Just a quick note for all my readers outside of the State of Ohio. Gin from Watershed Distillery, which I had previously reviewed in glowing terms here, is now available via mail-order. I’ve gone through a lot of this stuff since my first bottle, and if you like New American style gins, the very light, citrusy Gin from Watershed (not to be confused with Watershed Gin) is worth a try.

$28.99 from ThePartySource.com.

And for the record, Watershed is one of those liquor websites that at least asks about your age, instead of demanding a birthdate!

The Gin Flavor Wheel. An interesting infographic from the Aroma Academy and Bombay, detailing the various olfactory sensation elements in gin. Via The Gin Blog.

One of my Twitter buddies, Aaron, who blogs at The Gin is In (@TheGinIsIn) has done a couple of posts in the last day or so on the Pegu. His first post is part of his Cocktails by Consensus series, where he looks at older cocktails whose recipes have become… scattered with time as different people tweak them. He looks at Pegu recipes from various sources, including such world-famous cocktail writers as Dave Wondrich and, um, me.

You?
“World famous”?
Come on, player….

I didn’t say I was very world famous. Or world-respected. Or even regionally respected…

And those aren’t your recipes. The main one is Paul Harrington’s, and the egg white version is how Peter Dorelli made it for you.

Or even respected on my own blog, apparently.

Anyway, Aaron brings up some salient points that are good to keep in mind when working on your Pegus. The most important is that it is very important not to overdo the orange liqueur, whether it be Curaçao, Cointreau, or (shudder) triple sec. Read his post for a full rundown of where different “experts” are on the drink, and how their positions alter the flavor. His post also reminds me that I need to update the main recipe page here to discuss the use of orange bitters.

The second Pegu post, done as a followup, is a tasting of the drink with Oxley Dry Gin. I haven’t tried that one myself, but it has an old-school, juniper-forward formulation. Aaron is (obviously) a gin guy to begin with, and he enjoys the shading the Oxley gives. He also discusses various orange bitters possibilities, and provides the video I embedded above. As always, read the post for yourself. It is short and on point.

I haven’t done much with heavy juniper gins, at least in Pegus, for a while, but I’ll hearken back to my post on another rather on the nose gin, Broker’s. When I wrote that, my own love for gin was still in its infancy, and I didn’t particularly like what Broker’s did in a Pegu. I like it rather more now. That’s not important, but what we can learn from it is. Pegus are lovely cocktails with both juniper-forward London Drys, and more citrusy New Americans, but while the basic flavor remains largely the same with either type of gin, the character changes dramatically. A big, old-school London Dry style of gin makes for a much more assertive, manly drink. It’s bracing and stimulative. Lighter gin Pegus are a bit gentler.

I have long contended that Pegus, along with Aviations, are great cocktails to use when worming gin into the repertoire of the avowed non-gin drinker. In the case of both drinks, though, it is well to keep in mind that you should stick with the lighter products when you are ginvangelizing.

Kaiser Penguin is full of it. Gloriously, geekishly full of it. “It” being Gin and tonic….

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!

OK everybody, admit it.
You knew he was going to do this eventually….

Of course I was going to do a Tiki version of a Pegu eventually. But it was a considerably harder challenge than it looked at first blush. To begin with, the Pegu isn’t a very Tiki-like drink. It’s a classic, three (four) ingredient gin sour, strained, and served in a cocktail glass with a wedge. That’s too simple a recipe, presented and garnished too plainly, without any ice to play with. It simply doesn’t look, feel. or taste very Tiki. And I couldn’t just throw a normal Pegu in a monkey skull mug and call it a day either. If you are going to screw around with perfection needlessly, you need to be over the top about it. Especially when you are going Tiki, the official standard bearer of Over The Top among classic cocktails.

First, I decided to make my Pegu-Pegu a blender drink, and whip it smooth while I was at it. This ended up being hugely problematical, but when I made the decision, I was just thinking style. For the garnish, I went for a full-on, mulit-part constructed thingy that even Rick might appreciate. I started with my favorite tattooed lime wedge (already pretty elaborate looking), added a second, and sandwiched a cherry in between on a toothpick. You need to notch the lime wedges after you stick them together, at an angle, and off-center so that the toothpick can rest on the rim of the glass and support the weight. I decided to keep the cocktail glass, as homage for the original and because the new garnish sat best on it.

As for the drink, I decided to replace the lime juice with falernum, an iconic Tiki ingredient. My first iteration was a simple one to one replacement of falernum for lime juice. But you combine these ratios with lots of ice to make it smooth and you get a drink that is unrecognizably bland and sweet. Several iterations later, I found that the drink needed more gin, and the gin should be a London Dry, rather than in the New American style. Also, I added fresh lime juice back in, eventually reaching an equal measure with the falernum. Finally, I punched up the amount of bitters, and added orange bitters in as well.

I’ll likely play with this some more, but for this year, I’m reasonably happy. It isn’t instantly recognizable as a Pegu descendant, but all the flavors are there and fairly balanced. I’d like to add more falernum, for the extra layer of exoticism it provides, but It would push things over to too sweet again.
This formulation is a tranquil island presentation of the the Pegu’s flavors, with little of the imperially bracing punch of the original. Give it a try!

A year ago, to my knowledge, Columbus, Ohio had no distilleries. Now we have two. On an annual basis, this in infinite growth. Look upon us Scotland and Kentucky, and despair!

One of these two new producers is Watershed Distillery, located in the Grandview area of town, tucked away in a light industrial/warehouse park. They currently offer two spirits for sale. In no-nonsense style, they call them Vodka from Watershed Distillery, and Gin from Watershed Distillery. A bourbon, whose name I can only speculate upon, has begun production and now needs only the magic of time and oak to be ready for market.

I didn’t know of Watershed until just after New Year’s, when I was wandering the aisles of a new liquor store near my house, and stumbled across their gin. Any new gin that is added to Ohio’s meager selection is good news, but when I saw where this gin was made I was pretty darn excited.
Really.
Just ask my long-suffering wife who had to put up with me sailing into the house brandishing the bottle like it was a winning lottery ticket….

Gin from Watershed Distillery is a light, citrus-accented liquor in the New American school of gins. It has a distinctively bright and zesty character that is evident from when you first tug the stopper from the wide, cylindrical style bottle. The juniper is there, of course, but it isn’t heavy. The other botanicals consist of four citrus zests, lime, lemon, orange, and grapefruit, along with cinnamon, coriander, and allspice. They balance very well.

I asked co-owner Greg Lehman how they arrived at their formulation. They experimented with a wide variety of styles, with many test batches of each, to see which ones they could execute well. Then, through a combination of market research and personal preference, they settled on the citrus-influenced, New American style and perfected their recipe.
After he told me all this, I jammed a camera in his face without warning and made him give me the highlights of the process all over again. The result is the second Pegu Blog Original Video.

Not only is Gin from Watershed a very nice gin in its own right, but it also fills a need in the gin selection available to Ohioans. There are relatively few gins available in this state to begin with, and most that we do have are the big, traditional brands, in the big, traditional styles. Watershed’s offering can provide local bartenders and mixers with a great new option should they want to be working with a brighter, cleaner spirit that may be more accessible to drinkers who are just getting used to gin.

I’m not saying that Gin from Watershed is mild. It’s not. A sip of it neat will punch you in the snoot. But it’s a punch in the snoot from a pretty girl. The first bottle I bought (from hand-numbered batch #1) is already gone, so let me offer my coroner’s report on how it went.
Of course, the first drink I tried, as with all new gins, was a standard Pegu. Watershed is good here… really good. The added tones of all that citrus zest seem to enhance the drink’s regular flavors, especially those underlying the Angostura Bitters, without altering the balance. I then experimented with other gin sour variants and Watershed worked there very well, too. I think these kind of drinks are the best use for this gin.
It also makes a fine Martini, however. If you use fresh vermouth, and enough of it, dammit! For me, I’ve come to prefer a bit more juniper as I’ve come to know the cocktail. But if you are just making the move from Vodka Martinis to the real thing, I’d say Watershed would be worth a try to get you in the door.
I don’t drink Gin & Tonics, so I can’t speak to how Gin from Watershed works in that standard. Can any G&T drinkers out there who’ve tried it shoot me some feedback in the comments?

Right now, both both Gin and Vodka from Watershed are available only in Ohio, and right now they are only using the Columbus warehouse. The rest of you will have to wait. [UPDATE: Outside Ohio you can now buy the Gin from Watershed for $28.99 from ThePartySource.com. Lots of bars bars are using it around town, and it has been selling in a good selection of liquor stores all over, so it should not be hard to find. My advice is to pick up a bottle and drink all you want. Greg says he’ll make more.

234 years ago today saw the troubled, uncertain birth of a nation. Fifty-six frightened men in Philadelphia rather presumptuously committed their two million fellow colonists to casting off the control of the mightiest nation on the planet. They knew they were doing something important, something big, but they had no idea just how big it would become.

The Fourth of July is a day to celebrate, and let me just say that one of the most appropriate possible ways to celebrate the greatness of our nation is with our national cuisine.
What’s that you say? America has no cuisine of its own? We steal the best of other cultures’ schools and enjoy them for ourselves? Hamburgers are not cuisine?
America does indeed have its own cuisine, its own culinary school of art and skill in which delicious dishes are expressed with creativity and style. Like other nations, we’ve exported our cuisine, and you can find it made all over the world, often at the highest levels. But it remains ours, and America remains the source of the best of the craft.

America’s cuisine is the cocktail.

A cuisine is a specific school of preparing food (I contend that drink is integral to food) that reflects the culture of the people who originate it, and the land where they live.
Cocktails reflect the endless inventive nature of Americans. They use the both the bewildering variety of ingredients available in our land, as well as ingredients from all around the world where we have gone as traders. Like so many American institutions, their success is predicated on industrial advances, most especially for cocktails, the mechanical production of ice.
Cocktails are America’s singular contribution to the bedrock element of humanity, the convivial table. The gestalt of liquors, liqueurs, juices, spices, herbs, and sugars is indeed our cuisine.

So on this Fourth of July, even if you aren’t American yourself (or perhaps even more so in that case) celebrate with a cocktail or three. Celebrate our fractious, dangerous, magnificent nation with a balanced, delicious example of our national craft. Make whatever you like, whatever appeals. Create your own, if you like. The genius of the cocktail, that makes it even more American, is that you can do that. It doesn’t take advanced schooling or apprenticeship to be able to make or create a good drink (though it can help). All it takes is patience and perspiration.

But I’ll leave you with a recipe suggestion, nonetheless. I’ve posted on it before, but it is a perfect Fourth of July drink. Born in the fetid swamps of our nation’s capital itself, the Gin Rickey is an overwhelming weapon in the fight against thirst. Moreover, emblematic of the nature of our cuisine as I’ve touched on here, it is easily tinkered with. Simply replace the gin with virtually any spirit that suits your fancy, or you find at hand, and it will likely still be delicious. Try one, or any other cocktail, and raise a toast to those fifty-six men in a hot, sticky hall in Philadelphia, preparing to hang together… lest they all hang separately.

Everybody has a Bloody Mary recipe. And everyone thinks that theirs is the best one on Earth.
Everybody also has an assho….

Hey!
Let’s not insult the readers, shall we? Not in the first line, anyway. Besides, what you say is not true. I do not have a Blood Mary recipe.

…!

Among the (many) holes in my cocktail repertoire, perhaps the largest is the Bloody Mary. I always avoided it due to its resemblance to the hated V8 Juice, and thus I find myself with no experience here at all. During a momentary need for escape from Tiki monomania last February, I ordered my first Bloody Mary in a bar and found it darned intriguing. I resolved to undertake the task of developing my own Bloody Mary recipe this Summer. That quest begins here.

The problem is that it is a daunting task. Recipes are highly individualized, and since I have drunk perhaps five Bloody Marys in total, I don’t have a lot of experience to give me leads. I began with the basic recipe, at least as given in the BarSmarts Wired course, which matches up pretty well with a number of my books. It gave me the basic elements of a Bloody Mary: Tomatoes, Vodka, citrus, and spices.
But what kind of cocktailian would I be if I didn’t want to go beyond, to concoct my own twist on this most personalized of classics?

Inspiration struck last week in the form of a date night with Maggi, down to M at Miranova to see Columbus’ best bartender, Cris Dehlavi. (No really, she was just voted Columbus’ Best Batender) With all the mutterings around the web about Aviation variations, I wanted to try her new Violet Sour, an Aviation made with lavender-infused Plymouth Gin.
However, the other new offering I tried was her take on the Bloody Mary, which she calls the Heirloom. The key feature with the Heirloom is that it uses tomato water instead of juice. This makes for a less in your face appearance and a smoother texture that really appeals to me. Cris also garnishes it in a way that is beyond my resources right now, but I’ll work on gilding the lily when I have a lily worth gilding. If you are in Columbus, go try her Heirloom.

Or you can stick with me and give my experiment a try to see if you like it. I think you will.

The easy but time-consuming part is to make some tomato water. There are all sorts of recipes out there on the web, with varying degrees of complexity. I chose to eschew any peppers or other produce for this first run, simply choosing six or seven of the best looking tomatoes I could find and quartering them. I put them in my Blendtec (the new larger carafe makes this work a lot better) and hit the smoothie button. Have I mentioned before how awesome this blender is? It takes about four seconds to go from this…

to this…

Lay your largest strainer over a glass bowl and line it with several layers of cheesecloth. Carefully pour your pureé into the cloth and let drip overnight.

The next morning, you can discard the pulp and you have a lightly cloudy, pale red, very fragrant liquid. The amount it yields will vary on the size and quality of your tomatoes, but you may get more than you were expecting the first time.
Rick Stutz tried this last fall, and recommends refrigerating during the draining, but I chose not to. Cold can do things to tomato flavors and textures that I like to avoid if possible. Cover overnight and live dangerously.
Interestingly, I could not find a commercial source of tomato water anywhere. If anyone knows of a brand of commercial stuff I could keep on standby for when I want a drink now, instead of tomorrow, I’d love to hear about it.

At last, I was ready to make my first shot at a decent, somewhat unique Bloody Mary. Here’s what I came up with, after a few iterations:

Just a quick note here.
Protect your basil from any errant May frosts, or those two measly leaves in the picture will be all you have left that aren’t ruined!

The result is a mildly spicy deliciousness. The texture is far lighter than with traditional Bloody Marys, but it still possesses a definite comforting richness in your mouth and gullet that would be helpful with a delicate constitution. That said, the transient nature of the tomato water means I’ll be looking for a juice version to have on stand by if I ever get around to having my first hangover….

Stick around over the Summer, and help me figure out how to say, Well, my damn Bloody Mary recipe is the best there is! Or you can post your own version in the comments and I’ll steal from it shamelessly down the road if it is any good at all.

Apparently the Secret Handshake™ is enjoying a resurgence of interest ’round the Cocktailosphere these days. Dietsch weighs in over at A Dash of Bitters with a proposed improvement on the Classic Recipe.