- 2 oz scotch
- 1 oz sweet vermouth
- 2 dashes Angostura
Here’s another simple scotch-based cocktail. I decided to use a blended rather than a single malt, and the one I chose was too smoky for me. Dane certainly appreciated it, at least.
Tag: scotch
Day 35: Bobby Burns
- 2 oz scotch
- 2 oz sweet vermouth
- barspoon of Bénédictine
- lemon peel to garnish
Scotch cocktails are sort of a strange category. Sometimes it feels weird to mix a single malt with anything else, but I like to do it sometimes instead of relying only on blendeds. This is a pretty popular one to get at Whisler’s in my group of friends.
Day 13: Rusty Nail
- 2 oz scotch
- 3/4 oz Drambuie
- 1 dash Angostura
- lemon twist for garnish
Yesterday I went to the Death & Co book release tour at Half Step. Death & Co is a well-known bar in NYC that was featured in the documentary Hey Bartender, and I have also never been there. I had a couple of pretty damn good and interesting cocktails that I’ll have to try making later, and the book is beautiful. I thumbed through it this evening looking for a recipe and was unsurprised to find that I was missing at least one ingredient for most of the drinks I wanted to make. I did eventually find the Rusty Nail, which is a fairly well known cocktail that uses Drambuie. I originally bought a bottle of Drambuie for some other recipe and never could remember which one it was, so it’s been sitting unopened on the counter for several months now. I finally got to use it tonight!
The Death & Co recipe uses Springbank scotch and Bitter Truth aromatic bitters. The info I found online about Springbank oddly didn’t specify a region/style, so I had trouble determining what kind of substitute to make. I eventually settled on the Balcones Single Malt. Balcones has been my holy grail for a little while now and I somehow lucked into TWO bottles of it just this weekend, and flush with this bounty I felt I could spare a little for a cocktail. It’s a little peaty but with not as much iodine as an Islay, so I thought it would be a nice compliment to the Drambuie. As far as bitters go, I am finding more and more that I probably need another bottle of aromatics. Angostura is nice but it’s always obvious when you use it. The Nail could have used a more subtle touch, I think.
I’ve also noticed that my highball and rocks glasses all have a fair amount of calcium etching that becomes SUPER OBVIOUS when you take pictures using a nice camera. Anyone know of a way to resurface glasses to clear them back up?