Alcademics.com

Global Cocktail Trends at World Class 2011

A month ago I attended the Diageo World Class Global Finals (Facebook group here) in New Delhi India. (Most of my posts on the matter can be found by following the India tag.) But I'm not done talking about it - just getting caught up now. 

There were six challenges in the contest and I sat in on two of them. Peter Dorelli judged the Cocktail Theater and Stars challenge, in which bartenders had to create a drink inspired by a woman; and then perform a fancy version of a bottle service serve. Gaz Regan judged the Gentlemen's Drinks & Fancy Tipples challenge, in which bartenders had to create one of each of those style of drinks. It was these two sessions I observed. 

(Tea service as bottle service.)

I noticed several trends in ingredients among the 32 competing bartenders (and two cocktails each). I found it pretty interesting that despite wide differences in product/ingredient availability in different parts of the world that there would be any patterns at all. Yet there were many commonalities among the cocktails I saw.

Top Flavor Trends at World Class Global Finals 2011

•  Chamomile. I saw chamomile tea, chamomile flower garnish, chamomile syrup, and chamomile-infused vermouth. This flower was everywhere at World Class.
• Tea. Chamomile, of course, but also Indian tea, breakfast blend tea, and other flavors. Also, tea service: tea pots, cups, and tea time rituals.
• Infused Vermouth. Again, chamomile-infused vermouth but also cardamon and other flavors. 
• Dry Ice. I'm not sure if this is a real trend - that all these bartenders planned to use dry ice in their drinks from the beginning (close to half of bartenders did, but keep in mind I was sitting in the theatrical judging) or if they just decided to use it because it was available in the supply room at World Class. 
• Chocolate. Many bartenders used chocolate syrup, liqueur, bitters, or gave the judges a side of solid chocolate (all high-cacao content chocolate; none of the milk chocolate stuff) to accompany their drinks. 
• Smoke. Several bartenders used the Polyscience Smoking Gun to smoke cocktails. They smoked the mixing glass, smoked the cocktail glass, and smoked a bell jar to put over the cocktail. Other bartenders burned herbs or wood chips directly. A couple of drinks were made with a rinse of smoky Lagavulin scotch. No mezcal was in sight, but that may very well have been a supply issue. 
• Sherry. I'm delighted to see that sherry is a global bartending trend. At World Class they had only oloroso/cream sherry available to use, but I think someone made an approximation of Pedro Ximenez with it as well.
• Yuzu. Not a ton of it was used, but enough to be noticeable. 
• Coriander and Cardamon. These spices were muddled, infused into spirits, or toasted fresh into several drinks. I almost want to call it a 'gin spice' trend.
• Coffee. There was a bit of coffee liqueur used, but more often coffee tinctures or grated coffee beans used in and on cocktails. 

(Jamie Mac uses dry ice for a smoke effect.)

Chefs Get Into the Gin Game Before and After Distillation

Two stories have popped up recently on the intersection between chefs and gin. 

Before:

Roxor gin is made in Texas and was developed in part by Robert Del Grande, a James Beard-awarded chef with a PhD in biochemistry. The gin  contains the usual juniper, corriander, orris, grains of paradise and citrus including grapefruit and lime; plus hibiscus,  cocoa nibs, Texas pecans, and cinnamon. 

The chef developed the gin, and it is distilled to his specifications at San Luis Spirits in Dripping Spring, Texas. 

After:

Chef Peter Smith of PS 7's in Washington DC uses the spent mash from gin distillation- the botanicals left in the bottom of the still - to cure meats for the restaurant. He uses the mash from both Bluecoat Gin in Philadelphia and Catoctin Creek in West Virginia. Then:

 At the distillery, the fresh, non homogenized botanical spices are boiled down and melded together into a balance of flavors that is mellow but intense. Peter mixes this leftover, tea-like compost, with oil, leaving it to sit for a month. Then, he strains it through three times to get it pure, clear, and compressed. 
 
He has created a “Ginola,” a play off breseola, by rubbing his beef with the spent botanicals and hanging it to dry and cure for about a month.  The beef develops a gin-like taste and is included on his tasting menu.  He has been curing “GinBelly,” similar to pancetta, a cured pork belly covered with the gin mash botanical and then rolled and dried for two-five months.  PS 7’s also now features a halibut dish in which the fish has been treated with his gin-mash powder, giving it a light and unexpected gin flavor.  He has also worked with Catoctin Creek to develop a gin salt. 

You can read the press release here.

A Whipped Cream Frenzy

Though dessert and pastry-flavored liqueurs are all the rage these days, I am amazed at the amount of alcoholic whipped cream products coming out.

There are now at least two brands of whipped cream flavored vodka (Burnett's Whipped Cream flavored vodka and Pinnacle Whipped Vodka) and two brands of alcoholic whipped cream (Whipped Lightning and Cream Alcoholic Whipped Cream).

I can imagine college bars will soon start serving shots of the whipped cream vodka with alcoholic whipped cream on top. Woooot!

 

 

Called It: The New Absolut Vodka Flavor

The new flavor of Absolut vodka was just announced, "an exotic blend of all-natural green, red, and yellow apple with fresh ginger combine to create ABSOLUT ORIENT APPLE."

Apple and ginger, who could have guessed? Oh right, I did.

In this post I finally put it together that all of the Absolut city flavors eventually become regular Absolut flavors with minor tweaks. I said:

I'm gonna make a guess that the next Absolut flavor will contain red apple and/or ginger.

Because that's what's in Absolut Brooklyn. 

BINGO.

 

 

New Products from Beam: Devil's Cut, Rose Cognac, and a Twelve Dollar 100% Agave Tequila

I wish all the major spirit companies would do this: Instead of being contacted by a million different PR agencies, I sat down with a Beam Global employee and she took me through some of the new product launches for Beam's brands over the next half a year. 

Beam has partnered with Thatcher's Organic Liqueurs so we may be seeing those around more. They're pretty low in alcohol level so I think they'll be more for home consumers than for bartenders. Of the ones I tried I think the apple-ginger one has the most potential.

Jim Beam is releasing the "Devil's Cut" in July/August. A play on the angel's share (the alcohol that evaporates through the barrel), the devil's cut is the bourbon that is trapped absorbed in the wood when the barrel is emptied. Apparently they've developed a way to get some of this whisky out. (Chuck Cowdery gets the info here.) They add a touch of this devil's cut to six-year-old Beam (with the same mash bill as their four-year-old) and release this product at 45% ABV.

I sampled the Devil's Cut and found it to be light bodied like regular Beam, but definitely a lot more woody. Not so much caramelized vanilla, but raw wood.

Knob Creek Single Barrel is just regular old Knob Creek but unblended and sold at 60% ABV instead of the usual 50%. The one I tried tasted like Knob Creek, at higher proof.

Courvoisier Cognac is coming out with a Rose' - a blend of cognac and wine. Sounds to me like it's a Pineau des Charentes but I don't know enough about it yet. Courvoisier continues to release new products - last year saw the launch of a 12-year and a 21-year bottlings. Finally cognacs are getting creative.

Sauza is launching a 100% agave tequila called Sauza Blue for  $11.99 and $13.99  $18.99 (the product was just released at this price- must have changed since speaking with me), in time for Cinco de Mayo. Sauza is usually a mixto, whereas their other lines - Tres Generaciones and Hornitos are 100% agave.

I think this is a pretty significant event, because:

• While 100% agave tequilas are growing even in the bad economy, the cheaper mixto tequilas are actually selling less. It seems Sauza is acting on this.
• We're currently in an agave glut, but the price of agave must be super low to offer this for twelve bucks. Will it be sustainable?
• 100% agave tequila must be bottled in Mexico, whereas mixto tequilas are usually trucked to the US and bottled there. Because Sauza is the #2 selling tequila their production is so big that they added an additional bottling line in Mexico to handle the bottling volume of this product.

So between Cuervo launching the 100% agave Tradicional Silver in the US ($24) and this 100% agave Sauza, things are moving in the right direction.

Alcademics is Influential

According to a recent study by eCairn, Alcademics.com is the most influential English-language spirits blog and the third most influential alcohol blog entirely. Cool!

eCairn Conversation is a software tool for measuring influencers and conversations in social media. This allows brands to identify the separate online communities, look at what they're talking about, and see where they're located. This information/software can be purchased by marketing companies looking to reach bloggers and other blatherers on the web.

I don't know what set of metrics they use to measure influence. It's certainly not pageviews alone as I don't win in that race, and I'm sure other companies use different formulas to measure the same thing with different results. We can't say that this is the end-all-be-all of influence measurement, but an additional one. 

And like like Oscars or the Tales of the Cocktail Spirits Awards, winning doesn't necessarily mean you're actually the best, but it sure feels nice.

Here's how they described their study:

Tagging along with previous analysis of social media Tribes and Influencers (here, here and there), we looked this time at the socialcohol ecosystem .

Even if the wine & alcohol industry is highly restricted and social media has its set of challenges, matters like beer, wine and liquor generate quite a bit of conversations from the virtual streets.

Here, we pulled 200 influencers from our existing communities of English speaking influencers (~1500 for wine, ~1000 for beers and ~500 for liquor) to create our own cocktail of the tops.

And here are their results. (Formatting pasted from Brookston Beer Bulletin's website. Thanks to Steve Raye of Brand Action Team for pointing me to the posting.)

Top 20 Alcohol Blogs

1. Brookston Beer Bulletin (Beer)
2. Good Grape: A Wine Blog Manifesto (Wine)
3. Alcademics.com (Liquor)
4. Eric Asimov’s The Pour: NY Times (Wine)
5. Seen Through a Glass (Beer)
6. Pencil and Spoon (Beer)
7. The Beer Nut (Beer)
8. Catavino (Wine)
9. Art of Drink (Liquor)
10. Drink With The Wench (Beer)
11. Wine Spectator (Wine)
12. Mutineer Magazine (Wine*) [Listed as a wine blog, but Mutineer also covers beer and spirits.]
13. Trader Tiki’s Exotic Syrups, Bitters and Spirits (Liquor)
14. RumDood (Liquor)
15. AlaWine (Wine)
16. Good Wine Under $20 (Wine)
17. Wannabe Wino Wine Blog (Wine)
18. The Pegu Blog (Liquor)
19. Through The Walla Walla Grape Vine™ (Wine)
20. Palate Press (Wine)

Jay Brooks has some additional analysis on his site and I think shares the same sentiments.

Big Changes, Slow Changes

Usually in cocktail writing we think in terms of microtrends: the latest techniques (barrel aging cocktails, fat-washing), the latest categories (mezcal, pisco), popular flavors or ingredients (falernum, smoke), and the latest bar themes (high-volume cocktail bars, tiki).

We don't talk too much about the macro-trends. In my latest post for FineCooking.com, I discuss one of the biggest macro-trends: that cocktails are getting better in general, with fresh ingredients, respect for the classics, and more knowledgeable bartenders.

Also, there's a recipe for the Sage 75 from the Vesper Bar at the new Cosmopolitan in Vegas.

Fat-Washing Doesn't Have to be Used for Evil

Fat-washing is the technique by which bartenders infuse the flavors in fatty substances into alcohol. Usually that's a pork product such as bacon. The meat is put into alcohol and infused for a time, then the liquid is chilled and the fatty part, which floats to the top, removed. The flavor of meaty death stays behind in the liquid.

But, vegetalians, it doesn't have to be animal carcass that is washed.

Shawn Soole in Victoria, BC, Canada fat-washed a grilled cheese sandwich into Mount Gay rum and made a Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup Martini. Read about it here and more on the recipe here.

And when I was in Germany, at the bar Amano, I had a Fat Julep. The drink is a mint-infused butter which is washed into a bourbon. That's an infusion of an infusion, folks!

What other non-meat items could we fat-wash? Apple butter, blue cheese, jalapeno poppers, sour cream and onion potato chips, peanut butter, pizza, garden burgers, lasagna!

Most of my weekly food intake consists of deep-fried and/or cheesy buttery goop, so I could start fat-washing everything and call it a liquid diet!