How to make a gin and tonic, if you have a lot of time and chemical equipment on your hands

Tonight I stopped into the Martin Miller's Gin & Tonic competition at Beretta. The winner of the event was Jennifer Colliau of Slanted Door, who had some sort of bitters frozen into ice that slowly changed the flavor of the drink as it melted. Clever.

But the most interesting drink was designed by Joe Parrilli who works at Bacar. To make his drink, all you need to do is:

1. Make some dehydrated lime slices


2. Create spheres of tonic with gold cake decoration using molecular mixology techniques



3. Make some gelatin gin and tonic


4. Carbonate some gin


5. Assemble the drink and enjoy

So go ahead, it's easy!

Tonic Taste Test

In my tonic article in the Chronicle, I only briefly mentioned the tastes of the tonics neat, not having the time to do a full taste test with different gins. But how often do you drink tonic without gin?

In a lucky coincidence, Time Out New York did a taste test of three of the tonics I mentioned in my story- Fever Tree, Stirrings, and Q Tonic Water, with three different types of gins. Read it here.

On a separate note, I would like to call for an official moratorium on publications calling their booze stories "Raising the Bar." It's been done to death.

Boutique Tonic Water

Finally my tonic water story came out in today's SF Chronicle:

The Evolution of Tonic Water

In the quest to make better cocktails, today's bartenders rethink each ingredient in a drink and try to improve it -- from the cheap, mass-produced version, to a higher-quality version, to the artisan version, to the locally made artisan version, and finally to the homemade version.

We've seen this with spirits (from Tanqueray to 209 Gin) and juices (from bottled juice to locally grown fruit). But until a few years ago, nobody had given too much thought to tonic water.

This bitter, sweetened, carbonated quinine-based beverage is an odd mixer. Unlike soda it's rarely consumed alone, and unlike juices and seltzer water it's rarely an ingredient in more complex cocktail recipes. Most of the time, tonic is served only with gin or vodka and a wedge of lemon or lime as garnish.

In the average bar, tonic comes spitting out of the "gun," the squirter that mixes flavored syrup with seltzer water as it shoots into your glass. But now many venues pour boutique-brand tonic and other sodas from bottles. One venue even makes it in-house.

Read the full article here.

Homemade tonic expiration date

I hadn't really experimented with my homemade tonic water (or consumed much of it either) since I made it on May 31. Today I was thinking about tonic again and decided to have a look at the bottle in the refrigerator. Bad news- it had mold growing on top. (It was in a whiskey bottle with metal screw cap that I repurposed to hold the tonic water syrup.)

So for all of you wondering how long your homemade tonic syrup will last in the (my) refrigerator, the answer is less than a month.

Tonic, Part II of XXIVIXDMXIV

In an effort to improve on the tonic water I made, which was barky, I tried a couple of things. First I re-filtered it through another coffee filter. This didn't seem to make a difference on either the flavor of the tonic or the resulting barky coating of my tongue.

Then, since I had a Britta filter that needed changing anyway, I used it to filter some of my tonic syrup. The resultant liquid was thinner (less syrupy), lighter in quinine taste (in a good way), but also losing most of the citrus flavor and sugar (in a bad way). So that was a failure as well.

Should I try again, I think the recipe could use less powdered cinchona bark, and perhaps I should try making a tea bag with it in the first place rather than putting it in raw. I also think it could use a few other flavors to make it more interesting. I've spoken with the Fever Tree people, the Q Tonic Water people, Todd Smith of Bourbon and Branch, and Jeffrey Morgenthaler about their versions so I have some ideas.

For now I have to go finish my story on what the pros are doing before I continue my amateur experimentation.

Tonic, Part I of XXIVIXDMXIV

I'm doing the tonic water research that everyone else is doing right now, and as part of the experiment I decided to make my own. I followed the recipe from Kevin Ludwig from Park Kitchen in Portland as published in Imbibe Magazine.Luckily, my bag of powdered cinchona bark did not break open like it did for "Food Dude", nor did I spill syrup all over my kitchen. Nor did I cut myself while chopping lemongrass nor burn myself on the oven. So all in all, it was a better cooking experience than when I do it with food.
I also followed suggestions in the comments for that article: allowing the mixture to sit overnight before filtering out the cinchona bark, and not adding the sugar until after the filtering.


But how does it taste? Just okay, I'd say. The initial sip is terrific, with a good balance of sweetness and bitter quinine with a little lingering sharpness. However it doesn't linger for as long as I want it to, and after the second sip my tongue feels like it's coated with bark dust. This "barky tongue" then dominates the flavor in subsequent sips with or without added gin.


I think I'm going to try to filter it a second time and see if it improves but that's going to be harder now with the sugar in it.Quest for tonic continues!