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!

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.

I’m happy to have discovered another cocktail blogger who actually works at this, Andrew Bohrer, of the blog Caskstrength. Andrew can carve an ice ball in 42 seconds, and creates famous bartender action figures out of Legos. I ran across Andrew’s blog because he is hosting the next Mixology Monday. The theme this month is MxMo: Tom Waits.

Wait.
What the hell does that even mean?
I’ve seen Tom Waits, and I’m not looking forward to him as an ingredient.

It took me a bit to puzzle it out myself, but Andrew has come up with a very cool idea. This month we are not so much to present a drink, as a drinking story. I assume that including a good recipe as well will not be looked at amiss, but it doesn’t seem necessary. Waits is the bard of late-night leaning on the mahogany, no matter which side, so Andrew invites us to tell a favorite drinking tale.
I have missed the last several MxMos because, well, I had nothing interesting to contribute, and you can only get away with crap like this once. I do have a story or two which are legen.., wait for it…, dary, but I’ll have to see if I can cast one in a light that works with a Tom Waits soundtrack. In the meantime, I get to explore a lot of cool music.
Lots of you who blog, but not usually about cocktails, might want to take this opportunity to try getting into a MxMo.
The other reason for this post is to mention that I added Andrew to the BlogBarCrawl, and to pimp that feature of the blog to any new readers I have accumulated since I first added it.
Lots of us travel, and if you are into cocktails, what better information to have than an indication of where to get a drink from someone who obviously cares about good drinks? After all, there aren’t too many cocktail bloggers out there writing odes to sour mix or their newly discovered, wicked awesome, pre-made strawberry daiquiris. These guys (and gals) care about that they are making enough to write about it. And even if the blogger in question isn’t working when you drop in, you’ll still likely be in a reasonably caring establishment.
Next time you are in a strange city, take a look at the BlogBarCrawl and check out someplace cool. And if you are a blogging bartender and your joint ain’t on the list, please let me know!
The main link to the BlogBarCrawl is in the left sidebar, but I’ll embed a smaller map, zoomed in on Mecca the US Northwest, where Andrew keeps the counter clean.

View Pegu Blog BlogBarCrawl in a larger map

Whew.

I was this close to writing another of my FAIL posts about how Mixology Monday has come again, and all my experiments yielded crap. It’s happened before. Also, it’s come close before as well. Well, it seemed to be happening again this time for real, in a big time way. Everything I had on tap just stank.

The Mixology Monday theme this month is a fabulous one. One that I’ve been looking forward to since Rumdood announced it: Ginger.

I wasted a lot of my precious supply of Canton Ginger Liqueur on several failed drinks. That sucked on several levels.

I tried making some cool dried ginger garnishes with a funky homemade drying rig idea that I stole from Alton Brown. They looked so awful, I trashed them.

My best idea, in keeping with my current exploration of Old Fashioneds, was to try a Ginger Old Fashioned. It suffered the worst fate of all: It was boring.

So I gave up. Another MxMo missed, I said, and decided to work on another post for later. I went back to the lab to work with my bottle of Bols Genever that I was sent for review. That’s when the Watson come here, I need you! moment came.

I intend to do a full review and discussion of genever and Bols in particular soon, but since they saved my MxMo, I’ll do a bit of my best thoughts here and now. Genever is one of those sadly almost forgotten spirits that our cocktail renaissance is allowing to emerge from the shadows of history. Commonly called Dutch Gin… genever ain’t gin. It is the precursor to the London Dry Gin so many love (or loathe) today, but while it is also a gin infused white spirit, it has an unmistakably different flavor and especially aroma. The reason I haven’t written my full review on this fascinating spirit is that I’m still searching for the right words to describe the difference between it and gin. I’m a wordy bastard though, so I’ll get it soon enough.

In the meantime, I have found the drink that I’ll be featuring when I do get to the review: The John Collins, which is a Tom Collins made with genever.

So I rolled down to the basement in a failed MxMo funk to make a John Collins and try to find those words I needed. I was halfway into it when I discovered that I had a problem. I rather contemptuously kicked around soda and seltzer water in a recent post, and the fizzy water gods were angry. I had no bubbly water on hand! I was even out of cartridges for my seltzer bottle!

Words failed me. Well, actually they didn’t. I won’t relate the word I used repeatedly, but you should be able to guess from the suggestion that my word choice was a bit scatological.

Then I looked around in frustration and my eyes were drawn to the word ginger! I recently bought a new six of Reed’s Extra Ginger Brew, to replace the bottles I received from the sample fairy. (This reminds me I need to review that stuff too! I’m so behind.)

I had no carbonation for my drink. I was still steamed at not finding a use for ginger. I was thirsty. This is what we in the fiction writing business call a coming together moment.

THE ANTOINE COLLINS

• 2 oz. Bols Genever
• 1 oz. fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 oz. simple syrup
• Reed’s Jamaican Style Ginger Beer

Mix genever, juice, and syrup in a tall glass. Add ice and fill with ginger beer. Garnish with a broad strip of lemon peel.

I was fully prepared for it to suck. To be swamp water. In short, for it to top off my weekend nicely.

But, it’s good. It is refreshing, spicy, and tart. It shows off the unique qualities of the Bols Genever in a gentle way. It leaves your mouth clean and tingly like ginger does. It makes me smile.

Try it, you’ll like it too.

Now go back to Rumdood’s for the rest of this month’s MxMo ginger proceedings. You’ll be glad you did!

Well, I missed MxMo XXXIX this month, as I have all too often recently. Sigh.
Chuck Taggart’s roundup is now posted at Looka!, so go take a gander. Hard as it is to imagine, a MxMo without me somehow manages to scrape by in its usual, thoroughly fascinating way.
The subject, by the way, is Amaro. It is a class of bitter digestifs. Those who like them, swear by them.

This month’s Mixology Monday, hosted by the fabulous broads at LUPEC Boston, asks a question that is of genuine importance: Given someone who has never had a cocktail before (tragic, I know), what would you offer them as their first? You never get a second chance at a first impression, after all.

Let me guess.
You suggest a Pegu!

No. No I don’t, Ms. Smarty-Pants. And for all you who know me and were waiting for me to suggest the One True Cocktail, don’t be silly. For the gin-virgin cocktail drinker, I absolutely suggest the Pegu as a perfect gateway, but that’s another question.
What’s at stake here? You don’t want to offer something so bland or sweet as to leave them with the impression that cocktails are just another form of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, one you have to mix yourself. You want to give them an idea of the depth and sophistication there is to be had in the cocktail world, thus we’ll discard such offerings as White Russians or Strawberry Daiquiris.
On the other hand, let’s be honest. A lot of the favorite drinks we love around here in the cocktailosphere are a bit… sophisticated for a first time drinker. Just as you wouldn’t take someone to King Lear for their first play, you aren’t going to want to spring a Corpse Reviver #2, a Negroni, an Aviation, or even a Pegu on a neophyte.
Let’s answer three basic questions about what our entry level drug should be like.
I’ll start with the base spirit. I’d stay away from gin or whatever variety of whisk(e)y. These may be the kings of booze, providing the most depth and interest, but they have strong flavors what are all, to one extent or another, acquired tastes. Likewise, I’d avoid any specialty liquors, such as tequila, pisco, cachaça, ouzo, etc. That leaves us with vodka and rum. In fact, the case could be made that the best of all possible introductory cocktails would be either a well-made Cuba Libré, or a similarly executed Screwdriver. But either of those would would be too easy for for a MxMo post, and besides, I’d want someone’s first cocktail to be served in a cocktail glass, not a highball. I’m going to go with vodka because it has the fewest negative connotations (to the non-connoisseur), and because it is the blankest of slates.
The next thing is the personality of the drink. Attitude is the core of cocktails and the cocktail mindset, folks. A first cocktail should be evocative for the drinker. It should be publicly cool, and secretly a little silly. Most of all, the neophyte needs a decent chance of having always wanted one of those. So my advice is to go with a well-known, iconic drink. This eliminates otherwise excellent possibilities like the Moscow Mule.
Lastly, is our hypothetical drinker a man or a woman? This last is obviously not about the drink, but the drinker. And yes, it lets me cheat LUPEC’s question by offering two answers. Sue me. It also gives me a chance to get on my old, familiar hobby horse about Broads versus Chicks. The differences are myriad, but for this post, I’ll focus on broads as women who are more robust in their tastes. A chick given a binary choice will always hew to the option perceived as more feminine. A broad will choose based on her personal taste. There is a similar dichotomy with men, but for once it’s more complex than for women. It’s also less likely to come into play here so I’ll save you the time right now.

Thank you, Dr. Doug.
Where’d you get your degree again?

Shut up. The point is to offer two choices, both vodka-based, both well-known to Americans (at least) of all drinking types, one appealing to the bright and lively, the other to the darkly cool. When made properly, both are darn fine drinks. Neither is terribly complex, but both give a hint of the magic mixology can produce. And both will provide a lesson in the importance of skill and quality ingredients in making cocktails; said lesson will be learned later, the first time your new cocktailian orders one of these at an airport bar….

OK, get on with it.
I’m thirsty.

Oh, very well. The offerings shall be: The Vodka Martini and the Cosmopolitan.
Appeal to the guys, and the brassier of broads, with the old-school James Bond cocktail.

Appeal to the chicks, and your most beta of males, with Carrie’s concoction.

Whichever you make for your neophyte, make the same for yourself. Then, for the second round, make them the same, but make yourself a more advanced product like a Pegu, a Manhattan or even a Pisco Sour. Watch their face as they eye your drink and start to get an idea of the vastly greater variety hereabouts than in the world of Bud versus Guinness….

This month’s MxMo is being hosted by the Scribe, over at A Mixed Dram. His theme this month is Broaden Your Horizons. The idea is that we must write about something new to us in the cocktail world. Something we haven’t tried before. He specifically calls out Morganthaler, daring him to find some way to participate. My money’s on Jeff, but keep an eye out to see if he can find anything in the cocktail world he hasn’t done. Maybe he’ll drink a Budweiser….
As for me, well let’s see… I have to do something new… I know!
I’ll mix up a Pegu!
Seriously. For months, I have wanted to try out a Molecular Pegu. Specifically, I want to try the neat trick of spherification, wherein your liquid (played here by the mighty Pegu) is transformed into a mound of tiny spheres, solid on the outside and liquid in the center. You end up with the look and texture of large caliber caviar.
I had hoped to present a clean, concise layout of how to do this. I failed. Oh, I got Pegu Caviar, but the process is difficult, complicated, and not simple. In short, it is some serious chemistry, and Doug never took any chemistry at all. It is still fun, and I will keep working at it. The upshot is, this post will only be an outline, with most of the recommendations being things to avoid.
Here is the basic process for this kind of spherification: You take your liquid, which can be lots of things from pure water to fruit purée, and add sodium alginate and perhaps some sodium citrate (This perhaps is one of those things that straight answers for are difficult to ascertain). You spoon or drip this solution into a bowl of a calcium chloride solution. The outer surface of the drop will almost instantly gel. The longer you leave it in the calcium solution, the thicker the gel skin will become. When it reaches the strength you are looking for, you remove it from the bath and rinse in fresh water to halt the process. The drops are tough enough, usually, to handle, but burst in the mouth when you bite them. The result is outstandingly cool.
The process is outstandingly a pain in the butt. The devil is in the details.
To form the drops, you have a number of options. You can simply spoon them into the bath, carefully, with a small spoon. The results are irregular blobs that are cool to play with and eink (dreat?), but hardly visions of aesthetic prowess. Alternately, you can use a syringe to gently drip tiny drops into the bath. The smaller the drops, the more spherical they will appear. This can take forever, so there is a third, slightly more expensive option. When I first saw this done (with a cantaloupe puree), chef Rosendale used this device, from a company called Chef Rubber. You set it up over your bowl of solution, with a strainer positioned to catch the drops and make removal from the bath easier. Here’s what the setup looks like:

You force solution into the tube with a syringe, and it slowly drips through the nozzles into the bath. You let the drops sit for about a minute, and remove.
At least, that’s the theory.
I, of course, dove straight in. I mixed up a Pegu, added an ounce of water to simulate the amount of ice melt that would come from a normal shaking, and added about 1.5% alginate, and 0.5% citrate. Why these numbers? Because that was the upper end of the suggested range. Did I know what was supposed to happen, and what the result should look like? No. Oops. I first off wanted to test some drops before deploying the caviar maker. The drops simply vanished into the bowl, dissipating like any other liquid would.
What the hell?
I tried ten different ways of putting them in, and nothing worked. After some unhealthy suppression of profanity (I was trying to show off this process to my children). I decided my ingredients had to be the problem. I decided to try this with plain water to start, then add ingredients. I took a fresh 200 ml of water, and added 2g of the alginate. I walked away to secure some toys, and when I returned, found the water had gelled significantly. This had not happened with the Pegu. A spoonful into the calcium bath and bingo. I had a cool little bean of water that I could toss in my hands, but that exploded into tasteless water in my mouth.
I was reinvigorated. Apparently, I needed more water. My Pegu caviar would taste less strong than I had hoped, but this was going to work. I settled on putting in water equal to the Pegu ingredients this time, and blooming the alginate in that water before adding the flavorants and intoxicants. It took a stick blender to combine the ingredients, but I had a Pegu-colored bowl of goop.
Into the syringe it went, through the caviar dripper, and thence into the bath. The solution I had was probably too thick, but it eventually dripped into the water. And it formed little perfect caviar pellets. I strained them, rinsed them, and put them in a cocktail glass. Voila!

Maggi and I ate them with a spoon, and it was really quite cool. It tasted like just like a slightly diluted Pegu.
I intended to have video of the whole process, but my older daughter stole the video camera the moment I took it out, and now I have 42 minutes of my younger daughter making faces into the lens.
Here are the problems with this whole process:

• Speed. At this viscosity, it takes ten minutes to make an ounce.
• Wetness. The caviar remains very wet, which reduces the stuff I can do with it. I had intended to serve it on crackers, with a squirt of whipped lime for garnish.
• Color. The excess water makes the beads too pale.

Fortunately, I have lots of the chemicals. I will try this again, but there will be some changes next time. I will be alone in the house. I need this so I will be patient. Patience is a major key. and when I am not patient, I will be able to swear in proper, therapeutic fashion.
I will be prepared to try several concentrations to get one that is fluid enough to produce caviar at an acceptable rate, and will give the strongest possible, least diluted, flavor. I will set up a draining rig to go with the forming rig. Then one batch can be dripping fully dry, while I’m dripping in the next batch. And I will be patient.
I have further ideas, if I can get this process going in a reasonable fashion. I intend to try spherifying each ingredient of the drink separately. I’ll make up a batch of gin and bitters pearls, Cointreau pearls, and lime pearls. Then put 3 measures of the first, and one each of the second and third into a glass and swirl to combine. How cool would that be, with virtually any cocktail? All the flavors there, in the right proportions, but bursting and combining in your mouth.
It will either be a train wreck, or totally amazing. I suspect it will depend on the recipe.
Well, there you have it. My project worked, sort of. It certainly broadened my horizons. And it was fun… in places. Now, I’m sure someone else did this much better than I did for this Mixology Monday, so go read them and see how to do this correctly.

Sorry folks, I got nothing today. More specifically, I got no time today! I just wanted to throw up this post to remind any stragglers to go to Tiki Drinks and Indigo Firmaments and check for Craig’s roundup of all the best the cocktailosphere has to offer on the use of spices in drinks!
Or you could just do the right thing and drink a Pegu.

It’s the best cocktail on Earth after all.

And Angustora Bitters has lots of spices in it.

And so does Gin.

See? I do have MxMo post! And I finally can post a Pegu as my MxMo recipe.

(I know, I’m unspeakably lame. But the drink sure as hell isn’t!)