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Small Hand Foods Syrups Launches Web Store

Delicious Small Hand Foods syrups have been hard to get in most parts of the country/world, but as of now it will be a little bit easier as the new web store has launched.

Small Hand Foods is the brand by Jennifer Colliau, a Bay Area bartender who began making authentic orgeat and pineapple gum arabic (for Pisco Punch) when none was available on the market. She expanded the line to include grenadine, unflavored gum syrup, and raspberry gum syrup (plus the occaisional surprise).

The small (8.5 ounce) bottles run for $12, which is less expensive than you'll find on Amazon, and they have the full line unlike at Cask.

Check out the store here.

A Sampling of Sugars from Asia

Last year at Tales of the Cocktail I gave a talk along, with David Cid of Bacardi, about sugar, syrups, and rum. A detailed write-up of that talk is on the blog Commercial Free Cocktail.

As part of that talk, I passed around a ton of samples of sugars to taste. Most of these sugars were purchased in Singapore by Michael Callahan, bar manager of 28 HongKong Street. He carried a full suitcase of them for me, so he is awesome. Many of the sugars were taken home by seminar attendees (I encouraged it), or were no longer transportable, but seven of them made it back home with me.

For those of you not there to taste them in person, I wanted to write them up. It just took me five months to do it. Here are a few notes on the sugars.

Japanese Wasanbon Sugar

This is the famous Japanese wasanbon sugar. I picked up this packet in Japantown in San Francisco. It is labelled as "Baikodo Wasanbo". Here is some information about wasanbon sugar.

Wasanbon sugar is widely used in the world of Japanese sweets.
Wasanbon is a domestically produced light yellow sugar that is
made through a traditional Japanese manufacturing process
and a particular specialty in the Shikoku region. As wasanbon
sugar is made entirely by hand and the process is quite
detailed, mass production is impossible. Due to this and other
reasons, the price is higher than for ordinary sugar. The raw
material is chikuto, a kind of sugarcane with a thin stem, and
the manufacturing process is as follows :
-Squeeze the liquid out of the chikuto using a squeezer and
make shiroshita by boiling the liquid down.
-Put the shiroshita into a big "boat" the size of a tatami (rush-
mat), and knead it while adding water.
-Put the kneaded shiroshita into a bag made of hemp on the
outside and cotton on the inside and wring it.
-Place the entire bag into a "pressing boat" made of wood,
hang weights down from the tops of the cabers and apply
pressure via the principle of leverage.
-When pressure is applied, molasses is generated from the
shiroshita. Place the shiroshita remaining in the bag, not
the squeezed molasses, into the "boat" again and repeat the
same process three to five times. The shiroshita remains in
the bag, and is sifted through a sieve after being dried.

Wasanbon sugar crystals are fine, smooth and soft and melt
in the mouth while generating an elegant sweetness. In the
world of Japanese sweets, the taste of sugar is the life of the
sweet and is a treasured part of all Japanese sweets.

That information comes from this PDF document, which sugar nerds should definitely read. 

Tasting Notes: This stuff is delicious. It is soft and powdery and instantly melts on the tongue with a burst of beautiful pure sweetness and a slight afternote of molasses that you want more of (and I kinda hate molasses). Harmonious.

Taikoo brand Okinawa Style Natural Black Sugar

From the back of the package:

Taikoo Okinawa Style Natural Black Sugar is made from renowned Japanese sugarcane adopting the traditional Okinawa style of production. It is rich in the aroma of sugarcane and suitable for people from all age groups to take as a snack during leisure time. 

Okinawa Style Natural Black Sugar is ideal for preparing traditional Chinese recipes such as ginger soup, black bean wine, vinegar stew, lycii fructus with longanae arillus soup. It is also a perfect match for making Chinese style dessert such as chilled myotonin and red dates congee. 

Another website says:

Okinawan brown sugar is made from sugarcane grown in fields blessed with strong southern-island sunlight and minerals delivered by the ocean spray. Unlike other brown sugar, Okinawan brown sugar has a deep, rich flavor.

Not only used as a condiment, Okinawan brown sugar pieces are consumed as a sweet accompaniment to tea for relief of fatigue. Brown sugar is especially popular among women for its high iron and calcium content and is used as part of a remedy for anemia. It is also popular as a wholesome food. Use this great product regularly as part of your everyday diet.

And another website puts it more plainly:

Many Western women like to eat chocolate for comfort during their period, but Japanese women like to eat black sugar. For Taiwanese women, eating black sugar during their period is also a very common custom, probably because Taiwan is a former colony of Japan. They really eat pieces of sugar like it's candy.

Actually, the minerals like iron and calcium do help ease the tension and discomfort of a woman's period. Of course the calories of the black sugar do produce a lot of energy for this difficult time too.

Compare it to a cup of hot chocolate on a winter's day. Ginger and black sugar tea is a popular drink in almost every part of China. Apart from warming up the body, ginger tea also helps to cure colds.

Tasting Notes: Opening this packet I would swear I was smelling old Swedish licorice candy! It has a thick, raisiny aroma that reminds me of the Swedish licorice pipes. The taste isn't as dramatic as the aroma; a soft and gentle licorice that I can totally see enjoying as candy rather than sweetener. 

Thai Gula Merah Jaggery Powder

From the package, "Star Brand Jaggery Powder is a natural sweetening substance made by concentrating sugar cane juice without any preservatives and colorings. It can be used in brewing coffee, tea, and chocolate drinks and in preparing cakes, kuih, syrups, and desserts."

Tasting Notes: It doesn't have a strong aroma, smelling like dusty dirt for the most part. In the mouth it tastes of soft molasses mixed with super high sugar notes. Kind of disjointed; as if they just mixed one good light sugar with a too-sweet one.

China Rock Honey Sugar

First off: Best.Name.Evar. 

The package doesn't have much information in English. It says only, "Ingredients: chrysanthemum, sugar, honey, water," so it appears it's some sort of a mix. 

It's definitely processed and shaped into these rectangular pieces that look a lot like Rice Kripies Treats. 

Tasting Notes: It doesn't smell like much of anything, and the flavor is mild as well. It's crunchy like some sort of sugar candy with only a light molasses taste. I am not tasting any honey flavor. Oh well, at least the name is great. 

Small Lump Sugar

The only English words on the package are the ingredients (sugar and water), and "Product of China".

The lumps are in the size of giant crystals, the average size being about that of Chiclet gum. 

Tasting Notes: It smells only slightly of molasses but mostly just like rock candy. The lumps don't taste like anything at all until you bite into them, and then it's just like plain sugar, but a lot less sweet than typical white sugar.

Ueno brand Kurosato sugar.

Ingredients: black sugar.

This one I also found in San Francisco, and it sounds a lot like the other Japanese black sugar mentioned above.

Tasting Notes: It smells just like the other sugar too - Swedish licorice, but a little darker and more heavily baked. These chunks are much larger than in the other package, and their flavor far more white-sugar-sweet. Less interesting than the other brand of the same. 

Gula Melaka Coconut Candy

The ingredients of this package are coconut and sugar. Inside the package are four cylindrical, molasses-colored pieces of the candy.

Tasting notes: The smell is delicious, like a combination of maple sugar candy and molasses. The taste is also a bit like maple sugar candies, but more in texture than in flavor. Generally it's more brown sugary than anything else. I don't detect any coconut flavor.

Orange Sugar

This sugar I think Michael Callahan just bought in bulk in Singapore. I asked him for some more information about it. He says:

This is the famous "Orange Sugar". It is sold as you see it (in baggies) in all the Wet-Markets throughout Singapore. The base is a granulated Gula Merah (Palm Sugar). The coloring comes from additives. I have not found out what the original coloring agents were, nowadays they use modern food dyes. The color is to brighten up a local sweet dish called "Putu Mayam", an Indian dish variation adopted by the Malay people. The dish is all white and the "orange sugar" brought color and also allowed you to see how much you had added. It is wildly inconsistent and I am certain some of them must be carcinogenic. I love playing with it for making syrups as It brings a nice hue and tone to the drink with its touch of pink. 

Tasting Notes:  It doesn't smell like anything. Though it looks powdery, it's actually really small granules. The flavor is just of sugar, but it is pleasantly mild in sweetness. Nothing earth-shaking, but pretty nonetheless.

 

For more information on sugar from around the world, check the Sugar Spirit Project index at this link. 

When Did Grenadine Become an Artificial Ingredient?

We all know that grenadine is supposed to be a syrup made of pomegranate juice and sugar, often with orange flower water added in. But most commercial grenadines are little more than red food coloring and sweetener. 

We might think that artificially-flavored cocktail ingredients like grenadine all came to be in the post-war 1940s and 50s, or in the disco-drink 1970s, but it turns out that grenadine has been an artificially flavored syrup for over 100 years. 

As we read in a previous post, pomegranates were brought to California by the Spanish in the late 1700s, and grown commercially before 1917. We've also seen how grenadine became a trendy cocktail ingredient in the 1910s, first showing up in drinks in the 1890s. But was the grenadine used from 1890s through the 1920s real grenadine? 

Coincidentally I recently finished the book Drinking Boston: A History of the City and Its Spirits (2012), in which which author Stephanie Schorow does some deep research on the most famous classic cocktail to come out of the city (and that contains grenadine): the Ward Eight. 

In trying to find a more specific date of creation of the Ward Eight, Schorow looks into grenadine availability in Boston. She notes that pomegranates were available in Boston in the 1890s, according to a market report in the Boston Globe. 

But how about grenadine? 

Grenadine Goes Bad

Did bartenders ever use real pomegranate grenadine in their cocktails? In the US, maybe, maybe not.

There was a New York State Supreme Court case in 1872 involving apparently one of the first persons to produce grenadine syrup (at least there in New York) from real pomegranates. He called his "grenadine" or "grenade syrup", then someone else started calling his syrup 'grenade syrup' and there was a suit over using the same words. 

"THE plaintiff was engaged in the business of manufacturing from the juice of the pomegranate a syrup which he named Grenadine and Grenade Syrup and sold under those names. Subsequently the defendant commenced making a syrup which he sold under the name of Grenade Syrup. The plaintiff obtained an injunction order restraining the sale of any article under the name which he had thus previously appropriated. The defendant alleging that Grenade was a French word signifying pomegranate and that Grenade Syrup was sold in France by that name and denying that the plaintiff could acquire an exclusive right to use a foreign name by being the first to introduce it into this country moved to vacate the injunction order."

So it appears real grenadine from pomegranates was being made and sold in New York in 1872.

But it wasn't long before fake grenadine was on the market. I'm not sure when it was first manufactured without pomegranate, but it was quite early on. 

In a book called The Standard Manual of Soda and Other Beverages: A Treatise Especially Adapted to the Requirements of Druggists and Confectioners (from 1906) the recipe for grenadine extract lists as ingredients clove oil, orange peel oil, ginger tincture, vanilla extract, diluted phosphoric acid, maraschino liqueur, cochineal (which we know is a red coloring made from bugs), water, and alcohol. Note the absence of pomegranate.

In 1912 there was a ruling in a case called U.S. v. Thirty Cases Purporting to be Grenadine Syrup. (This is covered in the book Drinking Boston.) The government seized the shipment because there was no pomegranate in this grenadine - it was made from sugar, citric and tartaric acids, and 'certain fruits.'

Interestingly though, the court ruled that because grenadine wasn't as familiar to Americans as lemon and oranges (and that it was only an article of commerce in the US in the last 10-15 years), there was no reason for consumers to expect to get pomegranates in their grenadine. (You can read the court case and decision here.)

A later court decision ruled that grenadine is not even a fruit syrup, as it's not made with fruit but with citric acid.

 

The Fake Grenadine Backlash

Did the first US bartenders to use grenadine ever use the real deal? I haven't found incidences in my books of bartenders specifying the word "pomegranate" when talking about grenadine, so perhaps they were always using commercialized artificial grenadine. 

In later books, authors clearly spelled out their displeasure with the fake stuff, particularly the fake stuff from America.

In the fabulous book The Gentleman's Companion (aka Jigger, Beaker, and Flask) from 1939, Charles H. Baker, Jr. acknowledges the decline in grenadine quality. He says, "Don't be deceived by inferior American imitations of the real thing. Be sure and get the imported."

David Embury also warned against grenadine. In The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (1948), he defines grenadine as, "A very sweet, reddish, non-alcoholic syrup mildly flavored with pomegranates. Used primarily for color rather than flavor."

In 1972, Kingsley Amis said grenadine was, "A non-alcoholic, sweetened sort of pomegranate juice, nice to look at, odd in flavour- I am never sure whether I like it or not. But quite a few recipes include it."

Modern Grenadine

Rose's grenadine, the most popular brand, is made from "High Fructose Corn Syrup, Water, Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate, Sodium Benzoate (Preservative), Red 40, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Blue 1." Yum! 

Some brands of grenadine that do use real pomegranates are Small Hand Foods, Sitrrings, and Employees Only. PAMA pomegranate liqueur is also made with pomegranate juice, plus vodka and tequila. 

In Eric Felten's book How's Your Drink? from 2009, he says, "You can no more make a Bacardi Cocktail with red-dyed corn syrup than you can make a chicken salad sandwich with turkey."

But perhaps they'd been making Bacardi cocktails with turkey all along.  

 

For the month of December I'll be looking at the pomegranate and its use in cocktails, including in grenadine and in PAMA pomegranate liqueur, the sponsor of the project. Check out the information developed just for bartenders at PamaPros.com.

Other posts in this series:

• Intro to Pomegranate
• How to Remove Pomegranate Seeds and Make Grenadine the Easy Way
• The History of Grenadine Use in Cocktails: Literature Review
• The History of Grenadine Use in Cocktails: Theories and Conclusions

The History of Grenadine Use in Cocktails: Literature Review

When was grenadine first used in cocktails? I thought this would be a simple question to answer, but not so much. Along the way to figuring this out, I've had to split up this one blog post into several.

First we'll look at the cocktail books from 1862 - 1930 and see where grenadine is called for in recipes. Then we'll try to draw some conclusions from that. And then we'll look into what the grenadine that bartenders were using really was: made from fresh pomegranate or artificially-flavored? 

So let's get busy. 

From Nowhere to Everywhere

In Jerry Thomas' How to Mix Drinks, the first bartenders' guide from 1862, he calls for raspberry and strawberry syrups throughout, plus shrubs made from cherries and white currants, but I don't see any pomegranate. 

Fifty years later in Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930, I counted about 100 drinks that call for grenadine. Many of those say "raspberry syrup or grenadine" so it seems one had replaced the other. Let's see what happened in between. 

A Review of Grenadine in Cocktail Books 1862 - 1930

In Harry Johnson's Bartender's Manual from 1882, his list of required syrups at the bar do not include grenadine but white gum, raspberry, pineapple, lemon, strawberry, orange, orchard, rock candy, and orgeat syrups. 

The Modern Bartenders' Guide by O.H. Byron from 1884 lists recipes for cordials and syrups, concentrated fruit syrups, and fruit brandies: none of them list pomegranate or grenadine. 

In The Flowing Bowl (1891) by The "Only" William, I don't see any grenadine or pomegranate recipes, but several have raspberry syrup, including the Violet Fizz, the Knickerbocker, and the Pineapple Julep.

So far, the first grenadine recipe I see in a cocktail book comes from Cocktail Boothby's American Bar-Tender, from 1891. In the body of the text, it is only mentioned once, and not even in a cocktail, but in "Turkish Harem Sherbet." However, stay tuned for more information that comes from a later edition.

In Modern American Drinks by George Kappler (1895), The Bosom Caresser is made with raspberry syrup, egg, brandy, and milk. In later books, the ingredient changes.

This book shows grenadine beginning to creep into cocktails. Specifically:

• Grenadine Cocktail: "Use grenadine in place of gum-syrup in any kind of cocktail."
• Grenadine Lemonade: "Make a plain lemonade rather tart, and add a pony of grenadine before shaking. Trim with fruit, serve with straws."
• Pousse Cafe (French Style): Grenadine, maraschino, orange curacoa, green Chartresue, cognac. Note that there is also an American Style pousse cafe that includes everything but the grenadine, and a New Orleans Style pousse cafe that uses raspberry syrup instead of grenadine, plus you light this drink on fire. 
• Schickler (brandy, grenadine, soda)

Meanwhile, in France, grenadine was all the rage in Louis Fouquet's Bariana from 1896. His recipes include:

• Bosom Caresser - grenadine, maraschino, cognac, sherry
• Corpse Reviver -  This is a 13-layer Pousse Cafe, not the version we know today.
• Pick Me Up - lemon juice, grenadine, kirsch, champagne, orange slice
• Chicago -creme de noyaux (the signature ingredient of this book),grenadine, cognac, Amer Besset, seltzer water, lemon slice
• Mother's Milk - Curacao, noyaux, grenadine, egg yolk, cognac, milk, nutmeg (gross!)
• Ranson Cooler - Noyaux, curacao, grenadine, kirsch, bitter, and seltzer water, lemon slice (looks just like the Chicago)

I also don't see any grenadine in Mixicologist by C.F. Lawlor (1895). 

Stuart's Fancy Drink and How to Mix Them (1902) also lists many recipes for syrups and liqueurs, but no grenadine. 

A brief look through Recipes of American and Other Iced Drinks by Charlie Paul (1902) didn't reveal any grenadine either. 

Back to Cocktail Bill Boothby's American Bar-Tender. In an addendum of the 1908 edition of the book are several typed pages with new cocktails (apparently collected from contact with other bartenders), and here we find some grenadine. 

• Jack Rose Cocktail (credited to R.H. Towner of Wm. St. N.Y.) with grenadine, applejack, and lime juice
• Marguerite Cocktail ("conceived by the famous Otto as served in Henry's Hotel 11 Rue Volney, Paris, France and the La Salle Hotel, Chicago) with lime, grenadine, Plymouth gin, dash of absinthe, white of an egg
• Opalescent Cocktail (a la Bingham American Congress Bar, City of Mexico) with lemon, grenadine, mint leaf, egg white, Plymouth gin). You'll recognize that last drink as the better-known Clover Leaf or Clover Club.

After this point, grenadine really takes off. 

In Drinks by Jacques Straub (1914) we find a ton of grenadine drinks:

• Aviation Cocktail (applejack, lime, absinthe, grenadine)
• Bacardi Cocktail (grenadine, Bacardi, lime)
• Beauty Spot Cocktail (orange juice, sweet and dry vermouth, gin, grenadine)
• Booby Cocktail (gin, grenadine, lime)
• Chantecler Cocktail ("Bronx with 4 dashes of grenadine syrup. Shake.)
• C.O.D. Cocktail (grenadine, gin, slice of grapefruit)
• Isabelle Cocktail (grenadine, creme de cassis)
• Italian Cocktail (Italian vermouthg, grenadine, Fernet Branca)
• Jack Rose
• Japanese Cocktail (not the standard one - this contains grenadine, rye, Italian vermouth, and curacao)
• Marqueray Cocktail (lime, absinthe, grenadine, egg white, gin)
• Millionaire Cocktail (orange bitters, cuacao, rye, grenadine, egg white)
• Rose Cocktail (orange juice, grenadine, gin)
• Royal Smile Cocktail (lime, grenadine, dry vermouth, apple brandy, egg white)
• Ruby Cocktail (grenadine, apple jack, gin)
• Ruby Royal Cocktail (gin, dry vermouth, raspberry, frappe')
• Society Cocktail (dry gin, dry vermouth, grenadine)
• Sunshine Cocktail (lime, dry vermouth, Old Tom gin, grenadine, egg white)
• Country Club Cooler (grenadine, dry vermouth, soda)
• Sea Side Cooler (lime, grenadine, soda)
• Cider Cup (lots of fruit and grenadine)
• Grape Juice (same)
• Ginger Ale (same with ginger ale added)
• Star Daisy (lime, gin, applejack, grenadine)
• Amer Picon Pouffle Fizz (Amer Picon, grenadine, egg white)
• Elsie Ferguson Fizz (lemon, strawberries, gin, grenadine, cream, soda)
• Grenadine Gin Fizz (grenadine, Old Tom gin,lemon, soda)
• King Cole Fizz ("gin fizz with grenadine syrup")
• Bemus Fizz (lemon, grenadine, lime, sugar, gin, cream, soda)
• Ruebli Fizz (lemon, orange, grenadine, Rhine wine, soda)
• Whiskey Grenadine Fizz (lemon, grenadine, rye or bourbon)
• Amer Picon High Ball (Amer Picon, grenadine, soda)
• Irish Rose High Ball (Irish whiskey, grenadine, soda)
• Queen's High Ball (Amer Picon, grenadine, soda)
• French Flag (grenadine, maraschino, creme Yvette)
• Polly ("Gin Fizz made with grenadine syrup instead of using sugar.")
• Pousse Cafe No. 2 (grenadine, anisette, creme Yvette, Green Chartreuse, cognac)
• Millionaire Punch (lime, sugar, whiskey, grenadine, creme de menthe)
• Amer Picon Sour (Amer Picon, lemon, lime, sugar, grenadine)
• Canadian Whisky Sour (lemon, lime, sugar, Canadian whiskey, grenadine)
• Grenadine Sour (lemon, grenadine, dry gin)
• Grenadine Gin Sour (same with whiskey)
• Millionaire Sour (lime, lemon, grenadine, rye, curacao)

The book lists raspberry syrup in other drinks separately. The Knickerbocker lists the drink with raspberry syrup. 

In Hugo R. Ensslin's Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1916-1917) we also have a ton of grenadine drinks. Clearly grenadine was  well-established at this point. Drinks that include grenadine in the book are: Beauty Spot, Clover Leaf Cocktail, Daiguiri [sic] Cocktail, Hugo Bracer, "Have a Heart" Cocktail, Jack Rose Cocktail, Littlest Rebel Cocktail, Millionaire Cocktail I, New York Cocktail, Oppenheim Cocktail, President Cocktail, Pollyanna Cocktail, Pinky Cocktail, Royal Smile Cocktail, Santiago Cocktail (same as the 'Daiguiri"), September Morn, Saxon Cocktail, Twin Six Cocktail, Wallick's Special, Apricot Cooler, Lone Tree Cooler, Picon Highball, California Lemonade, American Rum Punch, Bacardi Rum Punch, Pineapple Punch, Hugo Rickey, Applejack Sour, Fireman's Sour, Knickerbein, Pousse Cafe, Wild Eye Rose. 

Some interesting things about this book:

• The Bacardi Cocktail doesn't mention grenadine, and yet the "Daiguiri" does. 
• The Knickerbein isn't made with grenadine in many recipes but here it is. 
• The Daisies are all made with grenadine, not raspberry syrup. This seems a big switch from previous books. 

In Cocktails: How To Mix Them by Robert Vermeire (1922), which was published in London, we see grenadine drinks such as the Chinese Cocktail, Club Cocktail, Daiquiri (the same Bacardi Cocktail-Daiquiri reversal is present here), Dempsey Cocktail, Depth Bomb, Gloom Raiser, Luigi Cocktail, Millionaire, Monkey Gland, R.A.C. Cocktail, Monkey Gland Cocktail, "75" Cocktail, Tipperary, Trocadero, Ward Eight Cocktail, and Whiz-Bang. That's just the cocktails- there are also coolers, juleps, sangarees, etc. 

• In the Clover Club Cocktail recipe, raspberry syrup is listed in the ingredients, but in the description it says, "Grenadine is often substituted for raspberry syrup."
• The Jack Rose Cocktail lists "A little raspberry syrup or grenadine" in the ingredients. 

In Barflies and Cocktails by Harry and Wynn (published in Paris in 1927), we again see lots of grenadine in the recipes. Below are some notes.

• The Bacardi Cocktail has grenadine and so does the "Dacqueri"
• The Clover Club Cocktail is again listed with raspberry but a note says "In London for some time it has been the custom to serve Grenadine instead of Raspberry."
• The Clover Leaf Cocktail (a Clover Club with a mint leaf on top), however, specifies grenadine. 
• The Daisies use grenadine. 
• Under "Various Continental Beverages" (the continent would be Europe), we see some interesting combinations such as Kirsch and Grenadine and Picon Grenadine, both of which are the two mixed with soda.

And that brings us to the Savoy Cocktail Book from London in 1930. Some notes:

• The Bacardi Cocktail Special is made with grenadine, Beefeater Gin, Bacardi Rum, and lime juice. 
• The Clover Club is made with grenadine, and the Clover Leaf is listed as "The same as Clover Club with a sprig of fresh mint on top."
• There are a few Daisy cocktails, but only the Gin Daisy is sweetened with grenadine. Other daisies call for different liqueurs. 
• The Jack Rose is made with grenadine and "applejack or calvados" (as I'm sure the latter would be easier to come by in London).
• The Bosom Caresser is made with grenadine 
• The Monkey Gland is made with grenadine 

In the next post in this series, we'll look at some conclusions from this literature review. 

 

For the month of December I'll be looking at the pomegranate and its use in cocktails, including in grenadine and in PAMA pomegranate liqueur, the sponsor of the project. Check out the information developed just for bartenders at PamaPros.com.

 

Dehydrated Liqueur Flavor Pills and Champagne Cocktails

As an ongoing part of my Solid Liquids Project, I have dehydrated various liqueurs into flavored powders and am now experimenting with new ways to use them. 

In yesterday's post I described how I bought a pill press to make tablets out of the liqueurs. 

I started with Angostura bitters, but then made additional "flavor pills" out of Campari, Midori, and Aperol. 

I was thinking that these would be fun flavor enhancers for drinks, especially champagne drinks. 

A cool presentation might be to give a guest a glass of champagne and a variety of flavor enhancers from which to choose. To make it extra fun, I put some in a pill box.

Then you pick your pill and add it to the sparkling wine. It fizzes up nicely.

And eventually it breaks down and colors and flavors the drink.

It does take several minutes for the flavor to become noticeable in the champagne. I tried to speed up the process by experimenting with adding baking powder to the mix, but this affected the flavor of the drink. 

Thus this works best with the most strongly flavored liqueurs, and using rather large sized flavor pill tablets. It could also be a fun addition to hot tea. 

Sometime soon I'll do some experimenting (I've run out of sparkling wine for now) to see which flavors work best in this format. 

I hope this inspires some fun experimenting!

 

The Bitter Pill: Dehydrated Angostura Bitters Tablets

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I wanted to find some more uses for the dehydrated liqueurs I spent a few months developing. The index to that experimentation is here. 

Yesterday I tried putting dehydrated liqueurs into pill capsules, but these did not readily dissolve in any of the drinks I put them in. 

So I went online and bought a pill press. You'll find them online often called a "pollen press" to make some sort of pollen pills (and I get the impression that they're also used in vaporizers with marijuana). Anyway, the one I bought was this simple split pipe and sleeve on Ebay. I bought the half-inch size.

You simply put some powder in the sleeve and the metal pipes into either end, then bang them together using a rubber or wooden hammer. It produces a tablet of sorts that you can make in any thickness. 

So now they're ready to use. One of the first ones I made was not the Campari or other typical liqueurs, but Angostura bitters. (I mixed Angostura and sugar and dehydrated them together in the oven.)

That way, this "bitter pill" of Angostura and sugar can be added to bourbon to make an instant Old Fashioned cocktail.

It can also be added to champagne to make a Champagne Cocktail.

 

A Brilliant Idea That Didn't Quite Work

You'll remember I spent a few months figuring out the best way to dehydrate liqueurs into flavored sugars.

Now I'm finding new ways to use those liqueur-flavored sugars.

Typically bartenders who use these dehydrated liqueurs sprinkle some on top of an egg white foam or use them as a rimming sugar on a cocktail glass. But I had the idea to use them as an optional flavor enhancer to cocktails - give the customer a drink and some powdered liqueur and let them add it if desired. (Some bars do this with bitters and tinctures.)

So I bought some vegetarian capsules and filled them with dehydrated liqueurs.

They look awesome, right? 

But unfortunately, they didn't perform as expected. When adding them to a cocktail the capsules didn't dissolve. I tried a boozy cocktail, a fizzy cocktail, and an acidic cocktail in the hopes that these would help speed up the process. I even tried a hot cocktail to see if that worked. 

In all forms, the capsules dissolved eventually, but if you want to wait 20+ minutes for that to happen you're a more patient drinker than I. 

Ah well, it was a cool idea that didn't work out. 

But in tomorrow's post, I'll talk about a technique that actually worked...

Read more about the Solid Liquids Project and how to deyhydrate liqueurs here.

Show Us Your Sugar: The Sugar House in Detroit

 

As part of my ongoing study of sugar in spirits and cocktails, I am curious to know what sugars bartenders are using in their bars - raw sugars, simple syrups, and any other sugars.

 

Bartenders: I'd love it if you'd send me a picture of your sugar and tell me about your program. 

I got the idea for a series from Dave Kwiatkowski of Sugar House in Detroit, who sent a picture of his sugar. 

 

 

Kwiatkowski says, "It's certified fair trade Malawian natural demerara sugar.  It's extremely sweet and an amazingly rich tasting, so instead of a 2:1 we use a 1:1, and often have to dial back the syrup just a bit."

"Before we hooked up with Wholesome, I was running around to all the Mexican markets in Detroit buying up all their Zulka every other day, as none of the food purveyors here seem to know what natural sugar is about.  Needless to say, that got old."

I didn't realize how much sugar bars actually go through. Kwiatkowski says, "We started buying it in mid November, and I've already purchased about 475lbs, with a few bags left." That was in January.

By my calculations that's about 60 pounds of sugar per week!

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Want to show off your bar's sugar program? Please send me an email. 

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.