I love this one! A while back I noticed that a ton of my favorites at Midnight Cowboy used Licor 43. I also just recently picked up the botanist gin, and it’s AMAZING. I highly recommend it.
I wanted to start a new feature, so welcome to whiskey Wednesday! Unfortunately we are starting off with one that I did not quite get right. It’s another recipe from Garage, and one that I haven’t tried making yet. This try was definitely too heavy on the gin. I think next time I’ll add more rye and decrease everything else, except for maybe the brandy.
Here’s another doozy of a tiki drink. Four whole ounces of booze, and so easy to drink! Falernum is a syrup that I’ve heard of before but never used myself, and I’m pretty much in love.
I picked up some pisco on my last liquor store trip on a whim. While looking around for recipes today I found this one, which I wanted to try because it uses port. (I’ve recently started becoming curious about cocktails that use various wines.) I expected this to be sweeter than it was, but my guess is that the port I used was not as sweet as I am used to. The pisco gave it a sort of earthy sourness that surprised me. I look forward to experimenting more with pisco.
When I saw this recipe in the book I was amazed to discover that I had all of the juices needed for it in the house already. SO MANY JUICES. The almond extract gives it a nice fragrance, and the assortment of juices ends up blending into a non-specific “tropical” flavor. This, like a lot of tiki drinks, is very easy to drink and will probably get you very drunk very quickly if you don’t watch out.
I also learned a bit about the drink’s namesake, Lapu Lapu. Who knew that making cocktails could also teach you about history?
I showed a colleague of mine the blog because I knew he was also a cocktail fan. The next day he lent me his tiki book. I spent most of Friday making as many cocktails as I could based on what I had in the house, just to practice a bit. The book is absolutely fantastic! I am definitely picking up a copy of my own at some point.
I got some Passion Fruit syrup when I made a liquor store run today since I noticed that so many recipes used it. The recipe calls for “gold Jamaican rum” and “light Puerto Rican rum”, so I used what I found to be close enough. (The book actually has a really good section on types of rums that I will use when I make up my next shopping list). This was pretty sweet, and easy to drink. I might try a more boozy variation at some point.
A few years ago we threw a “July in Christmas” party, which was basically a beach-themed party in the middle of winter. I decided to mix up a big punch bowl full of Mai Tai. Shortly before the party Dane came home from running some errands. “Oh, you’ve got the punch ready!” He tried a little bit, then looked me dead in the eye and said “You can’t serve this to people, you are going to kill them. We’re going to have people passed out all over the lawn.” So we added about a carton of orange juice to the bowl.
So. Mai Tais are a pretty powerful cocktail, not well suited to serving out of a punch bowl. I still have a zillion limes at home and I’ve been inclined to make drinks that remind me of summer (even though nothing is alive right now to make a proper garnish), so today you get another rum drink. I’m thinking of trying a new light rum next time I hit the store. If you have any suggestions, send them my way.
The Suffering Bastard is one of Dane’s favorite drinks. I always forget that it’s in the tiki family! Lots of variations abound for this one, and the recipe I was looking at used 1/2 oz of ginger ale and then topped with club soda. That seemed unnecessarily complicated, so I just used ginger beer for more bite. Normally I don’t like ginger beer (too spicy) but even I had a sip or two of this. It’s also got a fantastic name for a cocktail.
Oh, god. I had cocktails at Peche tonight to celebrate a friend’s new job, and they had a special called The Uptight. I can’t quite remember exactly what was in it, and I think I may be combining two different drinks in my head, but I’m pretty sure I was close. (Rye and Amaro Montenegro for sure, though I only had Averna to use.) I was mixing at William’s tonight, so he always has Lillet that he’s added quinine to for some old-fashioned Kina Lillet. I was almost done when I accidentally unscrewed what is actually a flip top lid on the orange bitters and dumped a huge amount into the drink. I figured I’d try it anyway.
Boy, that was a mistake. They can’t all be winners, I suppose. I’m going to see if I can get the actual recipe and redo this sometime soon. Always check your lids, folks.
Teardrop is a beautiful bar in Portland, a short walk from my Air BnB when I was visiting for a work conference last year. I watched a bunch of business people order Piña Coladas, which was somehow very satisfying to me.
This is the first time I’ve made this one. The description in the menu is “earthy & cooling, with a tropical bounce”. Mine was off the mark but I could see where it was going. Their recipe uses pineapple gomme and I don’t have any gum arabic just lying around the house, so I just used some pineapple juice instead. To make up for the missing sweetness I upped the amount of Bénédictine I would normally use. Looking at it now I might have been better off adding some extra simple instead. This turned out a bit too earthy. I’d like to try making my own gomme syrups at home, and use less genever next time.
