Last Wednesday I enjoyed a wonderfully low-key birthday celebration (joined by several bartenders — aah, my peeps! — including ones visiting from Portland and Seattle) at Copa d’Oro in Santa Monica, surely one of the best bars in the L.A. metro area. A world-class cocktail menu, a long and beautiful bar, an amazing stash of liquor, a friendly and inviting space, dangerously close to my day job … all that and grilled Nutella-almond butter paninis too? I’m so there.

A few months ago they debuted several new house originals on their cocktail menu, and I’ve been working my way through them ever since. Head barman Vincenzo Marianella is primarily responsible for the menu, and consequently we see lots of bitters and amari, plus some other Italian ingredients. One of these is the newly-reformulated liqueur Galliano, first developed in Italy in 1896 by a distiller named Arturo Vaccari (but now owned and developed by Lucas Bols in The Netherlands). Galliano’s infamy came about with the development of a drink in the 1960s called the Harvey Wallbanger, merely a Screwdriver with a Galliano float. The old liqueur, in that tall, beautiful bottle that doesn’t fit in your bar or on any shelf, was a very sweet vanilla-heavy concoction that most bartenders didn’t seem to have much use for, and if you ended up with a bottle chances are it remained rather full for many years, until its yellow coloring faded.

Recently Bols reformulated Galliano to its original recipe, now calling it Liquore Galliano L’Autentico. It’s a lot less sweet, with a higher proof, anise predominant in front but a broad base of herbs and spices, and the vanilla relegated to much more of a supporting role. Actually, it’s really good now, much more useful in cocktails, and you see it popping up in drinks at Copa here and there, both in improvised “market cocktails” as well as on the menu.

The new one I tried is the Custer, with Galliano providing sweetness and a spice base to the already nicely spicy base spirit, accented by two kinds of bitters taking the directions out to both fruity-tart and vegetal. I watched the bartender pretty closely, and this recipe seems to be spot-on.

THE CUSTER COCKTAIL

2 ounces Sazerac rye whiskey (6 year).
3/4 ounce Galliano L’Autentico.
3 barspoons Cynar.
2 dashes celery bitters (Bitter Truth).
2 dashes rhubarb bitters (Fee’s).
Orange peel.

Combine ingredients with ice in a mixing glass, stir for at least 20 seconds and strain into a chilled Old Fashioned glass. Garnish with a large orange peel after expressing the oil.

Mighty good, and lots going on in there — make one and enjoy it. Better still, if you’re local to L.A. head out to Copa and have one of the crew make it for you. Then stay for a few more, and have a grilled panino with ‘em.

UPDATE: I’ve revised my estimate of the recipe — knock the Galliano down to 3/4 oz. Permalink

I always try not to make any assumptions about my readership. I know there are a lot of cocktail geeks, nerds, and– er, ahem, aficionadoes and enthusiasts out there, but new folks discover this weblog all the time and might be new to the joys that the cocktail brings into our lives.

One of the very greatest cocktails in the history of Humankind, in the top five certainly, is the Manhattan Cocktail. For a spot-on perfect tutorial on how to make one, watch Bobby Heugel of my favorite bar between L.A. and New Orleans, Houston’s Anvil Bar and Refuge:

You may have noticed that Bobby used Sazerac Rye, the six-year-0ld variety we’re fond of calling “Baby Saz,” even though the printed recipe calls for Rittenhouse 100-proof rye.  Baby Saz is really good stuff and we use it all the time, but for a Manhattan I think the bonded Rittenhouse product can’t be beat.  The higher proof gives it a bigger kick and more body and brings out more of the rye’s spicy characteristics. I highly recommend this for use in your Manhattans.

The vermouth here is Carpano Antica Formula, simply put the greatest sweet vermouth on the planet.  Sure, Cinzano and Martini & Rossi are good, and Dolin Rouge is quite good, but nothing beats Carpano (car-PAH-no).  You’ll want to drink this alone, on the rocks with a twist of orange, even more so than other sweet vermouths (all of which make excellent aperitivos).  The depth of flavor, the spice and tempered sweetness, all the Christmassy brown spices in there, are a joy to the senses.  The only disadvantages of Carpano are that it’s more expensive — $26 a bottle as compared to about $10 for Martini & Rossi, and the difference in price is justified, and entirely worth it — and that it only comes in one-liter bottles.  Half-bottles would be ideal for keeping it from going bad on you.  Vermouth may be fortified wine that keeps longer than the bottles you basically have to finish on the same day, but it’s still wine and won’t last forever.   Perhaps you could split it with a friend and decant into smaller bottles, or just use LOTS of it so that it’s still in good shape by the time you get to the bottom.

Finally, when visiting Houston, do not miss a trip to Anvil.  You’ll thank me for it later. Permalink

[Well, I had hoped to hold off on posting until the blog redesign was done, but it's been over two weeks since I posted, and I really ought to make sure you know I'm not dead, and that I'm still writing.  We will, I hope, have a Grand Unveiling soon!  Now, on to the matters at hand ...]

Last Thursday night was another edition of Thursday Drink Night, taking place as usual in the Mixoloseum Chat Room. Bartenders, mixologists, cocktail writers, enthusiasts and more join into an affable rabble as we mix drinks and stay up too late.   TDN always has a theme, and sometimes an official sponsor, and last night it was a new product called Square One Botanical Spirit.  “Botanical Spirit”?  What the hell’s that?  Good question.

DRAMATIQUE™ bottle photo by CocktailNerd

Square One is most well known as a company that makes organic vodka. I understand it’s quite good as vodkas go, but as I’m not a vodka man I never paid it much attention.  Then came their second release, a cucumber flavored vodka that I got to try at The Sporting Life, a monthly gathering of local L.A. bartenders and cocktail nerds, with drinks made with the product by H. Joseph Ehrmann of Elixir in San Francisco.  H. made us some mighy fine drinks with it, and I found it to be quite a bit more interesting than most flavored vodkas I’d come across.

Recently Square One released Botanical, which is quite pointedly not labelled as a vodka.  It’s far, far more than a flavored vodka, and almost resembles a gin in its botanical complexity.  In fact, if it contained juniper (which it does not), it’d be a pretty tasty New Western-style gin.  As it is, it’s a pretty tasty … um, something.  We don’t exactly know what to call it.  It’s not flavored vodka, but more.  It’s not gin because there’s no juniper, not aquavit because there’s no caraway.  So far, it’s pretty unique, and perhaps “specialty spirit” comes closest, clunky as that is.

Square One Botanical’s botanicals include pear (which is the most forward), lavender, rose, chamomile, lemon verbena (a flavor and aroma that I adore; I wash with lemon verbena-scented soap every day), rosemary, coriander and citrus peel, in a base of neutral rye grain spirit that’s given as clean a fermentation as possible, just one pass through the column still and one simple filtration.  Another difference between this and a gin (besides the lack of juniper, of course) is that the botanicals go in afterward, and aren’t in the still during distillation.

The pear comes up in front, not like a pear-infused vodka (most of which I don’t really like) and not nearly as strong as a pear eau-de-vie, but still impossible to miss.  The lavender and rose gently envelop it, and any other lavender element you’d care to add to a cocktail based on this spirit (syrup, tincture or bitters) would go quite nicely.  The other spices are subtle, but provide a cushion upon which the flavor structure rests.  I really have to hand it to Square One for thinking outside the box on this one.  They wanted to produce something different, and they did — not only that, it’s good.

In coming up with an original cocktail for TDN my first thought was to treat it like a gin and make something Martini-like with it, just Square One Botanical with perhaps some Dolin Blanc sweet white vermouth to accent its fruity notes, but I decided to skip over that and head for something a bit more complex.  (I still might try that, though.)  I wanted some citrus to go along with that pear, some ginger too (I love that combination), and I wanted to boost the pear and lavender notes inherent in the spirit.  Here’s what I came up with.

THE AQUARIA COCKTAIL

2 ounces Square One Botanical spirit
1/2 ounce Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur
1/4 ounce fresh lime juice
1/4 ounce fresh orange juice
2 barspoons pear eau-de-vie (I used Purkhart)
1 dash Fee’s Old Fashion Aromatic Bitters
1 dash Scrappy’s Lavender Bitters (or lavender tincture)

Combine in a mixing glass, add ice, pop the shaker tin on and shake for a slow count to ten. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass, garnish with an orange peel.

The lavender bitters are optional, since they’re not easy to get.  Scrappy’s Bitters are a small-batch bitters maker out of (I think) Seattle, and while their lavender bitters are pretty one-note (lavender, with a bitter base) it works beautifully with this drink.  I think it’d work even better with Bobby Heugel’s house-made lavender-vanilla bitters from Anvil, but as I didn’t have any this did the trick.  In fact, I’m considering adding some vanilla extract to Scrappy’s to see how that works.

See the Mixoloseum weblog for more original recipes using Square One Botanical that flew into the ether that night — there were some mighty fine ones. Permalink