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Blue Cocktails on Details.com

I attended an awesome seminar on blue drinks at Tales of the Cocktail this weekend, lead by Sebastian Reaburn, Jacob Briars, and Phil Duff. 

Then I wrote a piece about it for Details.com, the website of Details magazine. It's my first story for the website. 

I learned a lot more in the seminar than is in the story, which is more of a trend piece.

Fun facts:

• Phil Duff worked at the same bar Tom Cruise trained at to prepare for the movie Cocktail (not at the same time)
• The first known blue drink was a non-alcoholic soda called Soyer's Nectar, from 1851. It was created by Alexis Soyer, the first celebrity chef. 
• Blue cocktails were futuristic. "In the 1860s people were excited about the future; now we're merely afraid," said Jacob Briars.
• The first known blue cocktail was from 1908.
• Modern blue cocktails may start with the Blue Hawaiian from 1957 - at the end of the classic rum-heavy tiki drinks at the beginning of the silly ones.
• Blue cocktails are popular in countries that either never had a super serious classic cocktail phase (Asia) or in places and with people that have gotten beyond it, like New Zealand and the top cocktail bars mentioned in the story.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story on Details.com!

 

The Princess Cruises Cocktail Menu

Alcademics reader Warren sent in snaps of the cocktail menu aboard Princess Cruises. 

Mostly it looks as I'd expect: sugary rum drinks and vodka "martinis" in various flavors, but there are a few nice surprises. There is a Blood & Sand on the whisky menu, and several beer cocktails including a Michelada and a drink with Guinness, rum, and bitters. 

The menus are below- click the link (if you see one) to keep reading.

Cocktail Menu: Summer Drinks at 1886 in Los Angeles

Though I haven't had the pleasure of drinking there myself, I love seeing each season's cocktail menu at 1886 at The Raymond in Los Angeles. 

I see: bottled cocktails, a rum-gin shrub drink, genever-basil collins, Battavia Arrack. 

See below for the menu.

Another Way to Make Clear Ice at Home

I am honored to have as Alcademics readers people who are just as huge cocktail nerds as I am. Many take on projects that I run out of time to do, pass along better information to me, or fill me in on the science I'm missing.

Kevin Liu, who has recently started the blog Craft Cocktails at Home and also blogs at ScienceFare.org, tested a method of making clear ice that another reader left in blog comments. 

In this post, he discusses the science of clear ice and two methods to make it at home.

1. The Igloo Cooler method, pioneered here on Alcademics.
2. The High-Temperature Freezing method, in which you let water freeze into ice at just below the freezing temperature. It's also simple, and depending on your freezer may not take up as much space.

Read the post for more info. 

Heaven Hill Distillery Visit

This spring I visited 8 American whiskey distilleries, including Heaven Hill.

Heaven Hill makes whisky brands Evan Williams (the second largest bourbon after Jim Beam), Elijah Craig, Bernheim Wheat Whiskey, Old Fitzgerald, Rittenhouse Rye, and Georgia Moon Corn Whiskey, plus they make and/or own Burnett's vodka, Hypnotiq, Lunazul tequila, and many other brands. They are the only company that makes all of  bourbon, rye, corn whiskey, and wheat whiskey. They have nearly 1 million barrels in storage. 

Though the visitors' center and many rickhouses are here, the distillery is elsewhere - the distillery and many warehouses burned down in a major fire in 1996. After the fire they purchased the Bernheim distillery in Louisville to do the distillation, along with some rickhouses there. 

For three generations, master distillers at Heaven Hill have been descendants of Jim Beam. 

We visited one of the warehouses - actually the rickhouse in which several "whisky of the year"s have aged. It is seven floors tall and we walked to the top for the view. Most of those "best whiskies" were aged on the top floor here.

Our guide pointed out where the distillery was that burned down. 

For all their bourbons, they use a single mashbill. (They didn't give out the specific numbers but said it's about 70% corn and 10% each rye and malted barley. Update: see the comments for specifics.) Between all the brands, age and proof are the only differences; not the recipe. When they distill a spirit and put it into a barrel, it's not designated to be a specific brand - they pull barrels as needed to make specific flavor profiles of their products. 

Visiting Heaven Hill

The Bourbon Heritage Center opened in 2004, and still looks shiny and new. Inside, you get the typical displays of bourbon history and the history of the company, plus there is a cool round bar tasting room inside.  

There are several tours available - mini tour inside the visitors' center, an 1.5 hour tour that visits a rickhouse as I did, a trolley tour around downtown Bardstown, and a 3 hour "Behind the Scenes" tour. More information about visiting Heaven Hill is here.

 

Noilly Prat Vermouth: The Differences Between Original Dry, Rouge, and Ambre

In yesterday's post I discussed how Noilly Prat vermouth is made, as learned on my visit to the vermoutherie in Marseillan, France. Today I want to talk about the differences between the types of vermouth they make. 

In most parts of the world, Original Dry is the only Noilly Prat. The Rouge is primarily for the US market, and the Ambre is available in a few liquor stores in Europe and at the distillery. (The Rouge is also available at the distillery.) 

Noilly Prat Original Dry

One-year-aged clairette and picpoul wines, aged, fortified sweet mistelle wine the from muscat grape, a raspberry and lemon-infused distillate are combined and infused wtih herbs and spices. The filtered results of this are then aged for three more weeks. 

The Original Dry is macerated with 20 ingredients. These include: 

• Chamomille. This is the dominant note. As a delicate dried flower, this maceration is done separately from the main maceration. Chamomille gives the vermouth both a slight bitterness and the dry finish. 
• Nutmeg.
• Bitter orange peels from Tunisia. 
• Gentian. This adds bitter and earthy notes. Gentian is used in gin and many perfumes to add base notes. 
• Wormwood. By European law, all vermouth contains wormwood. The word "vermouth" actually comes from the German word for wormwood.

Noilly Prat Rouge

This is Noilly Prat's sweet vermouth, which was created in 1956. It uses the same base wines, but also includes caramel coloring to give it its red hue. (Many people assume sweet vermouths are made from red wines- nope!) The Rouge calls for the same 20 ingredients as the Original Dry, but used in different ratios than the dry. It then adds an additional 5 ingredients not found in the Original Dry, for 25 ingredients in total. These ingredients include:

• Cloves
• Coco beans from Venezuela
• Saffron
• Quinine (like in tonic water)

Noilly Prat Ambre

This is basically a special 'distillery edition' of vermouth, only available here and in a few important wine shops in Europe. It is amber in color and much sweeter than the Original Dry- in fact sweeter than the Rouge. It contains all of the 25 herbs and spices used in Rouge, plus 24 additional ingredients, for a total of 49 herbs and spices. These include:

• Cardamom
• Lavender
• Cinnamon
• Rose petals
• Vanilla

There is also an Extra-Dry coming to the US market this fall, but I'll save that for another post...

Making Vermouth: A Trip to Noilly Prat in Marseillan, France

Though vermouth as an essential ingredient in cocktails, I never gave much though to its production, figuring it was just a simple infusion of herbs in fortified wine. It turns out there is a lot more to it than that. 

This June I visited Marseillan, France, the home of Noilly Prat vermouth. There, it is pronounced "No-ah-lee Pra" or "No-ah-lee Praht". 

This brand is considered the first commercial dry-style vermouth in the world, dating to 1813. The recipe was created then in Marseilles by Joseph Noilly. His son moved production to Marseillan in 1850 and his when his grandson-in-law joined the company it became Noilly Prat. In the early 1970s Noilly Prat was purchased by Martini & Rossi, and that company was purchased by Bacardi in the early 1990s. 

Marseillan is a small fishing town in the Southeast of France, located near the vineyards of the Languedoc region, which abut the oyster farms separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a small strip of land. Not coincidentally, Noilly Prat Dry is served with oysters in the region, and oysters are served everywhere.

Vermouth is a fortified, aromatized wine. So let's get into how it is made. 

The Wines in Noilly Prat

Three kinds of wine go into Noilly Prat Original Dry: Picpoul, Clairette, and muscat for the sweetening mistelle. Many of the wines are grown next to the ocean, adjacent to the oyster farms. What grows together, goes together. 

 

Those rows of things in the water beyond the vines are oyster tables

 

Picpoul is an AOC wine in the area, smelling and tasting citrusy and a little tart. It too pairs with the local seafood. It makes up 60 percent of the wine in Noilly Prat. 

Clairette, making up the other 40% of the wine blend in Noilly Prat, is less acidic than picpoul. It is fruitier and less citrusy than picpoul.

These wines are usually harvested in September. Noilly Prat doesn't own the vineyards but purchases them from local cooperatives. In fact, they buy wines, not the grapes themselves. The wines are 12.5 to 14 percent alcohol by volume, and not aged in oak (yet).

The Mistelle is the sweetening agent for Noilly Prat. Is is made from the partially fermented muscat grape juice. Fermentation is stopped by adding spirit (neutral sugar beet spirit) before it fully completes, leaving the wine very sweet at around 100 grams per liter sugar content. 

The room where the mistelle ages is filled with huge vats. It dates back to around 1850. The vats were so big they were installed first, and then the building was built around them. In this room the mistelle ages for a year. 

Aging The Wines

In the olden days,wines would have been sent out on boats to their destinations, aging in barrels along the way. However with faster transportation the wine was not the same. So Noilly Prat began replicating the aging step with their unique method called L'Enclos. 

Behind the front building at the Maison of Noilly Prat is a courtyard, and in this courtyard are 2,000 barrels where the picpoul and clairette wines age separately outdoors for a full year, oxidizing and taking on aspects of the salty sea air. 

The barrels are watered regularly to minimize evaporation of the wine

 

Before aging these wines are fortified (with neutral sugar beet distillate) to 18 percent for picpoul and 16 percent for the clairette. We sampled wines aged about 6 months from the barrels - the picpoul wine still tasted very citrusy (apparently picpoul means something like "lip stinger") but took on an oxidized smell that reminded me of flan. The Clairette also tasted oxidized and quite salty, reminded me a little bit of manzanilla sherry.

All the wine for Noilly Prat ages in this one courtyard, though they have more room in other courtyards should we start drinking more vermouth.

The barrels used are all more than 30 years old, some of them more than 100 years old. I believe they said they purchase them from scotch whisky distilleries, but they didn't look to me like ex-bourbon barrels but ex-sherry butts and ex-port pipes as they were all larger than the typical 55 gallon barrels of bourbon.  

As the barrels are so old (thus quite neutral and won't lend woody characteristics to the wine), there is a cooperage repair shop on site, located in a building where they used to distill absinthe. 

 

In the cooperage. That staircase? Designed by a guy named Eiffel.

 

Infusing the Vermouth, and One Last Aging 

Indoors in the Vermoutherie, the aged wines and aged mistelle are transferred here. Another distillate now comes into the equation: Lemon peels and raspberries are macerated in neutral sugar beet spirit for one week and then redistilled in a pot still to 76 percent alcohol. This flavored distillate is then used to further fortify the wine.

 

Pot still of the same kind used to make the lemon-raspberry flavored distillate.

 

In 2050 liter oval pine wood vats, the aged picpoul, clairette, and mistelle, plus the flavored distillate, are infused with the custom blend of herbs and spices for three weeks. 

Every day during this period a person stirs the macerating wine for two minutes with a special sickle-shaped tool for the purpose. 

Stirring the macerating herbs

 

After maceration, the vermouth is filtered in a big rotary filter to remove the herb particles. The vermouth is then further aged 3 more months in the same sized vats that hold the mistelle. 

In tomorrow's post, I'll discuss the different herbs and spices (plus a few other production differences) used in Noilly Prat Original Dry, Rouge, and Ambre. 

But I hope this post makes it clear that producing vermouth (at least this vermouth) is no simple business. I no longer just twist open a bottle and dump it into my cocktails- I now pour a bit into a glass with a single ice cube and savor it on its own first. Props.

The Bars of Havana, Cuba: A Pictorial Tour

While Cuba's two most famous bars are La Bodeguita del Medio and El Floridita, there are many more to see, including a former Trader Vic's that hasn't changed its decor since.

The Hotel Nacional

The Hotel Nacional stands out as a dramatic and luxurious hotel, though one set apart from the old section of Havana. The hotel has several bars, including one with a gallery of famous bar guests.

Monsignor

This is a French-themed bar and restaurant, which was built as a copy of a bar in France.

Emperador

A similarly-ornate bar/restaurant, this one with more of a Roman emperor theme.

Polinesio

This bar was a Trader Vic's only for a little bit before the Cuban revolution, and they kept the decor intact. Mai Tais here are even served in vintage Trader Vics mugs, though there are only a handful of them left.

La Bodeguita del Medio

Meaning "the little store in the middle (of the block)", this bar became famous when Ernest Hemingway announced where he drinks what: "My mojito in La Bodeguita, My daiquiri in El Floridita." The venue has grafitti-covered walls, a band in the corner, and as it is right in the heart of the tourist center of Old Havana, usually a crowd.

El Floridita

Visitors might be surprised to find this vintage bar putting Daiquiris through the blender, but it was actually at this bar where the frappe' style of Daiquiri was popularized, and in 1938 the bar was one of the first in the world to use blenders as part of drink preparation. Though a band plays throughout the day in the bar, El Floridita is a quieter bar than La Bodeguita, with more customers seated at chairs in one of two rooms. Patrons at the bar, however, get a view of the famous barmen (cantineros) balancing a touch of flair, a polite demeanor, and speed behind the stick.