Roffignac

I love when I casually cross path with a great cocktail. A couple of weeks ago I never knew there were such a creation as the Roffignac cocktail named after and in honor of the first mayor of New Orleans who gave that fine city it's first street lights.

Today I mixed it with a raspberry shrub made from the next to the last harvest of berries from my own garden and it was a revelation.

I haven't mixed much with cognac but I will in the future. I am amazed at how well it holds up against both the sweetness and the vinegar and how it brings out the glory of unprocessed raspberry juice. Not sure my beloved gin could accomplish that.

I made the shrub over three days - that's how long I let equal measures of fresh raspberries and organic sugar sit in a covered bowl on my cool kitchen counter.

After three days the berries had shrunk and looked borderline bad, but the bowl was filled with lovely smelling viscous mix of juice and sugar.

I strained the berries out and threw them away - they probably could have made a nice filling in muffins or a cake - and shook the juice-sugar mixture pretty hard to dissolve the crystals.

Next I gently added white vinegar in small increments until I found the balance between the sweet and the sour.  I didn't measure so I do not know how much I added - but if measurements are important to you this guy has a recipe.

After that mixing the highball was really easy:

• 6 cl cognac
• 4 cl raspberry shrub
• Seltzers

Just pour the cognac and shrub over ice in a highball glass and add seltzers to taste and. Garnish with some Maraschino cherries.

And for me an extra bonus of this cocktail was both it's history part 1 and part 2 and the fact that Chris Hannah of Arnauld's French 75 was instrumental in it's rediscovery.

I count as one of the high points of my visit to New Orleans and TOTC this past summer my visit with a good friend and cocktail expert to that fine establishment - and realize I've never written that visit up.

Emperor Penguin Flip

I made two decisions the moment I saw the theme for this months MxMo: I was not going to shop and add booze from hitherto unexplored continents and I wanted to have a go at all the continents.

But let Stewart of Putney Farm - this month's gracious host - present the intercontinental theme himself:

Everywhere we travel these days we see cocktails on the menu. And not just here in the USA, but all around the world. And that’s not only the drinks, but the ingredients as well… So let’s celebrate the global reach of cocktails with an “Intercontinental” Mixology Monday challenge. Create a cocktail with “ingredients” from at least 3, but preferably 4,5 or 6 continents. And if you can include Antarctica, then you get a Gold Star. And remember, sometimes the tools used, glassware, names or back stories of cocktails are important “ingredients.” Creativity and a bit of narrative exploration are encouraged. So if you have been waiting on buying that bottle of Japanese Scotch, Bundaberg rum from Australia, Pisco or Cachaca from South America or Madagascar vanilla, now may be the time to try them out….except for the Bundy…trust us on that. Have fun.

Like most participants in this months MxMo I had the greatest trouble finding a way to incorporate the continent of Antarctica into a drink. 

As far as I know the only two life forms actually calling that barren, icy desert home are penguins and lichen. Neither of which are readily available for purchase.

However should you ever come across a fresh egg from an Emperor Penguin this is the drink to mix: Emperor Penguin Flip.

It even has a subtitle - the Cherry-Garrad Flip.

You see my most cherished book is not a bar book, it's not even a book about the Titanic. It's a book about three mens quest to secure enough emperor penguin eggs to test a theory that penguins were the missing link between reptiles and birds.

In 1911 they went on a 60 mile sled trek from the winter quarters at Cape Evans of Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition to Cape Crozier.

This was at the height of the Antarctic Winter, so they made the trip in total darkness and in temperatures as low a -60 C. They suffered greatly and nearly died during a blizzard that blew their tent away - but they found five eggs and brought them back to base camp.

This trip has been described in a book by the only survivor of the three Apsley Cherry-Garrad, his two companions Dr. Wilson and Birdie Bowers died with Scott on the return trek after they were beaten to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen.

Cherry-Gerrads book The Worst Journey in the World is my most cherished book. 

I do hope my drink is not the worst journey around the world but here are the ingredients and their continents:

• 5 cl golden rum - I used Diplomatico from Venezuela and South America
• 2 cl New Nordic Cherry Liqueur - Europe
• 1 egg - Europe (or Antarctica if it's from an Emperor Penguin)
• 1 cl coffee and wasabi syrup - bring equal amounts of Ethiopian Coffee, Sugar to a boil - as it cools of add a dab of wasabi for fire and balance - Africa and Asia
• Grated macadamia nut - Australia
• Cherry Bitters - North America

Place rum, cherry liqueur, egg and syrup in a shaker. Add ice and shake vigorously. Double strain into pretty stemware and garnish by drawing feather in foam with a couple of dashes of cherry bitters and grate macadamia nut on top.

And the eggs from the emperor penguins? Only three were intact at the end of the worst journey in the world. Cherry-Garrad brought them to the Museum of Natural History in London but had a bit of difficulty convincing anyone they were important. They weren't actually examined until 1934 and by then the theory of penguins being missing links were already disproven. Good things as the embryos did not look any different than other bird embryos.

And should you ever get a hold of a fresh emperor egg for this cocktail you need to multiply all other ingredients by 11 as an emperor penguin egg has a volume of about 500 ml as opposed to a medium chicken egg with a volume of about 43 ml. Also the taste and appearance of the egg might surprise you.

Looking at tractors in Berlin

Bottles of booze forcing their way into the light through peaty ground, rocking chairs on cool verandas and icy cold copper mugs.

Even when some of the worlds largest sellers of booze target their most knowledgeable costumers - cocktail bartenders - it involves quiet a bit of theater.

Marketing gurus will call it storytelling - but it's clichés and stagecraft.

Not that it is not enjoyable wandering around and ogling bottles of Campari frozen into a giant ice ball or mixing your own Lynchburg Lemonade in a mason jar with a handle.

But what really worked for me at the Bar Convent Berlin was meeting producers and tasting their products - evaluating a taste against what the producer wants to accomplish.

And perhaps strangely - or maybe not - at a European bar show American craft distillers did this best. I tasted Aviation Gin and gin from St. George Spirits and loved both of them.

And I got to taste both the creme de menthe and the creme de cacao from Tempus Fugit that I hadn't imagined would be there. The creme de menthe is amazing and now commences the quest to buy a bottle.

The big brands so often got lost in their own gimmicks and/or the use of starlets.

Imagine that: Even i 2013 women are hired solely for their looks. I mean how hard would it be to train them to be able to answer the simple question of: What am I tasting? Apparently their pretty little heads couldn't contain complex answers like: Russian Vodka.

So was it boring or a waste of time? Not at all - at each of the three seminars I attended I picked up interesting facts, but they were not of the same quality as the seminars at Tales of the Cocktail or at Copenhagen Spirits and Cocktails.

It seams that in New Orleans and Copenhagen you start with choosing interesting subjects and then find sponsors, where as it's done the other way around in Berlin.

Thats why the seminar on the perfect Martini - sponsored by a vodka company - was a sales presentation for that particular product and nothing more. And why the tasting tray did not contain even a badly mixed gin based Martini for comparison - which would seem essential to such a seminar.

Will I be back? Absolutely - if nothing else to check out the tableaus the big brands come up with for 2014.

Sour Cherry

Last weekend I went on a lovely autumn trip with good people to the winery that makes Frederiksdal Cherry Wine.

We visited after the harvest but there were still quite a few, lovely, almost black and very ripe cherries on the trees. And we had time to pick some before tasting the wines and picnicking on the grounds.

So last Sunday I made some Maraschino Cocktail Cherries adapting this recipe with a bit of bourbon.

Today the cherries we ready to meet a cocktail and I started setting up for a rye based sour with a cherry wine float that I envisioned would be great.

I got a glass of the cherries from the fridge and put it on my kitchen counter and next time I picked it up to twist of the cap the bottom fell out of the glass and the lovely boozy syrup poured down my cupboard.

I suppose I should be grateful it didn't happen in the fridge but it's annoying in a first world kind of way.

On the other hand now I get to eat the cherries as I don't have any syrup to cover them with, and they turned out great with a real deep and lovely taste.

And why not put three of these rare cherries on a single drink:

• 6 cl rye - I used Old Overholt
• 3 cl honey syrup
• 3 cl fresh lemon juice
• 1 cl cherry wine

 Shake the first three ingredients with plenty of ice, strain into a rocks glass over ice and float cherry wine on top - garnish with Maraschino cherries.

Here's hoping the rest of the glasses won't break too.

Gefion Sour - MxMo LXVII

The theme for this month's Mixology Monday is Smoke - which immediately started the cocktalian part of my mind running.

Our gracious host Elena from Stir and Strain explains the theme this way:

Smoke has been everywhere this past year, from liquors to lemonades, to the hills here in Southern California(!); smoke in its many forms has been front page news.

For me, smoke is also a transitional element: it symbolizes the last summer bonfires, sitting around the fire pit making s’mores, and the start of the fragrant crackles from the fireplace announcing that fall is coming.

For September’s theme, I’d like to see how you interpret smoke. With your liquor or ingredients? Your glassware? Will you whip out a chemistry set to transform your cocktail into ghostly vapors? Do you own a home smoker, still in the box, that’s never been used? Well then, you’re welcome. Unpack those ideas and let’s set off a couple smoke alarms this month for MxMo.

I really didn't set out to, but this month's submission brings together quite a lot of the last MxMo themes.

Also Elana challenged me further by announcing on Twitter, that her submission would incorporate locally distilled spirits.

So I thought long and hard and came up with the Gefion Sour - named in honor of a goddess who plowed the island I live on in Denmark out of the middle part of Sweden. The "lost land" is now a lake.

Most of the ingredients in the Gefion Sour are from Sjælland or Lolland an island just south of Sjælland. The lemon however is from far away.

The basis - and where the theme comes in - is a lovely dill aquavit from Shumachers, just a 15 minute drive to the northeast of where I live. The aquavit has a very clear and crisp dill taste - it's made by extracting the fresh herbs in clear spirits - and a tiny bite of white pepper. And it is also certified organic.

I lavender smoked a deciliter using the same technique I described here - that was a cocktail inspired by MxMo LXVI. The lavender was grown right in my own garden.

Next I used the rest of my horse radish sirup from Hot Rod and finally I did a float sink of a completely new product: New Nordic Cherry Liqueur a wonderful alternative to Cherry Heering - thus tying into the cherry theme of MxMo LXIV.

• 6 cl lavender smoked dill aquavit
• 3 cl lemon juice
• 3 cl horse radish simple syrup
• 1 cl cherry liqueur

Shake the first three ingredients with plenty of ice, strain into an ice filled rocks glass and then gently pour the cherry liqueur on top of the drink over the back of a spoon. In my case the liqueur sank like a rock but the drink still turned out pretty.

My cocktail is obviously a riff on New York Sour - where red wine is floated on the top. I may just not have the right touch - or the difference in the proof of wine and liqueur may be the explanation.

I'm really pleased with this cocktail - the lavender smoke blends so nicely with the dill, the lemon, the cherry and a whisper of horse radish. I'll definitely be making it again.

And since I knew this would be an early afternoon drink and I was baking bagels anyway I had fun baking some miniature bagels to turn into snack with a garlic cream cheese (the garlic grown locally), onion and SMOKED salmon.

My 5 best cocktail books

It is a testament to all things digital that I only have one third as many cocktail books as books about Titanic.

Back in the early 90's when I became a serious student of the doomed ocean liner, there were no online resources or e-books. I couldn't even rely on a Danish book store to order the books I wanted so 3-4 trips a year to London and visits to Foyle's and other amazing book temples were necessary.

Along the way I even had the good sense to visit The American Bar at The Savoy  - but not picking up vintage bar books in any of the many used book sellers in Charing Cross Road and the little side streets.

Now some of what I buy are e-books and some are even audio books, but here are the 5 books in my possession I enjoy the most - and unlike Buzzfeed I'm not going to let you suffer through a count down:

1. The Drunken Botanist 
This book has it all: Stories, facts, recipes and just a touch of irreverence. Amy Stewart's book can help you with everything from planning a vegetable garden for maximum cocktail enjoyment to enlighten you about the history of Angostura Bitters.
 
2. To Have and Have Another 
Right now I'm on my second read through and I still can't wait to turn the next - digital - page because of the flow of Philip Greene's pen and general greatness of his subject. Mr. Hemingway and his favorite drinks deserve a great book like this.

3. The PDT Cocktail Book 
Had this book not existed the Savoy Cocktail Book would occupy this place on my list. But Jim Meehan's book is just a more interesting mix of old favorites and new classics according to my taste buds. 

4. The Hour 
I have this as an audiobook - until I find and can afford a print edition with this piece of cover art. And I still I laughed out loud at Mr. Bernard DeVoto's more outragerous claims like: Remember always the three abominations are: (1) rum, (2) any other sweet drink, and (3) any mixed drink except one made of gin and dry vermouth in the ratio I have given.

5. Lommebogen 
This is treasure - a facsimile of a notebook kept by a Danish bartender in the 1930's - his own personal reference book when the proper proportions of the Sidecar or the Bijoux slipped his mind.

It also holds quite a few Danish cocktails - drinks he either made up himself or drinks that had a short lifespan. Some of the mnamed after Danish actors and popular culture icons. Many of them involving some pretty bad Danish liquors made from raw alcohol and essences.
 
What about books like The Savoy Bar Book and How to Mix Drinks you may ask. Well, they are great reference books as are my reprints of The Old Waldorf Astoria Bar Book and Bar La Forida Cocktails. But they do not inspire me quite so much to mix stuff on my own or delight me with facts and opinions as the top five do.

What are your favorite bar books?

Skinny Middle Manager

Yes, the name is a joke, and no it is not a diet cocktail.

I've been admiring Barbaras Aperol Tequila Swizzle all weekend. A very pretty and tasty sounding drink. My only problem is that I really don't like Aperol.

But the image stayed with me, as I was challenge by a middle manager at work to make him a cocktail with the name Skinny Middle Manager.

So here is how a figured a drink in honor of all those middle managers who put up with someone like me day in and day out should be mixed.

Coffee - can't have management without caffeine, but I couldn't imagine mixing Kaluha and Aperol, so I went with an espresso syrup made from 2 oz espresso cooked with 2 oz sugar.

Aperol - moderne, talked about, very bleeding edge and it tasts really bad too.

Next i wondered what kind of base spirit to use - something macho like bourbon, or something more androgynous. I went with white rum.

Next something healthy - middle managers have to take care of their bodies or they won't become senior managers - I decided on coconut water. And finally it seemed obvious to make the cocktail as a highball with seltzers - as highball is sort of cocktail code for long winded.

• 6 cl white rum - I used Plantation 3 Star which may explain why I never get a pay raise
• 3 cl Aperol
• 3 cl coconut water
• 2 cl coffee syrup
• Seltzers

Shake the first four ingredients with ice and then strain the cocktail into a highball glass with plenty of ice - top it of with seltzers and add your most bling cocktail stirrer to impress the boss.

And strangely enough it does not tast half bad - pretty good actually. The coffee taste works wonders on the Aperol.

The Prince

I'm in love with my raspberry bush. It has grown and expanded all by itself to cover parts of my really boring fence. And best of all it produces so many wonderful, big berries with a deep and complex taste.

Today I effortlessly picked 500 grams of berries - and there is at least twice as many left for tomorrow and tomorrow and....

There are many uses for the berries - the one most obvious to Danes is this delicacy. But I've already baked those and made cordial so today I decided to make sorbet.

I blended the fresh berries with the juice of one lime and passed the mush through a sieve to get rid of the little seeds. Then I added a simple sirup made from 1 dl sugar and 1 dl water.

The liquid was poured into a square shallow baking tin and placed in the freezer. I scraped through it after 30 minutes and 1 hour to minimize crystals and got a very nice sorbet out of it.

I don't know if I was already subconsciously planning a cocktail but I certainly had a lot of ideas when the thought hit me. I settled on the tried and true mix of raspberry and gin -but since I knew that the sorbet was on the sweet side I added Campari to balance it out:

• 3 cl Campari
• 6 cl Gin - I used Old English Gin 
• 1 dl of raspberry sorbet

Place everything in a shaker and shake until the shaker is well cold and the sorbet integrated into the gin and Campari.

Pour into glass over ice and garnish with raspberry and pretty flower.

A letter to the future

When your favorite bar closes....

Dear future cocktail historian,

You have been searching high and low for information about a particular bar that existed for four short years in Copenhagen back in the good old days - back in 2009-2013.

You have read loads of irrelevant dusty old web pages, that almost made your eyes bleed, looked through millions of meaningless so called tweets (what was that about? Why did people impose needless and arbitrary limitations on their communication back then? Wasn't it primitive enough just to use text? Well let some other historian unravel that strange business), you have tried to decipher endless amounts of strange, unfocused, badly colored photos (or Instagrams as they were called - almost as strange as the tweets - why did a whole generation loose the capability to take strong, clear photos with depth and accurate coloring? Again let another historian unravel this mystery).

And what did all your hard work get you, but these meager clues:

Consider this your lucky day - that one needle in the haystack actually connected to the thread that can unravel it.

I wrote both the so called Facebook update (Don't ask it's easier to print a full scale 3D copy of the Great Pyramid of Egypt from cupcake frosting than understanding early 21st century social media) and the tweet.

I did it because I wanted to let the world know, I was there. That I was an eye witness to cocktail history.

And I didn't only watch history - I tasted it (which may explain the not very accurate communication in the Facebook update (back then an unfortunate side effect of cocktails was getting intoxicated something that was eliminated in the 2030's and in my opinion took the fun right out of drinking, but I digress)).

The literal translation is: Last cocktail served from Molktes bar, damn it's bitter sweet Henrik Steen Petersen.

It literally was the last cocktail I ever had mixed by the talented staff from the brilliant Molktes Bar. A place that so dominated the cocktail scene in Copenhagen back then, that it never really felt the same way to me ever again.

You most understand that Moltkes was at the forefront of what was even back then described as the renaissance of the Copenhagen cocktail scene. It was not the first bar to try to reintroduce cocktails to the Danes who had for so many years been lost to first aquavit and mass produced beer and then cheap wine.

But it was the bar most dedicated to only serve the true classics, and the bar with the most precise grip on what hospitality means. A place that never became infected with the dreaded hipster-disease where wearing suspenders meant being too cool to talk to the bar guests or notice when their glasses was empty.

Perhaps you already knew some of this? Perhaps that's why you are trying to dig deeper into the history of this place.

Well, let me give you a lead - concentrate on the man who made this bar. Mr. Henrik Steen Petersen, who also gave Denmark the Copenhagen Spirits and Cocktails event, and who went on to further cocktailian greatness after the bar was closed.

As for the tweet? I'm sure you already know Jeff Bell as one of the worlds best bartenders at the time.

But did you also know, that he with just the help of a bar back single handedly ran Moltkes for more than three hours that night and delighted us with some of his own cocktails, several punches and some cocktails from the famous PDT?

Well, I can prove it. While the bottle of Old Pal, as far as I can remember barely made it through 2013, and I unfortunately had to sell the two signed menus - one by Jeff Bell and one by Henrik Steen Pedersen - a decade ago to finance my new, improved, artificial liver (I got the EO-model) there are images.

And fortunately for you I know exactly where they are on the remnants of what was back then called the internet (before the cloud after arpanet) and once I fired up my antique MacBook Air (very popular but already obsolete when I bought it so called PC) I could get them. You should see them float around this.

I'm sorry that text is the only way I know how to communicate and hope - if you do not know how to read - you have found someone who remembers how.

A very old Ginhound

Harvey Bonghead

This morning I took a catch up tour on Small Screen Networks many lovely presentations and I came across Jamie Boudreau's video How to Smoke a Cocktail that I have somehow missed previously. 

Also as I had found one of the most intriguing entries to the latest Mixology Monday was Feu de Vie's Wind Whisperer I figured the cocktails gods were trying to tell me something: Get smoking

I settled on building something from bourbon, rum, Galliano, lemon, rose tincture and burning Earl Gray tea.

As a gear junkie my first impulse was to buy a smoke gun, but I took a cue from Kate's solution and my bank manager thanks you for that.

So method was mostly inspired by Kate and drink mostly from Jamie Boudreau and the name is thanks to expert marketing of the Galliano company.

First set up your cocktail ready to shake:

• 4 cl bourbon - I used Bulleit
• 4 cl rum - not too sweet I used Barbancourt 3 star
• 1,5 cl Galliano
• 1,5 cl lemon juice
• 5 drops rose tincture

Next find a way to burn some Early Gray tea leaves and collect the smoke. Not knowing what to expect smoking and smell wise I set it up on my little grill: A piece of aluminum foil shaped into a little tray, a broken wooden chopstick on two sides of a small pile of Earl Gray tea leaves, an upside down funnel to direct the smoke into an inverted glass bottle.

It worked well and once I had a bottle full of smoke, I corked it and brought it into my kitchen where I gave the cocktail a good shake with ice and strained it into the smoke bottle before pouring it into a coupe and garnishing with a pretty flower. I figured bongheads were into flowers back in the day, weren't they? I can't remember.
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