The Liquor Fairy recently brought me two bottles that individually and collectively packed a double-whammy. They were Kahlua Coffee Cream, and Amarula Cream. First, both were delicious; and second, they both gave me something interesting to write about beyond what they taste like. They each deserve their own review, and I will thusly deal with each separately below, but I want to start with what is cool about them collectively.
Liqueurs predate cocktails by a long, long time. Most of us modern cocktailians tend to treat liqueurs as mere ingredients, on the order of lime juice, or cinnamon syrup. At most, we employ liqueurs as a base spirit in our concoctions. But before people were mixing spirits and other things in glass or shaker to make them more palatable, they were mixing spirits and other things in bottles to accomplish the same goal. Liqueurs were historically created to be drunk straight, not as ingredients.

Now, to the modern palate this may seem a bit dubious. Take a swig of Benedictine, for instance, and you may challenge my assertion that it was formulated for drinking straight. Time changes tastes… in everything, not just drink. Also, many, if not most, modern liqueurs are formulated and produced exclusively for mixing in cocktails. Imagine leaning across a bar and asking for a glass of Blue Curaçao….
So, we modern mixers tend to treat liqueurs as we do because:

• We mix. It’s what we do.
• Modern distillers create products to allow us, the consumers, to do what we do. Ain’t capitalism grand?

But Amarula and Kahlua Coffee Cream don’t fit that paradigm. I’m sure that there are all sorts of ways you can mix great cocktails with these two products, but I only want to focus on how they taste by themselves.
Because that is how liqueurs as a class were originally intended to be drunk, and these two products fit that bill nicely.
And that is worth thinking about.
I honestly do not understand the manufacturing magic that allows distillers to bottle a product with so much real cream and have it last any length of time at all on the shelf. Nor do I know how they make such liqueurs so incredibly rich. If you mix spirits and fresh, heavy cream in any combination, you won’t get the same texture. But my ignorance of the production minutiae won’t keep me from talking about the results.
I’ll go with the bottles in the order that I received them.

Kahlua Coffee Cream Liqueur
Kahlua is one of the best known liqueur brands out there today, of course. They are introducing a new special run liqueur they call Kahlua Coffee Cream. You won’t find it on their website, since it is a limited-edition product, but you should expect to find it on shelves all over the US through the end of the year.
Everything Kahlua makes is coffee-based, of course, as is the new Coffee Cream. It is a cream liqueur along the lines of a Bailey’s or Castries. The base spirit is rum, and subtly brings the characteristic taste elements of that spirit to the party as well.
My initial thought before tasting was, Isn’t this a White Russian? It is not. Kahlua actually produces pre-bottled White Russians as well, but even if you roll your own, White Russians are thinner in taste and texture, as well as higher in proof, than the Kahlua Coffee Cream.
The taste of the Coffee Cream is similar to an unflavored ice cream custard base. There are vanilla tones, as well as prominent flavors of caramelized sugar. The coffee is there, but not very in your face. For non-coffee drinkers like me, it is a beautiful balance. Imagine if you will, a sip of liquid Tiramisu, and you will have great idea of what you get in a bottle of the Coffee Cream.
As I said above, this liqueur is simply a great after dinner drink, served by itself on the rocks. If you simply must use it as an ingredient, I’ll send you to the wrap-up of the recent Thursday Drink Night, where the gang did a great job putting Kahlua Coffee Cream through its paces.

Amarula Cream Liqueur
Amarula is a brand I had never heard of until it arrived at my door. It too is a sweet-tasting cream liqueur, but has some unique elements in its creation and in its flavor.
Amarula was first marketed in the 1980′s in Zimbabwe, and I think it is now made in South Africa. It is made from an African fruit called the marula, which grows wild in South Africa’s Limpopo province (with its great grey-green, greasy river). Locals harvest the fruit and sell the takings to Distell, Amarula’s distiller. The other main harvesters of marula fruit are elephants, and this is why Amarula plasters them all over every bottle or piece of marketing material they produce.
The interesting thing about the Amarula is that the marula fruit provides not just the flavor, but the alcohol. They produce a brandy by fermenting both the juice and the pulp, then distilling. This brandy is then aged and combined with cream to produce Amarula. I see some mention that they first produced the brandy itself as a commercial product, but I guess it was not successful on its own, and now they make only the cream liqueur.
Regardless, the resulting liquid is delicious, and just a touch exotic. It is sweet, but not overly, and the marula fruit flavor is unique, at least to my palate. To return to my central theme, the liqueur is so nicely balanced that you need add nothing to it beyond a couple of nice cubes of ice. As with the Kahlua, I like this too much straight to bother much with fiddling with recipes. But if you’d like to expand your wings with a bottle of Amarula, I found an excellent page of both cocktail and dessert Amarula recipes at African-Tradition.com. On second thought, I may try my hand at the truffles….

The Liquor Fairy Was Here!
The following products, Kahlua Coffee Cream Liqueur and Amarula Cream Liqueur, were recently provided to me as promotional consideration to encourage me to discuss them.
For a complete disclosure of my policies regarding promotional items and all other financial interests, please click this link, or follow the Liquor Fairy link in the header of this page.

I get a fair number of samples these days from liquor and liqueur makers who would like me to try their wares, and write about them. Sometimes I know a particular bottle is coming, and I’m all agog with anticipation. And some of these surprise me by being a little (or a lot) disappointing. Sometimes a bottle appears out of the blue, which is always a nice surprise. And sometimes I get a bottle that just makes me go, What the heck is this stuff?
And sometimes, these last kind of bottles can be the biggest and best surprises. This post is about one of those surprises: Castries Creme Liqueur.
Castries is a rum-based liqueur from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean. The main player in its ingredient list is roasted peanuts, which immediately took me aback. Peanut is not a flavor I associate with drinks—with drinking, sure, but not in drinks. I love a good bowl of salty spanish peanuts with my Pegu, but I had a hard time wrapping my head around a peanut flavored alcoholic beverage. Still, the bottle is lovely, if a bit too tall to fit in my cabinet conveniently, and I pondered what to do with it.
My first thought went to desert drinks, and there are several recipes on Castries’ website that fit that bill. Maggi’s favorite candy is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and they have a recipe on the site with the same name, minus the brand.

Now here’s the surprise. I was expecting a sticky, sweet, candy-like taste to this cocktail. No way. What you have here is an elegant, lightly sweet after dinner cocktail in which the peanut element is a harmonious accompaniment, rather than an in your face solo. It’s a delicious drink. Maggi, who usually prefers wine after dinner, does not complain when I emerge from the Basement Bar with one of these!
Now, one really good drink from a specialty bottle is usually good enough for me to be more than happy. But I was so surprised (remember) by how good this stuff was in the Peanutbutter Cup, I thought I’d take a shot at one of the regular cocktails on their site. For this one, I went with a very simple concoction named The Phantom. It is nothing but a two to one ratio of Castries to cognac, served on the rocks with a sprinkle of nutmeg over the top.
Again, I was surprised at this drink too. It’s a little sweeter than I usually like in a cocktail, but unlike most sweet drinks, you can still get a full appreciation of the flavors from the liquors involved. Whatever rum Castries uses ain’t bad at all, and the vanilla is certainly of better quality than the Stoli Vanil’s in the Peanutbutter Cup. I’m not sure about the other ingredients in Castries, but at least one they claim is brown sugar. I can see this, but I’d like to know what they do with it, because the sweet is more caramel than molasses. Regardless, it marries far better than I expected (more surprises) with the cognac, and makes for a pleasant cocktail if you are in the mood for a gentler feeling drink.
Castries is available at retail in only a handful of eastern states from Georgia to New York, but it is carried online at Astor Wine and Spirits should you want to give it a whirl and see if it surprises you as much as me.

When I received a bottle of Metaxa for review, I must confess I had absolutely no idea what it was. A little digging, and I’ve learned a fair amount actually. Here’s a short list of the highlights:

• It is Greek.
• It is a venerable brand, having been made for about a hundred and twenty years.
• It is essentially a brandy liqueur.
• It is quite good. I could even see drinking it neat or with a single ice cube as an after dinner wind-down.

The base for Metaxa is grape wine, from greek grapes of varieties of which I’ve not heard. They distill this into a sort of brandy, age it, then mix it with muscat wine and botanicals. There are various grades of Metaxa, graded with stars. The more stars, the longer the aging of the distilled wine. There are also special reserve bottlings for even finer grades. The bottle I received is the Seven Star. They also use a different bottle shape for each grade as well, which is kinda cool.
This makes Metaxa technically a liqueur. But its flavor is much closer to a nice cognac than it is to a traditional brandy liqueur like Benedictine. It is sweeter than cocgnac, and has a muskiness that replaces some of the cleaner burn of a pure brandy. Please note that it is 80 proof, like most liquors, so the slightly softer taste is not indicative of softer punch. I think you ought to think of and use Metaxa as if it were a liquor, instead of a liqueur.
Metaxa just sponsored a Thursday Drink Night, but I was too busy losing money at the poker table to make it. This left me on my own to find ways to put this fragrant liqueur to use.
I tried it neat, to get a feel for where I was going, and as I said, the flavor is much closer to a cognac than a liqueur. Then I went looking for recipes that featured brandy that I could tweak to fit in with the Metaxa’s unique qualities.
The Metaxa website is the usual Flash extravaganza, with a more annoying than usual age check function. There is interesting info, however, on the history and manufacture of the spirit. There are also a bunch of recipes for cocktails, but none really went where I wanted to go. All seem fruit related first and foremost, and that wasn’t what I was into. Brandies mix much better with lemon than lime, and sure enough, there is lots of lemon and no lime among Metaxa’s recipes.
After browsing my books, I concocted this little variant on the Classic Cocktail, which is itself a variant of the Sidecar. I actually rather like it, and I hope you do too.

It is the best of liqueurs, it is the… well, also among the best of liqueurs, it is the crispest of spices, it is the smoothest of flowers, it is the apex of ginger, it is valley of the elderflower, it is the root of the orient, it is the bloom of the alps, we drink a bold, bright elixir, we drink a smooth, twilight potion – in short, we are examining poles totally unlike, yet bound in form, function, and quality in such a way that some of the noisiest authorities insist we must receive them, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
—With a nod to Chucky Dickens

My last post seemed like a good lead-in to some thoughts I’ve been developing about two of the more interesting, ultra-premium liqueurs in my inventory, St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur and Canton Ginger Liqueur.

Hey, where are the scare quotes around ultra-premium? You hate that phrase.

I hate it, it’s true, especially when applied to vodka. But every once in a while, you run into a product in this, as with any, industry that kinda deserves the label. Each of these liqueurs is fairly unique in the market. Each is several levels higher in complexity and refinement than the overwhelming majority of what we call liqueurs. Each can be used in a wide variety of applications. Each comes is a magnificent, display quality bottle. And each is tres cher….

Despite my photoshop, this isn’t really a showdown post. As I said, they are both top-notch products, and they really don’t taste anything like each other. The only things they ostensibly have in common is their color, and their status among the current aristocracy of booze. So why am I binding them together in this post?
What I wanted to share is the amazing fact that these two can be exchanged for each other with impressive results in an incredibly wide range of drinks.
I am in no way saying that one is a substitute for the other. What I am saying is that a drink that works with one of these very different liqueurs will likely also work with the other. The result will be a very different drink, but one of similar drinkability. And if you find a recipe using one of these two seems a bit too much… whatever, I think a great first step in trying to fix it is to switch one of these for the other. I liken this procedure to adjusting the color-balance in a photograph: Whether you will prefer the results will depend on your personal tastes.
I cite again my experiment in my last post with substituting Canton for the St. Germain in Gary Regan’s Botanical Breeze. I hardly claim to have made the cocktail better, I just claim to have made a drink that more fits my tastes.
I had made this switch a couple of times as experiments in the past when trying to come up with something on my own, but never thought about it much, as I never had a really successful result with any of the overall drinks. But I never really noticed what I was doing, and how often it worked until the Thursday Drink Night over at the Mixosoleum that was sponsored by Sandeman Port. (As an aside, I was amazed at how good a mixing ingredient port is in cocktails. I would never have thought it.) If you have never tried visiting TDN, and have the ability to follow seven simultaneous yet different, drunken conversations about the same subject in an internet chatroom, I recommend you check it out. At any rate, the excellent Dr. Bamboo suggested the following cocktail:

I tried it and liked it. And then about 15 minutes later, I realized that I had made it with Canton instead of St. Germain! In my defense, TDN had been going on for a while at this point…. That night I was just embarrassed, but the next day, in looking over my notes, I was struck by how this worked. The Trans-Europe is also quite good with the St. Germain, but I personally prefer my accidental substitution:

As to why these two dissimilar liqueurs can sub in for each other so often, I suspect it’s because each is about the same sweetness (not very), and the same strength of flavor (though very different). Similar coloring also keeps the switch from making an ugly mess of the result. Beyond that, I can only say, Just does, Mommy.
Aside from allowing for drunken substitutions that don’t end up wasting expensive liquor, this phenomenon is pretty cool in other ways.
Both of these liqueurs have their fans, but also their detractors. And they are both rather difficult to track down in some markets. So, you may have dismissed an otherwise interesting recipe because you don’t like or can’t get (for instance) St. Germain, but have a beautiful bottle of Canton in your inventory. Go ahead and try the Canton. Or, you may be the kind of drinker who usually just follows recipes; try this substitution as a first step in learning to tweak and invent your own creations. There’s a lot of fun and flexibility to be had here. Try it.
I’ll end with the admission that this is hardly a scientifically proven theory. I haven’t done exhaustive testing (though I’ve done more than I’ve written here), and I have done much more substituting Canton for St. Germain than I have the other way around. If you tinker with this, I’d love to hear your results, especially where it didn’t work.

UPDATE (3/3/09): Camper English writes of another fascinating convergence between these two liquors that I had not known. Apparently, the makers are brothers who “enjoy” a highly competitive and not wholly cordial relationship. I guess my graphic up top was even more cogent than I thought. You can read about the story in depth at The Wall Street Journal. (Wow, my first link to the WSJ….)

Before Christmas, I suggested supplemening your Basement Bar’s glassware collection through liquor gift packs that include a glass or glasses. This year, one of the nicer looking sets was a large, painted, Old Fashioned glass with a bottle of Agavero (El Original Licor de Tequila). I would have been tempted to buy it, had I not just received a sample of Agavero to test drive. The drive ended up involving a cross-section of my family, making it a bit of an adventure.
First off, a few words about Agavero, and what it is, are in order. Agavero is a traditional Mexican tequila-based liqueur. It starts with a blend of Anjeo and Reposado tequilas, to which the featured, active ingredient is added: Damiana flower. The resulting liqueur is sweet and very smooth.

The traditional use for Agavero is as a replacement for the triple sec in a Margarita.
The traditional reason for this substitution is more entertaining. Damiana has quite the reputation as an aphrodisiac, being especially effective for women. Stock up, guys!
Now, the efficacy of Damiana has not been scientifically determined. This is the case with many aphrodisiacs, and I just for the life of me cannot figure out why. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars studying the mating habits of lightning bugs. Why don’t we spend our money on rigorous tests to see which of the various human aphrodisiacs out there actually work? Finding test subjects cannot be the problem! Someone write Barack Obama about this. It ought to be part of the… Stimulus Package.

Regardless of any potential side benefits, my own interest in Agavero is strictly centered on its mixological uses.

Meaning your wife doesn’t drink Tequila.

Exactly. She has a rule.

I have a buddy with that same rule.

Yeah, but he woke up naked in a jail in Oregon, missing three days. Maggi has no such excuse.
Fortunately, my brother-in-law Bill does drink tequila, um, on occasion. Since we were visiting the old country for the holidays this year, off the bottle went to Georgia. We sat down with the Agavero, his liquor cabinet, and my new traveling kit on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve to mix drinks.
Um, be careful when informing your brother-in-law that the liquor you have asked him to drink with you is renowned primarily for its aphrodisiac qualities. Be especially careful when you tell him you plan to write about the experience on the Internet. He may look at you like this:

(No one was harmed in the writing of this post.)
Bill and I sat down with my sister, their daughter who went to college with my wife, and said wife. The women all decided that being left out was not acceptable so they joined us, regardless of prior stated tequila drinking policies.

Women always do that. Guys are just too fascinating to them to resist.

Either that, or they knew that you were going to be drinking and cutting up limes. Someone has to be around to dial 911.

The first question was what, precisely, should we do with the stuff in this lovely bottle? Agavero’s website has a number of recipes to offer, which seemed a likely place to start.
We started with the Machismo, which is nothing more than a shot of Agavero. To my surprise, this was very good all by itself. The liqueur is fairly sweet, and there is a faint but pleasant floral background. I have never had Damiana before, so I can only assume that this was what we tasted. You can certainly tell it is a tequila-based drink, but even neat, and at room-temperature, Agavero is already smoother than an average Margarita. That characteristic muskiness of tequila is present, but without the in-your-face edge that even the best of the pure stuff provides.
Agavero suggests that you chase the shot with a wedge of lime and sugar, not salt. I do not. The sugar is a sweet step too far. Stick with a plain lime wedge, or lick some of the traditional salt. Even a light sprinkling of granulated sugar overloads the sweet of the liqueur and washes out virtually all the other flavors that give the liqueur its character.
If you are trying to get a woman to try Tequila shots, a Machismo would be an excellent way to start her out.
Of course, given the reputed nature of the Agavero, if you are trying to get her to try any number of things, this would be an excellent way to start her out….

We next tried the Mexican Cosmopolitan, but met with less success. Their recipe is 2 parts Vodka, 1 part Agavero, with splashes of cranberry and lime juices. We only had cranberry juice cocktail, but otherwise followed the recipe. The problem again was sweetness. The added sugar in the cranberry juice cocktail wipes out any interest the Agavero might add to the drink, and you are left with what tastes like a run-of-the-mill Cosmo from your neighborhood bar. When I got home and once again had access to the full, vast research capabilities of the Pegu Lounge, I tinkered.

I can fully recommend this cocktail. It is light and accessible, like a regular Cosmo, but possesses a richer feel in the mouth and some interesting character lurking in the depths. If your intended lady won’t go for the Agavero shots, this may be your way to get her to try it.
These first two drinks illustrate what I’ll call the First Law of Mixing with Agavero: Easy on the sugar! Even if you want a dessert drink, don’t sweeten Agavero any further.

By this time, I began to notice that a lot of their recipes were essentially based on replacing Cointreau with Agavero. Those of you who read me regularly know where this immediately led me: I had to make an Agavero Pegu. I mixed up one, subbing Agavero for Cointreau one to one, and handed it to Bill. If I may here extend a word of advice, do not replicate this experiment at home, or anywhere else. Bill didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. The women didn’t like it. Second Law of Mixing with Agavero: No gin. And other liquors besides vodka are likely out too. The tequila in Agavero may be subtle, but it will fight with others just the same. If you wouldn’t mix it with tequila, don’t mix it with Agavero. I’m not proud of this experiment, but it had to be done. You know, for science and stuff like that.

The last drink we tried was a Mexican Coffee. You make this, you guessed it, with Agavero in place of irish whiskey. I didn’t personally try any of this one, because I really do not drink coffee. But the women reported that the Agavero was practically absent from the taste. Agavero is a nice liqueur, but it is expensive, so they pronounced this preparation to be a waste. This irritated them, since they had gotten all cocktailian and made up fresh, unsweetened whipped cream for the experiment. We’ve since tried this one again as well, with fresher coffee, but it still seems to be one to avoid.

So what did we learn? Agavero is nice stuff. It is good enough to, and in fact may be at its best if you, drink it neat. It is a nice way to dip your toe into the waters of Tequila, if you’ve not tried them before. If you do drink tequila, the Agavero makes for an interesting exploration. My guess is that Agavero, like every other spirit on Earth, is not for everyone, especially those whose tastes run to the tart. But it is definitely worth a try, especially if you’re interested in what Damiana can do for you, or someone you love….