Monday, February 20th, 2012 will be the 64th Mixology Monday. I’ll be hosting it here at the Pegu Blog, and since February is Tiki Month in these parts, We’ve decided that the theme shall be TIKI!

The Tiki scene, like classic cocktails in general, is reviving nicely these days. The lush, decadent marriage of tropical flavors and exotic kitsch carries us away to a better, less dreary place. Please join in and add your words, images, and offerings to the Tiki Gods on the 20th. Since Tiki is more than just the drinks, feel free to post on whatever Tiki subject floats your outrigger canoe. I suspect most of you will want to offer up delectable drinks, but feel free to wax eloquent on aloha shirts, exotica music, decor, garnishes, food or whatever else moves you to enter the Tiki spirit!

As with most Mixology Mondays, the procedure is easy:

• Write up your exotic journey and post it to your blog or on eGullet, etc., on or before February 20th, 2012.
• If you are currently blogless, drop me a line, and I’ll set you up an author account and you can post your offering to the gods right here. If you don’t want to figure out how, you can even email me the text and pictures, if any, and I’ll post it. But please do it early!
• Be sure to include a link back to this post, and to the Mixology Monday site. Also include the regular MxMo logo, or you can use this thumbnail-sized version of the MxMo: Tiki logo at the top of this post. (You can steal the full-sized pic above if you like, too)
• When your post is done, add a comment to this post right here and/or email me the link at D o u g (at) C o c k t a i l c a p e r s . c o m.
• Check back to the home page here after a day or so to see all the glorious results.

Aloha, Y’all!

This month’s MxMo theme is Flores de Mayo, presented by Dave at The Barman Cometh. When I first saw this, I figured that I’d take this month off. I figured that since the only floral cocktail I could think of off the top of my head was the awesome Aviation, and I assumed it will be well-covered elsewhere. (As I write this, I get a ping-back that tells me Kim of Understanding Cocktails is already fulfilling my prediction.) But then I realized that I have in fact recently been drinking a fairly hefty number of a cocktail in which the floral element is utterly critical: The Mint Julep.

Uh, Doug…
Mint is an herb, not a flower.
Stretching much?

That’s true, but the floral element I’m talking about is Orange Flower Water. Without it, you can’t make a really kicking Mint Julep. I know it is a little late to write about Juleps, what with the Kentucky Derby already in the books, but that leads to my whole post. Today, the only time anyone drinks Juleps is on Derby Day. Why? Because 97.235% of all Mint Juleps made today are… nasty. (Source: Institute of Statistics I Pulled Out of My Ass But Are Totally Accurate Anyway)
Even among the cocktail-knowledgeable readership of this blog, I’ll wager that half the readers have never had a decent one, and fewer still of you have had one that has you looking forward to another before you even finish the first. What is the secret?
I’ve written about Mint Juleps before, emphasizing different elements.

First, on the question of Rye versus Bourbon, I prefer Rye. Bourbon, the modern default, usually tastes better at the first sip, but by the time you get through an entire glass of this minty sweet concoction, the rye maintains the drinker’s interest better. I think the reason is that the spice in Rye stands in greater contrast to the sugar, keeping the palate clean.

Second, Juleps benefit from some added complexity. During the heyday of the drink, there were a multitude of recipes for all manner of Juleps. A good number of these looked more like Tiki concoctions than classic cocktails. I don’t get so Byzantine, but I do think that Mint Juleps make the step from upper crust hunch punch to serious drink when you add in some good dark rum to the mix.

Third, proper handling and dosing of the sugar and mint are of course mandatory. It’s easy to yield to temptation and use too much. You can easily lose all depth and interest of the liquor if you use too much. I imagine that this is how the julep dropped out of public favor. Prohibition left us, during and for a while after, with nothing but rot-gut liquor. If you have only this to drink, then a candy-flavored Mint Julep is a great way to disguise the awful taste. But when booze started to get good again, people seem to have retained the Prohibition recipe.
If you want to enjoy your Julep as a good cocktail, use your sugar sparingly. And muddle less mint, less aggressively. Instead, use a huge, lush, Mai Tai-like spray of it as a garnish for looks and aroma.

Do all that, and you’ll have a delicious, but still not remarkable drink. The final ingredient that you seldom see in a Julep recipe is a tiny amount of something called Orange Flower Water. Like bitters, orange flower water (and it’s sidekick, rose flower water) is an ingredient where a little goes a long way. A mere quarter teaspoon full will completely open up this drink already filled with powerful and fragrant ingredients. It subtly transforms the essence of your Mint Julep from a more or less culinary feel into something that evokes the fresh, natural outdoors of the rural South. (I’d elaborate on the transformation more, but I’m starting to sound like Alex Ott… even to myself.) It’s a very subtle ingredient, in that you really only notice it when you leave it out and you find you really miss it.

Orange flower water (also known as orange blossom water) is not the easiest ingredient to find in your grocery store, even when they do carry it. Some stores will carry it in the spice aisle. Others have it in the baking section. Still others will have it in the ethnic food section, usually under the rather broad sobriquet of “Mediterranean”. Most stores won’t carry it at all. There is quite a bit of it available on the internet of course. The brand I use, and you most often find in regular stores, is A Monteux. Amazon is out right now, but here’s another from a company called Malandel. (Sixteen ounces is a lot of OFW. I can’t find a good answer on how long it keeps, but since it is nothing but volatiles in distilled water, I’m sure it gets weak long before you’ll use 16 ounces.)
Darcy notes that orange flower water from France is different from the stuff by the same name from the Eastern Mediterranean. The French is more aromatic and less flavorful, making it better suited for cocktail applications. Be careful when you go looking for it.

If you have access to fresh orange blossoms, you could make your own water as well. There are two ways I’ve found, and since I can’t get my hands of orange blossoms around here, I have tried neither yet.
The easiest way is to macerate your orange blossoms in distilled water, then put in mason jars and steep in the sun for a couple of weeks, until the aroma whacks you when you open the jar. I suspect that this method will produce a more eastern kind of flower water with more flavor than you might want, however.
The other method is the one more commonly described for making rose flower water, where you actually distill the aromatics out of the petals. (I first saw this on Good Eats. Alton Brown just popped up on Twitter, then promptly announced he was ending Good Eats after 249 episodes. Follow him and call him a quitter.)
Place a brick in a large pot with a domed lid. Fill the pot with blossoms and distilled water to the top of the brick. Put a heat-safe glass bowl in the brick. Put the lid on upside down and fill with ice. Bring the pot to a good simmer and the aromatic steam will condense on the icy lid, running down the curve and dripping into the bowl. This method sounds fun, but hard to balance.
If anyone has done either method, I’d love to hear how it went. I’ll be doing it with rose petals from my garden this Summer.

Of course, orange flower water is good from more than just Mint Juleps. The big Kahuna among cocktails is the Ramos Gin Fizz and numerous other fizzes. It’s also a common ingredient in all sorts of desserts.

Orange flower water is not terribly expensive, and will last you longer than a bottle of bitters, so give it a whirl. Than head back to Dave’s and check out the rest of this Mixology Monday!

56? Really?
This little Blog Carnival of Cocktails might just catch on.
This installment of Mixology Monday is hosted by Turntable Boy, aka DJ Hawaiian Shirt of Spirited Remix. Chris (yes, he’s got a lot of names) has a nifty original idea for a theme this month: Your Best. He asks all cocktail bloggers and sundry to post (or repost) our favorite original cocktail.

So what original concoction am I most proud of? For many of the prolifically creative out there, this question may be hard to answer, but not me. First, I don’t create that many drinks at all, and second, I don’t pretend to be that good at it.
That said, I have made a few that I’m proud of, but one stands out head and shoulders above the rest. I came up with it more than two years ago and since then the only cocktail I have made more of than it is… well, you know.

This month, I (re)offer: The Blue Beetle #2.
The name was stolen from Jacob Grier, whose Blue Beetle is also nice but not at all like my #2. (I was on a Corpse Reviver kick when this drink was created, thus the naming convention.) Here’s the main recipe:

Once you’ve got the blueberry syrup done (see below) this drink is dead easy to make, it has a striking blue-purple color, and most importantly, a fresh flavor and aroma that appeals to all sorts of drinkers. It is particularly effective as a gateway drug for gin. The Blue Beetle #2 damps down the pungency of gin, while still allowing its underlying complexities to make themselves evident. A gin drinker will identify this as a gin drink right off. But a gin skeptic will likely just say, “Wow! That’s good!”
I recommended Whitley Neill since there is something in its African botanicals that marry really well in this drink. But any good dry gin will do well. I do recommend that you stay away from really heavy juniper formulations, and don’t think the recipe’s magical gin-softening powers will let you get away with the cheap stuff either!

The only tough thing about the BB#2 is the blueberry simple syrup. It’s actually easy to make, but a bear to clean up after. I use the recipe Alton Brown gives in his blueberry soda episode of…

You sure do use a lot of my stuff here on this blog, don’t you Doug?

Well, yeah. There’s lots to use.

Of course.
You know, with some good humor, a little culinary know-how, and the right blueberries, a fun little syrup like this can be…

…

What, you’re going to leave me hanging here?

Oh no. I praise you. I link your recipe. Promo your show, Good Eats, yourself.

Ha!
Gotcha!

Damn.
Anyway, here’s the recipe:

I’ll leave you with a last note about the blueberries. They don’t have to be fresh, but they do need to be flavorful. Dole sells American wild blueberries frozen in 12 oz. bags that are much better for this syrup than all the big, beautiful, flavorless Chilean blueberries that you find in the store most of the year. Put those on your Frosted Flakes.

So that’s it. The Blue Beetle #2 is my best. I hope you give it a try. Now swing back to Spirited Remix and give some others’ a whirl as well!
Cheers!

Really, Dennis? Could you have put this one more on a tee for me?

It is Mixology Monday time again, and this month’s host is Dennis at Rock & Rye. Here is his charge for this round:

The challenge this month is to bring to light a drink that you think deserves to be resurrected from the past, and placed back into the spotlight. It could be pre-prohibition, post-war, that horrible decade known as the 80′s, it doesn’t really matter. As long as it is somewhat obscure, post it up. If possible, try to keep to ingredients that are somewhat readily available. While we all appreciate the discovery of an amazing cocktail, if we can’t make it, it’s no fun for anyone.

This is just too damn easy, folks. May I present to you a cocktail that has labored in great obscurity, and still labors in far more anonymity than it deserves? Let’s try that exotic offering from the late British Colonial Era of Burma, a delicious and exotic gin sour called…

How could I do anything else? Three and half years, 600+ posts, and 275,000 visitors ago, I started this entire blog with the purpose of bringing this hardly remembered classic back to the minds of cocktail drinkers everywhere. I’d been pushing this on my own since the turn of the century, badgering every bartender I encountered while traveling around the country killing people into learning the recipe. I can’t tell you why I have this obsession schtick, but the last decade has been one long-form version of MxMo 52 for me.

There are a variety of ways to make a Pegu, but all have certain things in common. Pegus all are sours made with gin, orange liqueur, lime and bitters. All are light, bracing, delicious, and deceptively potent.
This cocktail was created by and for the men who were members of the Pegu Club, an outpost of British culture in the frontier of The Empire in the jungles of Burma. These were men who were men of culture, refinement, and breeding, who simultaneously straddled the globe and bent it to their will (for a time). They appreciated a drink with subtlety and grace, that accompanied that refinement with serious power. A drink, in short, meant for this guy:

Here’s the first version of the Pegu I ever encountered, in Paul Harrington’s important Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century.

This is a delicious drink. It is easy to make, and most reasonably equipped bars (no bar is reasonably equipped without fresh limes for juice) can make it for you. Harrington’s Pegu is constructed to capture the feel of the older recipes, while using ingredients readily available in normal bars. For further discussion on this “easily make-able today version vs. classic version” issue, see this post on versions of the Aviation. Harrington’s Pegu is still my favorite, and accounts for more than half of the ones I drink myself at home and nearly all of those I have in bars. It’s best with mainstream gins, especially floral jobs like Sapphire.

The first variation of a Pegu was also the first one made for me by a bartender who already knew of the drink before I told him about it. The man was Peter Dorelli, back in 2000 when he was still head barman at the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel in London. My wife and I went to England and France for ten days that Spring. She wanted to see and do a hundred different things in London. I wanted to go to the American Bar—because I figured since the Pegu first saw print in The Savoy Cocktail Book, I ought to be able to order one without giving a class for the first time. It worked. It was a sufficiently unusual drink order that Dorelli came to our table, and sat and talked with me about cocktails for quite a long time. It was wonderful.

The drink he brought me looked quite different from what I had expected. And while it tasted just right, the texture was smoother and the color lighter. It was a bit frothy. Apparently he thought all Americans are Health Nazis, since he took a lot of convincing before he admitted that he made his Pegus with a dollop of raw egg white.

While just as powerful, a Silver Pegu is even more gentle in the mouth. And less aggressively orangey pink. If you are worried about the dangers of raw egg whites, you have three options:

1. Buy pasteurized eggs. (The whites are a little less effective than regular)
2. Consider the amount of disinfectant that tiny amount of egg white will be swimming in.
3. Live a little.

When I make these (which is rare, as the eggs are a pain), I usually use a big, juniper-heavy gin, like Broker’s. The egg white takes the natural softening of the gin in all Pegus and goes almost too far. A good burly gin fights back and comes through admirably.

In the ten years I’ve been pushing this drink, the cocktail world has, to say the least, changed. The range and numbers of fine drinks being served has exploded. Naturally, business has responded by introducing new ingredients and reintroducing old ones to facilitate.
Today you will easily find, for the first time in 50-80 years, not only one, but a variety of such ingredients as orange bitters and orange curaçao. Now, you can drink a cocktail much closer to what they were making in the Nineteen Twenties, when the Pegu first made it’s name around the globe.

This is pretty close to most early versions of the recipe you find. It is also just about what Audrey Saunders slings in her wonderful Pegu Club lounge in Manhattan. (It’d be wonderful even without that name and signature cocktail… just not as wonderful.) Lighter in color, the Pegu Club is also lighter on the tongue. Interestingly, the orange bitters doesn’t do as good a job of softening the juniper, so the Broker’s I recommend for the Silver Pegu will ruin a Pegu Club. When making these, I’m much more likely to choose Beefeater, or better yet, a light touch gin like G’Vine or Aviation.
For the orange curaçao, I often still use Cointreau, though I’ve had some good experiments with Creole Shrubb. I strongly advise against Citronage in Pegus. Other curaçaos do other things, and if you’ve got a good recommendation, please let me know!
I’m making a lot more Pegu Clubs lately, in part because the PeguWife prefers them.
The chief disadvantage of the Pegu Club is that while any reasonably equipped bar can make a Pegu, only a premium cocktail establishment will have the stuff to make Pegu Clubs.

There you have it: Three cocktails, any one of which you can legitimately call a Pegu, and any one of which will make your cocktail snob’s heart sing. Not only that, but if there is a good entry gin cocktail for the “Oh I don’t drink gin” crowd, this drink is it. Help me out here, have a Pegu yourself, and pass along the good news to ten of your friends!

I’ll add a few words about the challenges and the rewards of running a cocktail blog called The Pegu Blog. I started this blog almost as an exercise in self-parody of my “obsession” with this drink. But I really do want more people to relearn this great cocktail. I figured out very early on that I couldn’t just write about Pegus. As wonderful as the drink is, there is not enough material to keep up regular postings, and no one would read such a monomaniacal set of writings if I tried.

That’s OK, Doug.
No one reads your writings anyway.

I thought I’d make it through this post without you.

Hey!
I’d never miss a Mixology Monday!

So here you are, insulting me. You know, bloggers have sockpuppets to give them a way to praise themselves…

Hence, your exercise in the old self-parody!

Pardon me while I hit my head on the desk….

Regardless of Guy’s snotty commentary, I’ve found that the best way to get you to read about Pegus is to write (hopefully) entertainingly about cocktails in general. Less than 10% of my posts are really about Pegus at all. Thanks for visiting, this Mixology Monday, and I hope you look around the site while you are here, or even subscribe to my feed. Now that you’re done, head on back over to Rock & Rye, thank Dennis for all the work he’d done, and enjoy the other forgotten classics we cocktail writers have put together for you!

Image lifted from Feasting on… Pixels. (See below)

And so here we go. Monday, Sept. 20th was the fifty first Mixology Monday carnival of cocktails, the monthly roundup of related posts that originally forged the first, disparate cocktail blogs into today’s thriving Cocktailosphere.

As the designated glutton for punishment host of this month’s round up, I called for posts on the subject of limes. And the Internet delivered.

[UPDATE: And speaking of the Internet delivering, welcome Instapundit readers! I hope you enjoy yourselves as you check out another corner of the blogosphere. Thanks, Professor.]

The first thing the Internet delivered was an Operation Overlord-sized landing of… Gimlets. All manner of Gimlets.

Things were calm until someone brought vodka to the party,
and G.I. Gimlet here got angry….

Gimlets are among the most basic of cocktails, and I’ve always sneered at them. So I mixed one up last night for the first time in years in honor of all this Gimletry, and damned if I didn’t end up drinking three.

DJ Hawaiian Shirt manned the bunkers, defending the shores with a traditionalist’s reminder that a Gimlet means Rose’s Lime Cordial, and don’t forget it!

Jason, of the Ancient Fire Wine Blog (who invited in the wine bloggers? Oh right, we did.) lead the attack onto the beach with his Basil Vodka Gimlet. Using vodka in a traditionally gin drink is always a good way to pour oil on troubled waters in the Cocktailosphere, Jason….

Bi-lingual blogger Malty Puppy, makes his own lime cordial replacement for Rose’s and compares gins and service methods for Gimlets.

It’s the first ever MxMo post for Polish blogger Artur of Tarasco Bar. He makes me wish he posted bilingually more often, if only so I’d have an excuse to check out the ridiculously gorgeous header on his blog. He fully internationalizes the Gimlet fray by taking this english cocktail, borrowing Brazilian methods, and offering up the Gimletinha.

Janet A. Zimmerman posted her own recipe for lime cordial in this month’s eGullet discussion board thread. She also references her posting last November that is a comprehensive, scholarly, and award winning history and appreciation of Rose’s Lime Cordial.

Oh, and Camper English joins in too.

Wait!
What?
I didn’t write a….

Yes, yes you did Camper. Or at least your post on Gimlets was timed perfectly to suck you into this whole Gimlet-palooza subset of Mixology Monday. Enjoy G-Day, Camp!

Tiare of A Mountain of Crushed Ice steers us clear of this bloodshed by bringing (of course) the Tiki. She employs one of the real superweapons of cocktailia to do so. Was she really thinking hard about limes for this post? I doubt it. She just wanted to have a ridiculously potent Mai Tai, post another of her photos that are so much better than mine, and rub in the fact that she still has Lemon Hart 151 lying around.

Frederic, the Cocktail Slut (His URL says something different, but the URL is old, IYKWIMAITYD) Teases us me with the Peguweiser, a beer-based sacrilege, then gives us the complex and mysterious McMenomy.

Paul, the Cocktailosphere’s Godfather, and proprietor of the essential Cocktail Chronicles notes the lime’s utilitarian nature. He uses it for background acidity rather than flavor in his offering this month, but mostly as an excuse to write about banana liqueur and the Planet of the Apes…. Um, that makes perfect sense.

If you don’t know Reese, he blogs as Cocktail Hacker, where he makes his name fixing things that ain’t broke. His jailbreak this Mixology Monday ramps up one of lime’s greatest hits, giving us the Noon Day Sun Margarita.

“Guy“, the guy who comments on my blog so much he usually sticks his oar in before I get the posts finis…

That’s me!

Shut up.
Guy has posted a roundup of his own of general lime trivia, information, and lore. Feel free to smack him around in the comments if he steps out of line.
It’s so hard to get good sockpuppets these days.

New(ish) blogger Jordan Devereaux of Chemistry of the Cocktail uses lime in just about everything. He offers us the sweetly delicious Caroni Rum Sling. As you can see from his nifty photo, he gives the lie to a point made by said worthless sockpuppet about lime twists.

Besides Frederic, with his blasphemously funny Peguweiser, two bloggers apparently thought they needed to suck up to me. (No one needs to suck up to me):

Keith the Speakista brings the best cocktail EVAR, and uploads the biggest cocktail photo EVAR, too. Click the pic on his blog to see what I mean. He also offers a drink named after relatively obscure (compared to me) public figure, Pedro Martinez….

And the inimitable Jacob Grier goes all molecular mixology on us, with agar clarification of lime juice. Crystal clear lime juice just upsets the natural order of the universe. Cats and dogs, living together, etc., etc. He does know how to choose a good cocktail to try it with, though.

Londoner Andy, who writes about Good Drinks, etc., goes all avant garde with the fascinating Cubre, an up version of the Cuba Libré. As a Georgia boy, I am driven by genetics and bound by honor to note that he probably ruins it by using Pepsi instead of Coke….

Kim, of understandingcocktails, (another first time MxMoer) deconstructs the Caipirinha while constructing one. While you are visiting his page, be sure to refresh your browser a couple of times in hopes of seeing the header picture that is most appropriate for this month’s festivities….

Food and drink blogger Andy presents the Stiletto on his blog, Sybaritic Wanderings. It’s your basic three-ingredient goodness that marries what is to me a very unexpected trio.

Speaking of food blogging, the PeguWife has actually taken the plunge and written her first post here! It’s not about cocktails, but it is about limes, key limes and pies to be exact. And she is my wife, so you will read it!

Also in the food blogging vein, the image I lifted to start this article comes from an old post on the blog Feasting on… Pixels. The fresh lime sorbet she makes in the post, along with its awesome presentation, has all sorts of limey mixological implications. Your extra credit assignment for this month: Play with her idea and report back in the comments!

Dan Chadwick posts his Caipirinha variant, the Old Sao Paolo at kindred cocktails. It’s database format over there, so he takes the unusual step of putting up the MxMo portion as a comment on his own post!

Chris Amirault also has an offering in the eGullet thread. As we all do regularly, Chris rotated out his inventory of white cardamon recently. This month’s MxMo helped him hit on a mixological use for the expiring stuff. A little Tito’s, the cardamon, and a lime later….

Scomorokh, of Science of Drink, brings us two drinks made with a product I’ve never seen before: Lime Liqueur. His Lime Daiquiri picture is one of the prettiest cocktail photos I’ve seen in a good while.

Carly Kocurek brings us a Brown Sugar Basil Mojito at her blog, My Life In Cocktails. I’ve made Basiljitos before, but her version sounds better. The PeguWife will want one with her Key Lime Pie.

Time for another grouping of like-minded thinkers:

Really Marcia? Puns?
Sigh.
Drink of the Week puts de lime in de coconut, ‘n plays wit’ de name. The results look good.

AJR, who sometimes tends bar at Tonic at Quigley’s Pharmacy in Washington, DC (Just added you to the BlogBarCrawl, Anthony!) writes a site named Done Like Dundee, Gone Like Gandhi. He frets that choosing Lime in the Coconut will make him redundant, but if he’d posted 41 minutes earlier, Marcia would be the redundant one. And since their executions are totally different, no worries. It’s not like they were doing Gimlets….

Ed, the Wordsmithing Pantagruel, offers his own Marchetti Falcon for us to try. I like the lime zest garnish, and it meshes thematically with my entry (which is next). And don’t bother rushing to Google to figure out that the heck a “Pantagruel” is, just check Ed’s sidebar.

Speaking of my own entry, behold my tattooed lime wedges. As someone who has admitted in public that he doesn’t always garnish his cocktails, (The CSOWG held hearings. I was allowed to remain a member anyway.) this is as fancy-schmancy as I get.

Dennis, at Rock & Rye, offers excuses for his late post. Then he complains about the syllabus I’ve assigned. After that he vamps a while about the subject matter to make sure his work doesn’t look too short. And he finishes off with stock photography. All this, like his drink the Daiquiri, creates a post “that is altogether greater than the sum of its ingredients.”

Tacoma bar, 1022 South has its own blog. If all blogging bartenders I run across go on the BlogBarCrawl map, blogging bars certainly must! The bar offers us two drinks made with their house-made kava kava tincture, married with both lime juice and the limey goodness of falernum….
I have got to find a client or two in the SeaTac area….

And our final entry is from Chad Robinson, who left this for us in the comments of my announcement post:

Where’s the picture, Chad?

I want to thank everyone who participated in this month’s lime mayhem (especially those I drafted). Now I must go back to my regular routine of producing my own content, rather than having you all provide it for me.
Sigh.
Be sure to check back at the Mixology Monday website soon for next month’s theme and host announcement, and I hope all you new visitors will come back and visit me again!

Howdy, folks! Guy here. This month, Mixology Monday has got itself a lime theme. Since the bossman offered space to other folks who wanted to write a MxMo post, I thought I’d belly up to the bar myself. How’s about we round up a whole bunch of miscellaneous information about limes in cocktails?
A lot of this stuff is cribbed from the prior posted wisdom of our esteemed main blogger here, that sage of the cocktail, Doug, who….

Wow dear.
Sucking up much?

I beg your pardon?

“Sage of the cocktail?”
Doug’s ego doesn’t need that much of a boost, does it?

We’re sockpuppets, dear. Pimping the hand that makes us talk is what we do.

Of course.
How silly of me.
Doug really is teh awesome, isn’t he?

Yes. Yes he is.

And so are limes. Limes are the closest thing you can get to a Swiss Army Knife of cocktail ingredients, as I think we’ll see when all the drink posts for this month are in.
Still there are a lot of details to the lime, lots of things they are great for, and even a few they are not so great for. I thought I’d do a roundup of my own of general lime information in the form of a FAQ. Hopefully, it will be useful to someone, and even more importantly, be a source of good traffic for Doug’s awesome blog in the future!

Well then, you should probably stop wasting scroll-space on the Dance of the Sockpuppetplum Fairies, hmmm?

Frequently Asked Questions About Limes

• How much juice will I get from a lime?
  This will depend on three things:
  1. How large is the lime (obviously)
  2. How old the lime is. Elderly limes will yield less juice
  3. How cold the lime is. If you store your limes in the fridge, they will last slightly longer, but yield less juice. A lot less.

  All that said, an average grocery store lime in good condition will give you about an ounce of juice. The larger varieties can yield as much as two ounces, though, if fresh.
  It is best to measure your juice when you can to get the amount called for in the recipe.

• What if the recipe calls for “the juice of one lime?”
  In most cases, older recipes that call for the juice of one lime mean about 3/4′s ounce. Start with that and add a quarter more to taste. Or you could just juice one lime and be done with it. I assume since you are asking that you are using bottled juice?
• Keeping fresh limes on hand is a pain in the ass. Any suggestions there?
  Air flow and attention.
  Store your limes in a container outside of the chill chest. A wire bowl or basket is best to maintain the best airflow. Your limes will exude fumes as they sit that will brown their neighbors.
  Keep an eye on the limes you have and discard or use any that show any brown spots, as these will ruin the others at a much faster rate.
  If you must buy the bags of limes, open them as soon as you get them home and hunt out the inevitable oldsters who will ruin the entire bag in but a day or two if you let them stay.
• Sounds like a hassle. How about I just buy the juice bottled?
  Sounds good to me. But True Believers™ of the Church of the Cocktails® will unleash these guys on you if you do.
  
  Seriously, fresh juice is a lot better than any bottled lime juice. But the bottled stuff still makes a good drink, so pick your battles as you delve into cocktails. Here’s an old post of the Boss’s that looks at a few brands.
• What about Key Lime juice?
  There are all sorts of high quality Key Lime juices out there. Often they will look like higher quality juice than RealLime, or whatever else your grocer carries. But please understand that Key Lime juice is not lime juice. The fruits have distinctly different flavors, and they are not interchangeable. A drink made with Key Lime juice will taste different from one made with regular lime juice. It might taste better. It’ll probably taste worse. It’ll absolutely taste different.
• OK, then I’ll just use Rose’s. It’s a known brand and everyone has it.
  A: That’s not a question. And
  B: Hush your mouth.
  Rose’s is not lime juice. It is a sweetened lime syrup with a unique taste. It has a place in exactly one great cocktail, the Gimlet. It is about as interchangeable with lime juice as cinnamon toast is with french bread.
• If I’m in a bar and the bartender reaches for the Rose’s when I’ve asked for a Pegu or other drink that needs fresh lime juice, what do I do?
  Bar snacks.
• ???
  Throw bar snacks at him to get his attention, then tell him to put down the Rose’s and walk away slowly.
• If I’m just playing around, what spirits should I use limes with?
  Limes can go well with most any spirit, but they marry especially well with gin and rum. They can work with whiskey and brandy too, but try lemons first there.
• What about Vodka?
  Everything goes with vodka. That’s because it’s vodka.
• Got any tips for garnishing with limes?
  Well, His Awesomeness’s MxMo post this month is about a lime garnish option that he ripped off from offers as an homage to Pegu Club. And Ed’s Marchetti Falcon shows how nifty a garnish a little lime zest can make. But limes are traditionally just used in wheel or wedge fashion. Also, many drinks, like the venerable Rickey or the G&T leave a spent wedge or even lime half floating in the drink as if as proof of the freshness of the juice.
• How about a twist?
  Leave the twist to lemons (or oranges). First, lemons have a lot more oil in the skin to flavor the drink with. Remember, a good garnish will excite more senses than just the eyes.
  Second, lemons have nice thick skins and you can make twists with just a knife, a vegetable peeler, or even a sharpened spoon. If you are handy enough with a knife to easily and routinely produce twists from the paper-thin skin of limes, the Mayo Clinic has work for you.

Enough questions!
I’m thirsty. Make me something limey.

Of course, dear. Just go read through this month’s roundup, and tell me what you want.

But it’s not up yet.

Well, don’t look at me. Talk to Doug.

Key lime pie must never be green!

No.

If you are in the Keys (or, really, anywhere) and the “Key lime” pie you are served is a rather off-putting shade of beige, just close your eyes and enjoy.

Yes.

Even better, get it frozen… on a stick… dipped in dark chocolate!

The fifty-first installment of Mixology Monday (a.k.a. The Carnival That Created the Cocktailosphere) has the theme of Lime, and is being hosted at… well, here! I’ll thus skip all the general introductory discussion, leaving that for the announcement and the eventual roundup, and delve right into my offering.

I’m a fan of Audrey Saunders’ Pegu Club, for numerous reasons beyond just the obvious, and I’ve reviewed the place twice. But one perfect detail of the joint is the magnificently crafted garnishes they offer, each used to highlight but one or two of their signature cocktails.
In particular, I love the tattooed lime wedges that perch on the rim of their Pegus. While there is virtually nothing Tiki about Pegu Club, this garnish does produce a subliminal sense of Far Eastern (as opposed to Polynesian) exoticism.
The wedges, which look very like the one pictured above, evoke the region of the Pegu’s origin like some totem of the Thugee cult. Of course, I don’t think the Thugees extended their reach into Burma, and I’m sure they didn’t accept citrus fruits as members….
I was mystified as to how they made these little rim-hugging gems, until the Peguwife had a chance to look at them. It took her about thirty seconds to figure how to at least approximate the results.

Making a lime’s worth of wedges takes but a few minutes at most, and they are a great way of showing off without going the Full Penguin.

You will need the following:

• Cutting board
• Serrated knife
• A good, beautiful, richly green lime. The bigger, the better.
• A five hole citrus zester (like this one, for example.)

You will use the zester to tattoo the whole lime, then slice it into wedges. (This order of things may seem obvious to you, it wasn’t to me!)
I could get really wordy about how you create various designs (shut up, Guy!) but instead I decided to make a video tutorial of the process. Behold the awesomeness of the Pegu Blog’s first vlog entry!

As you get some experience with this technique, you’ll see that you can make your cuts in ways that will look better when you cut the wedges, and conversely that you can choose where to cut to make whatever design you have carved look better. It is especially a good idea not to run scratches very far longitudinally. They will likely take up an entire wedge and leave very little visual complexity. Even simple patterns will look very complex after slicing if you do them right.

You can do this method with any citrus wedge or peel, though I think it looks best with limes and worst with lemons. The lemons don’t give enough contrast to really look good. And it works with any cocktail (including lots of tiki drinks) but you are honor-bound to mix a Pegu for the first drink you decorate with it….

The next round of Mixology Monday (a.k.a. The Carnival That Created the Cocktailosphere) will once again be hosted here at the Pegu Blog. This month, I thought we should examine one of the most ubiquitous items in any decent bar: Limes.

Limes are an ingredient. Limes are a garnish. A bowl of them makes a beautiful and functional ornament for the bar. While they aren’t a floor wax, at least they can be a dessert topping….

The date to make with your favorite green citrus is September 20th, 2010. Pop me an email with a link to your post (Doug (at) cocktailcapersdotcom), or post a comment to this thread.

In case you are interested in writing about limes, but don’t have a blog or other place of your own to post right now, I’ll be happy to host your musings here as a guest blogger. You just need to let me know well enough in advance to get your article formatted and posted by the night of the 20th.

I aim to have the roundup written and posted here by Wednesday. Hopefully I’ll actually meet that deadline.

Brown, Bitter, and Stirred. That is this month’s invocation for Mixology Monday, hosted this round by Lindsey Johnson of Lush Life Productions at her blog, er, Brown Bitter and Stirred. At first glance, it is almost too easy. The phrase itself is practically a recipe for the first cocktail, and three mighty elders of classic cocktaildom leap immediately to mind: The Sazerac, the Old-Fashioned, and the mighty Gospel of Whiskey, the Manhattan. But the challenge with Mixology Monday for me is to offer something that may be a twist for at least some readers who stumble into this blog binge.
I’m going to discuss an Old Fashioned. Specifically, I’m going to offer up the much lesser known Rum Old Fashioned. Like Sours and Rickeys, Old Fashioneds are actually a class of cocktail. While a single spirit is best known as the base, a mixer can open up new worlds just by substituting another. The method of preparation is the same.
I’ll start right off with my recipe for an Old Fashioned. It is not the recipe for an Old Fashioned, which is too damn time-consuming to use for everyday work. Nor is it (thankfully) any of the other recipes for an Old Fashioned.
For the nonce, I’ll just say spirit. You can use most base liquors here, but it works best with certain brown ones like Bourbon, Rye, and Aged Rum.

I use simple syrup instead of the sugar cube in the recipe because I have things to do. I don’t use wads of citrus or cherries because this ain’t no fern bar beverage.

I recently made some disparaging remarks about ice geekery, but the quality and nature of the ice you use in an Old Fashioned has a greater effect on the experience of drinking it than with most any other cocktail I regularly drink. Old Fashioneds are sipping drinks, meant to be savored slowly, while thinking deep thoughts on matters of importance. Yet, they taste best cold. That’s why you serve them on the rocks, rather than up. But they also suffer greatly with dilution. The Old Fashioned is a potent potion, and if you let it get all watery, you go from Don Draper to Dwight Schrute.
This is why I stir the drink first, then strain. This gets the drink good and cold to start. Then I use the largest ice I have available in the drink when I serve it. The large ice will keep things cold, but does not melt with anything like the speed of smaller pieces and their vastly increased surface area. Clover Club takes this to an art form, but I’m pretty happy with what I do.

Hey!
That’s a cocktail glass!

Yes. Yes it is. Your point?

Well, there is a different kind of glass that people usually use. It’s got a funny name… Whatchacallit… Oh yeah, an Old Fashioned Glass!
What is wrong with you?

More things than I’ve got space for here….
I just think that the ice ball looks better in a cocktail glass than the traditional low ball. And I’m an iconoclast.

Lastly, let’s talk about the spirit that makes this drink different from the regular Old Fashioneds that I more often make. Old Fashioneds are obviously going to be very sensitive to the quality of the liquor you use, since that liquor is almost the entire drink. Less expensive rums that may be just fine in more complex cocktails will be a waste of time, money, and liver in a Rum Old Fashioned. And many top shelf rums have the wrong profile to be really happy in the drink either. I prefer a rich, mellow rum on the sweeter side in an Old Fashioned.
I’ll make a suggestion here of Zaya Gran Reserva rum. I do so for two reasons: The Liquor Fairy sent me a bottle recently, so I’ve been experimenting with it; And since I first tried it in a Rum Old Fashioned, I’ve been hoarding the remaining amount solely for this use. (As is so often the case with really good stuff, it isn’t available locally in Ohio. Sigh.)
Zaya is a blackstrap rum from Trinidad. It is a luscious dark color, with a viscous consistency, and redolent aromas. It is a lot of fun in Tiki drinks, but it is so rich on its own that I think it best reserved for drinks like this one instead. The makers are positioning it as a sipper as well. RumDood points out that the connoisseurs may be split on how this rum ranks. I think that that is a good sign of interesting character in a product. I also like to see this since it means the stuff isn’t likely to cost twice as much next year….

Regardless of the rum you use, the Rum Old Fashioned is a markedly different drink from the more common whiskey variety. It is a happier and less introspective drink in general, though it will still do the job when deep thoughts must be thunk. Now, go back to Lindsey’s place for more Brown, Bitter and Stirred! Thanks for dropping by, and don’t be a stranger.