Base spirit, sweet vermouth and bitters. It’s a classic combo, which gave us the Martinez and the Manhattan to name but two (not to mention myriad Manhattan variations).

The Scotch whisky version of this combination has long deserved its own name (don’t call it a Scotch Manhattan!). Here’s the basic recipe.

Rob Roy

2 ounces blended Scotch whisky.
1 ounce sweet vermouth.
2 dashes Angostura bitters.

Stir with ice for 30 seconds and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry.

A Rob Roy lends itself very well to being made as a Perfect Rob Roy (1/2 ounce each of sweet and dry vermouth) or a Dry Rob Roy (1 ounce dry vermouth). If you make it dry garnish with a lemon peel; if perfect you may use either lemon peel or cherry.

Gary Regan is a proponent of Peychaud’s Bitters in a Rob Roy, and I’m very much with him on this. The cherry and anise flavors of Peychaud’s marry well with the peat and smoke of Scotch, and I’ve been making mine with Peychaud’s ever since I first read his suggestion. Like this — here’s what we’d probably hand you if you came over and asked for a Rob Roy:

Rob Roy
(Chuck & Wes’ typical version)

2 ounces Famous Grouse 12-year-old blended Scotch whisky.
1 ounce Cinzano sweet vermouth.
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters.
Lemon twist.

Stir and strain, chilled cocktail glass, express oil from twist and garnish.

Gary goes further, though. He’s a major espouser of the “garbage-in-garbage-out” theory, and is even bold enough to advocate the use of powerfully flavored single malt Scotch whiskies in cocktails (something which causes a few Scotch-drinking acquaintances of mine to recoil in horror). I’m with Gary on this one, but it requires careful consideration of flavor and balance.

Brief digression: We’ve been watching a series on the Fine Living Network called “Great Cocktails.” When we heard about it we were intrigued but skeptical; I’ve seen plenty of bad TV about cocktails, and I was hoping this one would raise the bar. For the most part, it does. While we do disagree with some of the things espoused by the host (please don’t encourage home cocktail mixers to freepour — use a jigger!), generally the approach is very good, and they’re talking to all the right people, including Duggan McDonnell, Audrey Saunders and Gary.

On the last edition of “Great Cocktails” that we watched, Gary made a Rob Roy — a classic cocktail — yet remade it entirely by using one of the most powerful Scotch whiskies in existence. When using so powerful an ingredent, you need to adjust the balance of your drink so that the Scotch doesn’t completely overwhelm everything else. In this case the standard 2:1 (or occasional 3:1) ratio gets bumped up to equal proportions, with more bitters then you’d normally use.

It sounds mad, but trust me — it works. I made these the other night when Wes wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t strictly medicinal, although it did have that effect. It was, in addition, a ballsy and stupendous drink.

The Laphroaig Rob Roy
(from the delightfully mad Gary Regan)

1-1/2 ounces Laphroaig 10 Year Old Scotch Whisky.
1-1/2 ounces Cinzano Rosso vermouth.
4 healthy dashes Peychaud’s Bitters.

Combine with ice in a mixing glass and stir for no less than 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled Champagne flute. I’d omit the garnish, unless 1) you’re really crazy, and 2) you had one of my friend Barry’s smoked cherries (he threw a pan of them into the smoker when we was smoking a hunk of meat; technique described here).

It cured him for a day, but then he got sick again yesterday. I should have made two.

[UPDATE: Not only is the Roy Roy a great cocktail, it’s also one of my very favorite bars anywhere. When in Seattle visit Rob Roy, have some of their great cocktails, and tell Zane and Anu that Chuck and Wes said hi!]

I stumbled across a few recipes on the Chowhound site for a specialty cocktail created by the guys at Employees Only in New York, one of the top cocktail spots in the city. The recipes centered around a cocktail consisting of gin, dry vermouth and Cointreau — sounds simple, and very similar to a couple dozen cocktails in the database, but the similarity ends there when the gin is infused with lavender and the vermouth with herbes de Provence.

Provençale
(Employees Only, NYC)

2-1/2 ounces lavender-infused Plymouth gin.
2-1/2 ounces Vermouth de Provence.
1 ounce Cointreau.

Combine with ice in a mixing glass and stir for 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange twist.

YIELD: 2 drinks.

To make lavender-infused gin, add 1-1/2 teaspoons dried lavender to one 750ml bottle of Plymouth Gin. Infuse for 24 hours, then strain and rebottle.

To make Vermouth de Provence, start with 2-1/4 teaspoons of herbes de Provence and one 750ml bottle of Noilly Prat Original Dry vermouth. Add the herbs to 3/4 cup of the vermouth and bring to a simmer (not a boil!) over low-medium heat. Simmer for 5 minutes, remove from heat, allow to cool for 15 minutes, then strain. Pour the infusion back into the bottle with the rest of the vermouth.

Sure, make two. Who wants to drink alone?

These guys play with infusions a lot and savory flavors in cocktails. It fascinates me, and I’ll definitely be visiting when I finally get my butt to New York.

Wes dug this one up last night, browsing through Robert’s cocktail list. By The Professor’s reckoning you might be able to call this an “Improved” Martini, although … really, there’s no improving on a Martini. This is a damned tasty drink, though.

The Caprice Coctkail

1-1/2 ounces gin.
1/2 ounce dry vermouth.
1/2 ounce Bénédictine.
1 dash orange bitters.

Combine with cracked ice and stir for 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Straw colored, smooth and with a touch of spice. Mmmmmmm.

I suspect that many of the upcoming Cocktail of the Day posts will come from Dave Wondrich’s new book Imbibe! — it’s so inspirational, getting back to our roots, and besides, they look delicious.

This is a nice, refreshing drink great for hot days and tropical climes, although it’s a bit removed from the original version as it was invented in 1915 at the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore by a bartender named Ngiam Tong Boon.

Here’s the current, most popular version of the drink. While it may not be the original version, as Chris McMillian quotes Dale DeGroff, “When a drink tastes this good, who cares if it’s the original one or not?”

The Singapore Sling
(Contemporary version)

1-1/2 ounces gin.
1/2 ounce Cherry Heering.
1/2 ounce Bénédictine.
1/4 ounce Cointreau.
1/2 ounce fresh lime juice.
2 ounces pineapple juice.
1 dash Angostura bitters.
2 dashes grenadine.
Club soda.

Combine with ice and shake well. Strain into a tall wine glass or Collins glass over ice, and top with club soda. Garnish with an orange-cherry flag.

Research by Dr. Cocktail, among others, suggests that the original version of the drink was much drier, made with a dry cherry brandy like kirschwasser rather than the sweet Cherry Heering. This alleged original is good too, and very much worth a try. Doc has renamed it the “Straits” Sling.

Straits Sling

2 dashes of Orange Bitters.
2 dashes of Angostura Bitters.
The juice of half a lemon.
1/8 gill (1/2 ounce) of Bénédictine.
1/8 gill (1/2 ounce) of Dry Cherry Brandy.
1/2 gill (2 ounces) of Gin.

Shake with ice, pour into a tumbler and fill up with cold soda water.

I know the weather’s turning cold, but if you happen to have an unseasonably balmy day (we’ve had plenty up until just this week), sling away.

Here’s New Orleans master bartender Chris McMillian making one for us:

One of the things Dave Wondrich continued to emphasize in Imbibe! is that the gin you read about in all of Jerry Thomas’ classic recipes is not the gin you’re thinking of. At all.

Today, when you say “gin,” people automatically assume you mean London dry gin, which is by far the most prevalent. Beefeater, Tanqueray, that sort of gin, and the similar Plymouth gin, and all its contemporary variations (from Hendricks to No. 209 to Aviation), despite their different flavor profiles, are all far more similar to each other than to the gin described in the Professor’s (and Dave’s) book. The gin they’re talking about in many of these old recipes is Dutch gin (to use a mildly inaccurate term), the precursor to London dry gin, which in Dutch is galled genever or jenever, and in the Professor’s day was called “Hollands gin.”

It’s very different stuff, and I had very little experience with it until fairly recently. Genever comes in two main varieties: jonge and oude, literally translated as “young” and “old,” but unlike most other similar appellations this doesn’t refer to the age of the spirit, it’s more the style. Oude is the one you want, distilled from malted barley (moutwijn, or “malt wine”), with some rye and corn; it’s “thick, malty and divine,” as Dave describes it. It actually has more in common with whiskey than with London dry gin, and Dave even recommends an emergency substitute for oude genever if you need some but can’t find any, a mixture of Irish whiskey, Plymouth gin and a little simple syrup (“not particularly adequate … [t]his works tolerably well in Punches and the like, but less so in Cocktails.”) Oude genever, in the old days, was considered a bit less than palatable on its own, and because of this herbs were added, including juniper berries (for which the Dutch term is jeneverbes, hence jenever or genever and then “gin”). Jonge is a clear spirit, dating from the World War I era, with a much more neutral flavor and very little maltiness; while it’s good too, I prefer the oude myself.

You may have a bit of a hard time finding it, but the first brand I managed to find fairly easily was Boomsma, which was available at all my local liquor haunts, as well as nationwide at BevMo. It’s cheap too — around $15 a bottle, and really tasty stuff. Unfortunately, the stuff from the Netherlands I really want isn’t available here at all — it’s called korenwijn, meaning “corn wine,” and it’s even older than genever. It’s a distilled malt spirit, and a precursor to the oude type of genever, but has a great character all its own. Philip Duff, who’s with Bols in the Netherlands, gave me a swig of korenwijn at Tales of the Cocktail, and my immediate reaction was “I want!”

Nowadays the premier genever readily available to us in the U.S. is Bols Genever, which is a really wonderful product. It’s clear but has a wonderfully robust malty flavor, and is Lucas Bols’ 1820 recipe. The stuff the Professor served probably tasted a lot like this.

So, what shall we do with our genever?! There was one cocktail in the book I zeroed in on and wanted to try right away. As we know, the original definition of the Cocktail (“more vulgarly called a Bittered Sling”) was a mixture of spirits, sugar, water (those two often in the form of gum syrup or simple syrup) and bitters (a “sling,” in its original definition, having been merely spirits, sugar and water). Around the mid-1860s to early 1870s we began to see “fancy” cocktails, which might add a dash or two of Curaçao, and an “improved” cocktail, which might add a bit of absinthe, a teaspoonful of maraschino or some other liqueur. This is the one I wanted to try, and lo and behold … it was a fantastic drink.

The Improved Hollands Gin Cocktail
(adapted from Imbibe!, by David Wondrich)

2 ounces Bols genever.
1/2 teaspoon maraschino liqueur.
1 teaspoon rich simple syrup (I made mine with Demerara sugar).
2 dashes Angostura bitters.
1 dash absinthe.
Lemon peel, twisted to express the oil.

Combine with cracked ice in a mixing glass, shake well, then strain into a fancy cocktail glass. The flavor is improved by moistening the edge of the cocktail glass with a piece of lemon.

Even though the Professor called for this drink to be shaken, I’m a stirrer when it comes to drinks composed of all spirits, wines and/or liqueurs; you can’t beat that silky smooth texture you get. As Dave says, “If you’d rather be right and stir, be right and stir. Then smile.”

We smiled a lot while drinking this cocktail. I could hop in the Wayback Machine, quaff these at The Professor’s bar and be very, very happy indeed.