater became enamored with older Willett Family Estate bottlings, loving their deep flavor profile, which is often described as showing singular notes of pine and cherries. Knowing that Willett sourced their older barrels from distilleries like Heaven Hill, he was flummoxed as to why Willett tasted so different. With quality Willett bottles becoming scarce and quite costly on the secondary market, Strongwater wanted to see if he could make his own similar blend that would offer a better “bang for the buck.”

“OK, so what other bourbons do people put out with these flavors. . .and how much would it take of each to show up in the background?” he wondered. “It’s like blending wine.”

It took him six months to figure out a recipe that worked, at first building blends in very minute amounts, measuring precisely. He claims as little as five milliliters of something can make a massive difference in a 750-milliliter bottle.

“That’s where everybody else gets it wrong,” he tells me. “They think they need to do 60/40 blends, or 60/20/20.” He also claims it’s crucial to shake all barrel-proof bottles in order to release all of the char flavor, something few drinkers do.

Amateurs like Strongwater making their own blends is nothing new in the whiskey community. A few years back, Blake Riber got a lot of attention on his Bourbonr blog for “Poor Man’s Pappy,” a supposedly thriftier way to simulate Pappy Van Winkle. Strongwater recently loved someone else’s blend of equal parts Michter’s barrel-proof bourbon and rye, along with Four Roses OBSQ Lincoln Road. And I’ve extensively detailed the emergence of personal infinity bottles. But no blend has garnered quite the underground attention that California Gold has, with serious whiskey geeks clamoring to acquire these uber-limited bottles.

How did it manage to break through?

In the deepest levels of whiskey geekdom, it’s not uncommon for strangers who only know each other online to meet up for a drink when they randomly find themselves in each other’s cities. Strongwater was friendly with a Nashville man with a large, at-home whiskey “reading room” that had become quite well known in the online community. That man has an impressive array of opened bottles—hundreds of Willetts—and is always willing to share with out-of-town visitors for free. Strongwater started sending him rare samples to help him build his library; in the box, he’d always include a small vial of early California Gold batches. Eventually, the Nashville man asked for two full bottles, which he began serving to guests who would visit. Instantly, the word began to spread online.

“So it became well-known in the community,” Strongwater explains. “And everybody likes to share. Especially something new and unique.”

Everyone who tried California Gold soon wanted to acquire their own bottle. Friendly guy that he is, Strongwater is always willing to accommodate a few random strangers, so long as they have someone to vouch that they intend to drink (and not sell) California Gold. (Strongwater declined to discuss details about how the bottles change hands.)

“It’s really become a pain in the ass, to be quite honest with you,” Strongwater tells me. He’ll make a batch of only five to ten bottles at a time, measuring meticulously. He’s around his 20th batch or so.

Clearly well-versed in other whiskeys on the market, Strongwater doesn’t even think it’s a “fair fight” pitting his California Gold against the big boys in tastings for one key reason: California Gold is whiskey that now has the complexities of a distilled cocktail—one bottled at barrel proof no less (California Gold has tested in the 110 to 125 proof range).

Actually, what Strongwater thinks California Gold most proves is that the big Kentucky distilleries should be collaborating more often, in the same way craft breweries do. Combining yeast strains, mash bills and each distillery’s unique “funk”—that is, the signature, one-of-a-kind notes produced from specific distilleries’ equipment and aging facilities.

“It’s sad multiple distilleries don’t collaborate,” he tells me. “‘Hey, you got this great product with strong barrel char; hey, you got this great syrupy product.’ If they’d just do that, they could really have something special.”

So what exactly is in California Gold’s blend? Strongwater won’t tell, though he hinted that the base is a barrel-proof Buffalo Trace product with strong oak character and that its spicy notes may come from a Four Roses Single Barrel offering. The caramel flavor he gets from another product, the espresso notes from yet another, and so on.

The only one who does know the exact blend is his long-suffering partner, who has the recipe written down somewhere. Strongwater has instructed her to pass it on to a friend of his should he die, so that that person can continue “producing” California Gold. Even so, Strongwater says that one of the components in his blend is not readily available anymore (he’s even scoured Europe looking for it) and, thus, California Gold’s days may be numbered.

“I’ve heard lots of guesses. Lots of people don’t like that I won’t share the recipe. But I don’t want to cause a scene,” Strongwater tells me, having instructed owners of bottles to please not post pictures of it on social media. “People who are just lovers of bourbon, though, they don’t care where it came from or what it is or who made it. It’s so non-commercial, so un-mainstream. What they all tell me is it’s just the best cost, best bourbon there is—period.”
 
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How the Hummer Became Michigan’s State Drink
The Hummer—a mix of white rum, Kahlua and ice cream—was invented at a Detroit yacht club fifty years ago. It’s now a statewide phenomenon.
JUNE 16, 2017

story: MEGAN KRIGBAUM

photo: LIZZIE MUNRO
Article-Hummer-Ice-Cream-Boozy-Milkshake-Frozen-Cocktail-Kahlua-Recipe.jpg

For the past 93 years, Detroit’s Bayview Yacht Club has been the launch pad for the Bayview-Mac, a 200-plus mile freshwater sprint, beginning in Port Huron and ending at teeny Mackinac Island. There, more than 200 boats from the Great Lakes race annually, many of them world-renowned. So it stands to reason that anyone in the racing circuit will know Bayview Yacht Club. But they’ll also know Jerome Adams.



The story goes something like this: Fifty years ago, Adams, originally from Georgia, got a job at the club as a dishwasher, quickly graduating to porter before landing a spot behind the nautical mahogany bar overlooking the freighters in the Detroit River. This is where, on a slow afternoon in February, 1968—an undeniably odd time to break out a blender—Adams served the first Hummer, a whirred-up combination of white rum, Kahlua, vanilla ice cream and a couple of ice cubes.

It is now, without contest, Michigan’s state drink.

Adams, now 77, is still behind the bar at Bayview five nights a week and Hummers have become so popular that they’re often sold by the pitcher. What’s more, Adams has become an ambassador of sorts, traveling around Michigan and to yacht clubs countrywide, sometimes serving thousands of Hummers in a night. So while the drink is inextricably linked to its home state, it’s also become a standard in the racing community.

“When I was racing on the Grizzly with Chuck Bayer, he had portable chainsaw blender that went everywhere with us,” says Bob Bailey, who’s been sailing from the Bayview since he was 12 years old (or “40-some” years). “In Key West, we’d go through maybe 100 gallons of ice cream, serving Hummers to everyone, people from around the world.”

Hummers are most commonly served as an after-dinner drink everywhere from the Detroit Athletic Club to the Jockey Bar at Mackinac Island’s anachronistic Grand Hotel. Hummers turn up in unexpected places, too, including in slushie machines at clubs, at dive bars and even so-called “west-Mex” restaurants like Harbor Springs’s Mustang Wendy’s.

The only place they aren’t, is anywhere outside the Michigan state lines. Though, that hasn’t stopped Michigan ex-pats, like my friend Curt Catallo’s grandmother, from requesting them wherever she went. “When we’d go visit her on Longboat Key, Florida, we’d go out to Moore’s Stone Crab or Euphemia Haye she’d order a Hummer as her pre-dinner cocktail,” Catallo tells me. “Apparently, they’re great with shrimp cocktail and calamari.”

While the Bayview version of the drink is still the archetype, many bartenders have taken to upgrading it. At the Detroit Athletic Club, lead bartender David Bertolino’s version of the Hummer calls for housemade ice cream (the X-factor, according to him) and excludes ice. During Hummer high season at the Club, in fall and winter, it outsells the Last Word, the beloved classic cocktail that was also invented there.

While the Hummer has seen its fair share of homegrown innovation, it’s still the ice-cream based original that remains nothing short of a Michigan institution, sating everyone from grandmothers to sailors. Only recently have Michigan bartenders taken to riffing on it.

Dorothy Elizabeth, formerly of Detroit’s Standby, began workshopping Hummer variations by breaking the drink down to its basic components—something creamy, something sweet, something slightly bitter—and then rebuilding it. Her resulting Munising Falls is a frappé made with a whole egg, house-infused banana rum and Spaulding’s Coffee Liqueur from nearby Ann Arbor. Her Sorbet All Day, meanwhile, blends coconut sorbet and rum that’s been infused with burnt cinnamon, giving it the toasty bitterness that’s usually borne of a coffee element.

Moving even farther away from the frozen standard, Beaux Kerin at Sugar House spent months working on a Hummer riff for a Detroit cocktail tribute menu. The menu concept was ultimately scrapped (there just aren’t enough Detroit classics), but the drink found a home on the bar’s summer Corktown Carnival menu. Stirred and served up, his World’s Strongest Man combines milk-“washed” Cruzan Blackstrap Rum, St. George’s Nola Coffee Liqueur and Averna.

Such alternations would be heretical at Bayview, where Adams is frequently called on to tell the birth story of the Hummer. With each recounting, he gives credit for the name to one of the first members that he served the drink. “One of the guys asked me, ‘You got a name for it?’ ‘It doesn’t have a name,” I told him.” Having ordering a second round, the man said to Adams, “‘You know, after two of these, it kinda makes you want to hum.'”
 
Before The Fires, I put up some lemoncello. Zested 9 lemons, covered with vodka. Made lemonade from the lemon juice. Forgot while dealing with Emergency Harvest, then added simple syrup, strained and bottled. The remaining peel was candied.
Was going to do something simular with quince, but because of the ash from the fires, nothing will be used this year. No point making dirty booze...
Still overcast from smoke, so picture dark. Sorry.
20201010_101620.jpg
 
Before The Fires, I put up some lemoncello. Zested 9 lemons, covered with vodka. Made lemonade from the lemon juice. Forgot while dealing with Emergency Harvest, then added simple syrup, strained and bottled. The remaining peel was candied.
Was going to do something simular with quince, but because of the ash from the fires, nothing will be used this year. No point making dirty booze...
Still overcast from smoke, so picture dark. Sorry. View attachment 21403
My wife & I were being foodies 2-day over a centered red wine making a in season blackberry pie 4-2-daze tea.
Not everyone like’s GF?
However we have fun with food and drink?
U-ever tried VODKA put in da icebox?
Shot with CANNABIS is a way 2-experience CIVILIZATION!
 

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