OK, so this Adventure in a Giant Box of Booze isn’t from the original Giant Box of Booze that I brought home from Spec’s in Houston. Instead, I brought home a Bottle of Canton Ginger Liqueur from a store in Orlando called Total Wine and More. Total Wine isn’t Spec’s, but it was more than enough to make me insanely jealous of Olandans (Orlandians? Orlandonians? Orlandites?) It had a great selection of stuff I can’t get in Ohio, along with a full-time wine tasting bar, and a tall blonde dressed like an Apple Genius Bar employee who was pushing samples of Heineken Light at eleven in the morning.
Canton is a Cognac-based liqueur, infused with the finest fresh baby Vietnamese ginger and lots of other spiffy flavors like honey and vanilla. It ain’t cheap. The bottle is simply beautiful, as you can see in the picture above. The website is attractive, somewhat informative, has some interesting recipes, and is a pain in the butt to navigate efficiently. They do a cute thing with English and French words turning one into the other that is interesting. Overall, the site is worth a visit, but not one to emulate, unless you are trying to satisfy Canada Bi-Lingual requirements in an interesting way.
It took me almost a week after I got home until I could breathe enough to try something interesting with this stuff. As I said, there are several intriguing recipes on the website, so I selected the Domain de Canton Mojito for Maggi to try, since I have a mass of fresh mint right now in the back forty….

I’m not sure what the Rum brings to the party, other than to give them an excuse to give the drink the marketing-friendly label of Mojito, rather than Ginger Julep, which it seems to me is really more appropriate.
For my tipple, I tried this unnamed cocktail from Michael Dietsch at A Dash of Bitters.

My Vermouth is old and tired, but it seems to do the job here nicely. I’d help Michael out with a smart-ass name playing on Vietnam, France, Surrendering, etc., but we Yanks had out own share of ass-hattery in Southeast Asia, so I’ll leave it alone. How’s about a Canton Sidecar?
Anyway, both drinks worked nicely. It appears to be pretty sweet stuff, as the Mojito needed no sweetener at all, and the Sidecar would have been much too sweet had I sugared the rim. There is a distinct spiciness that you don’t feel at first, but which lingers comfortably. Or possibly uncomfortably, as Maggi found the Mojito left her with burning lips about three-quarters of the way through. You might wish to consider your own sensitivity to ginger and adjust amounts accordingly.
My Sidecar was delicious, and seemed quite Asian in flair. Whether it is in fact Asian in flair or if I just was being suggestible, I leave to someone else to evaluate.
Either way, the Canton looks like a winner. I’m going to build on the Asian idea for further experimentation. Canton has a recipe that uses Sake, which I will use as a stepping off point for further adventures!

UPDATE: Since writing this post, I have discovered an interesting phenomenon that involves Canton and St. Germain Elderflower liqueur. You can read the post here. If you like Canton, the post is worth a read.

For all my new visitors who may not be familiar with the cocktailosphere, Mixology Monday is our monthly blog carnival, wherein we all work to research and/or create a libation according to a common theme. This month’s Mixology Monday enjoins we drunkenly intrepid bloggers to delve into the world of Fruit Liqueurs. Our host is Anna of Morsels and Musings, who dwells on the other side of the globe from most of us, in Sydney, Australia. UPDATE: Anna’s roundup has been posted! The links have been updated.
First off, this one is a definite departure from my usual comfort zone. I use fruit liqueurs in few of my usual favorite drinks; at least what I would usually consider a fruit liqueur. I guess Cointreau is such a beast, and I use it in virtually everything I make. I should be their national spokesman, as I find myself reaching for it automatically whenever I mix anything. <Warning: Obligatory effort to make every Mixology Monday theme applicable to Pegus is imminent!> I suppose, therefore, that a Pegu would qualify for this month’s event. I invite you to try one at your earliest convenience.
But I will refrain, as usual, from taking the easy route, and instead go to a prize from my Adventures in a Giant Box of Boozes series: My bottle of Cherry Heering.
I kicked around the web, looking for something interesting that wasn’t too similar to what I usually do. I should have held back my post on the Blood and Sand! I ended up on CocktailDB, using their excellent search by ingredients feature and found a bunch of possibilities using Gin and Heering. There were some initial disappointments….
I finally found one that used ingredients I have on hand, that sounded good together, and actually ended up pleasing to the taste buds.
Behold, the Flying High!

It took about three or four rounds to get this right, and it still has one serious flaw that will probably keep this drink from becoming a part of the rotation, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
As I said, I found this first at CocktailDB, then went looking for alternate suggestions and found it also at the Absolut site. (This was before I read about the Reconquista ad, wrote a post on it, got buried in an Instalanche, and doubled this blogs total all-time traffic in twenty-four hours. Thank you Absolut! (I seriously doubt I’ll get a you’re welcome!))
Here is the CDB recipe:

And here is Absolut’s take:

Neither of these works. I tried CDB’s first, and it was too sweet, and too sticky. But it showed promise. I felt it needed more Gin, and 1 egg white is WAY too much. You also quickly get a deposit of white goober in the bottom of the glass unless you practically shoot the thing. Comparing this to the second recipe, I figured Absolut had it.
But Absolut’s has problems too. First off, what the hell is a splash of egg white? If any of you out there want to drop me a comment or email telling me that you can do it, I’ll be more than happy to doff my cap to you and call you the big fat liar that you are. I settled on a teaspoon of fresh egg white. When I tried the Absolut set up, it was a little too ginny, and too sweet, but in a different way: The cherry came on too strong, and the bitters faded. Incidentally, Absolut is right to stress shaking this thing hard. It breaks up the white, and the colder, the less cloying it is.
I tried a time or two more, and this is where I found what I wanted:

You need to shake this very hard, and very long, until the shaker is painful in your hands. The melt is important to the texture, the agitation of the ice is essential to breaking up the white, and the cold is required to cut the sweetness.
You end up with a cocktail that feels rich in your mouth, and showcases each of its fruit constituencies nicely. The Gin is just a backup player in this drink, but you still ought to use the good stuff. New Amsterdam, which I usually like, was not up to the task, but Sapphire, Hendrick’s and Van Gogh all work well (I made tiny drinks!) While sweet, the Flying High is not frou frou. It sits in that grey zone between guy and chick drinks that I like to explore a lot.
So what don’t I like?
Well, the appearance. This cocktail is close to a Blood and Sand, which I like the look of, but the color here is more like… Blood and Milk. A great cocktail has to look good when you hand it to someone else, and the Flying High fails here. So make it for yourself, or make sure the lights are dim before you serve it to another!

Time to go back to my spiffy box of booze that I found in Houston, Texas, but can’t buy here in Ohio. This time I’m going to talk about the bottle that I was most eager to find, Heering Cherry Liqueur (a.k.a. Cherry Heering, a.k.a Peter Heering, a.k.a. another booze company with a gorgeous, but slow-loading flash-based website!) A lot of the cocktails that I have read about and most wanted to try have this stuff in them, and I was thrilled to get my hands on a bottle.
Of course, shortly after I got home, I was bragging about my get at our club to Bill, our most senior bartender. He simply walked away and returned with a nearly full bottle of Cherry Heering from the back! Popped my balloon, it did; but only temporarily.
I had a very specific cocktail in mind, that I had seen on several other blogs: The Blood and Sand.

I found different recipes on two of my favorite sites.
Paul, at Cocktail Chronicles, provides this formulation:

• 1 ounce blended scotch
• 1 ounce fresh-squeezed orange juice
• ¾ ounce cherry brandy
• ¾ ounce sweet vermouth

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass; garnish with a cherry.

But Jay, over at Oh Gosh!, uses a completely balanced:

• ¾ shot Scotch whisky
• ¾ shot cherry brandy
• ¾ shot sweet vermouth
• ¾ shot orange juice

Shake well with ice and fine strain in to a cocktail glass.

I used Johnny Walker Black, largely because I had it on hand, and am a member of their Striding Man Society (translation: a Marketing Victim), my Heering, no-pulp OJ, and a dusty old bottle of sweet vermouth from back before time began.

I tried Paul’s formulation first, as it seemed like it would be more to my dry tastes. I liked it a bit, but I thought it seemed a little off. My heart was a little low. I was really looking forward to this, and it just seemed too sweet and bland. Still, the next evening, I went with the four equal measures of Jay’s recipe, and learned a little something: even small changes in proportions can make a big difference in the character of a cocktail! Not the taste, mind you. The two taste pretty much the same, but the Oh Gosh! version seemed much more mellow and pleasant. So my recommendation is (in Pegu Blog recipe form):

The Blood and Sand

• One part Blended Scotch
• One part Cherry Heering
• One part Sweet Vermouth
• One part Orange Juice (no pulp)

Shake vigorously and serve in a cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry and a twist of Orange.

Where’d the Orange Peel come from? From this video from VideoJug. It is nicely done, though seems strange in that it is describing a pretty esoteric cocktail, likely to appeal to the more advanced cocktailian, with a low-level simplicity more appropriate for a viewer who might ask, Now what is this Merteenie thing, again?

How To Make A Blood And Sand Cocktail

Lastly, I kind of wanted to see if, by siding with Jay, I’m on the side of tradition or apostasy. Lots of sites list the Blood and Sand, and there seems to be a balance of opinion betwixt the two. I’ll settle with this nod toward Jay’s and my preference. I like it because it is a fun piece, and because it is in part about Barnaby Conrad II, a writer I like, whom I’ve met, and who went to the same high school I did. With his imprimateur added, however indirectly, I’ll say even measures is the gospel version. I feel so kosher….

Cheers!

Looks like I’m back just in time for the latest Mixology Monday, hosted this month by Jimmy’s Cocktail Hour. This month’s theme is Variations, so I’m going to try a first for me: A cocktail of my own devising!

I’m sure it will take the world by storm….

Look, why are you butting into my MxMo post? I gave you your own account! Go post under your own name.

It’s more fun to diddle with you here.
Make your own recipe? I can’t wait for the train wre….

Will you please shut up? Let the man give it a shot. I’m certainly up for an adventure. Please go on.

Duelling sock puppets…. I’m back blogging for less than a week, and it’s already come to this!

Anyway, this is also part of my spiffy, AGBB series. Today’s treasure from the Big Box O’ Out of State Booze is (Drumroll!):

Milady Cranberry Liqueur! I saw this on the shelf and I had to bring it home.

It has such a cute little hat! I’d like one like that! Let’s get a bottle.

Hey there, Milady(har!), kindly back off! Didn’t you say to leave him alone? Like he, or any man—especially me, is really going to buy a bottle just because of a little pink hat!

Well… um… see, the truth is I kind of am a sucker for little hats on bottles. Didn’t you read my last post about Broker’s Gin?

Of course. I forget. After all, you are the king of pink drinks.

As I said before, Pegus are not pink! And for the record, neither is Milady’s hat—it’s fuschia.

I stand corrected. I am completely convinced of your manliness. In fact, I’m not sure which convinces me more: That you bought a bottle of hooch because it was wearing a fuschia hat, or that you felt the need to make the distinction between fuschia and pink….

Uh, thank you.

So I went looking for a manufacturer’s website for Milady, and it was quite hard to find. Turns out it is made in Moldova. I don’t recall ever buying anything made in Moldova before. I guess I should just be glad it isn’t made in China. But, I’m thinking that it will be a while until the PRC makes many inroads into the U.S. Liquor market. Even Darcy would have a difficult time coming up with a really good cocktail that uses Creme de Plomb…. The manufacturer of Milady is SRL Renaissance Perfect, and their website is actually pretty cool. I don’t usually put up with Flash intros, but this one is better than most. The site focuses on their Vodka, Perfect, but has a bit or two about the Milady line, which show in the pictures as Desert Perfect. A rebranding? Different label for the U.S.? I don’t know.

But besides the hat, the thought that immediately leapt to mind for me was: The would be cool for Cosmopolitans! The more I thought about it, the better it seemed that it would work for me.

• It passes the laziness test (an important hurdle here at The Pegu Blog): It won’t spoil anytime soon, thus I don’t have to worry about checking the date on the cranberry juice or finding out the hard way that it has gone bad.
• It is an unusual ingredient, which means I can be pretentious exotic by employing it!
• Finally, the bottle shape and fuschia hat make it pretty enough to keep out for display on my bar.

OK, now I just have to make up a recipe. When I happened to stumble across this month’s MxMo theme, I went into overdrive to come up with a recipe. I haven’t tried making my own concoctions before, as I said, and the ingredients are fortunately tasty enough individually that my several false starts were not too disgusting to drink.
You can find my usual Cosmo recipe here, which I used as a starting point. For the first run, I simply replace the juice with the Liqueur. You experienced mixologists may take a moment to chuckle.
I said chuckle, not laugh your ass off! Done? Good.
Next I dropped the Cointreau, reasoning that there was enough alcohol in the liqueur already, but this still left it too sweet. Adding more Lime Juice to equal the amount of Milady made for a better balance, but the drink was overall still too thick, and too dark. The Milady Liqueur is very viscous, and needs a lot of diluting to get the drink from a bloody red to a more pleasing pink.
My latest try seems to fit the bill, and has shown repeatability. It has the lightness of a Cosmo. It tastes like Cranberry, without being too sweet. Yet it still possesses a certain… stickiness that makes it different and interesting enough to be its own drink.
The final question was what to call it. I had nothing here until Thursday night at the poker table. Among those trying to take my money was Pegu Blog Certified Bartender™ Tony’s boss, Bill. We were discussing my efforts and he was asking about the Milady. Among the things I mentioned was its rich color and thick texture, as well as its maker being Moldovan (Romanian). After another hand or two, and about 70 bucks more in my stack, I put those two tidbits together.
Hmmm.
Thick, red, viscous fluid, a drop of which, when spilled on the counter looks like something Gil Grissom, or The Sunglasses of Justice would send to the Lab….
Comes from Romania….
Light bulb.
The …

If you have some Milady, give the Dracupolitan a try and let me know how you like it!

I just visited Robert Heugel’s Explore The Pour and read his very neat idea for a Pegu variant as part of his new series on Smoked Cocktails.
In the next week or so, I’m afraid Robert is going to think I’m stalking him. I’ll have another post on his smoked Pegu idea, just as soon as I can visit the tea section at Whole Foods. Another of his recent items relates to the Blood and Sand, and I already have a half-written post about that as part of my AGBB series. He also has a series on egg cocktails, so I’ll have to shadow him with some comments on egg use in Pegus (That being the critical element in The One True Pegu™, after all.)

You can relax Robert. If I really were stalking you, I’d have pulled my head out of my backside and gone to visit you at Beaver’s while I was in Houston! Sigh, a chance to argue about Pegus with someone who’s heard of them before….

I’m going to start my series of posts on my Adventures in a Giant Box of Booze I’ve Never Seen Before! (in Disney 3D!), which I shall henceforth categorize as AGBB, with a Gin (of course) in a Pegu(natch!).

The first bottle I put in my cart at that chintzy little liquor store, Spec’s (I was so psyched about it before, but now both Robert Heugel and FARK harshed my mellow this morning!), was one of Broker’s Gin. I chose it for two reasons: First, I haven’t seen it in Ohio; and Second, I’m a sucker for bottles with little hats on them!

Cute, huh?
Now for me, Gin was invented for one reason: To make Pegus…

Oh come on! I seem to remember about 16 brazillion other cocktails that use Gin….

Of course. But I don’t like most of them, and the rest pale in comparison to the Pegu.

Gee. If you like the Pegu so much, maybe you should write a blog about it.

…

…!

Aaaaaanyway…. When I test a Gin, I make a Pegu. And to best determine its character, I hew as close to the Pegu Blog recipe as possible. Thus: Sapphire out, Broker’s in. The change was apparent before the first sip, as the Gin announced itself to the nostrils during the trip to the lips. The flavor similarly lacked much in the way of English Diffidence.
This is the image Broker’s wants you to have in mind when drinking their Gin:

I’m sorry to tell the good folks at Broker’s that these two fellows (the founders, I believe) are not the image either I or Maggi got upon tasting a Broker’s Pegu!
This is more like it:

Well, alright then!
Right, Lads! One more cocktail to shake off this Malaria before we march the troops out into the Bush to set the Wogs to rights, shall we?

Wogs!?!?! You can’t say that!

I didn’t say it! I just imagined that he would have.

It’s still not….

Before you go hauling him off to the Hague to answer for his crimes, I’d like to talk about the Pegu some more, if I may?
Thank you.
One of the reasons I like Pegus is that I love the complexity of Gin, but not its, um, pungency. A good Pegu doesn’t really taste a lot like Gin. A Broker’s Pegu does. If you like Gin Martini’s or G&Ts, it is worth your while to try a Pegu made with Broker’s. You may find it much more to your tastes than a Pegu with one of my more preferred Gins. For me, I’ll set the bottle aside and wait until I next want a Corpse Reviver #2, and try it there.
Please understand, Broker’s seems to be a good Gin. I detect no discordant notes or off flavors. It’s just too strong for my tastes.