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Course: DrinksCuisine: American
Servings
1
servings
Calories
100
kcal
Total time
3
minutes
Learn how to make a classic Adonis/Bamboo cocktails
Ingredients
2dashes2Orange Bitters
1.5oz1.5Sherry
1.5oz1.5Sweet Vermouth
Directions
Technique: Simple Stir
Combine all ingredients in the mixing glass.
Add ice to the mixing glass.
Stir the ingredients for 10 – 15 seconds. Try to avoid over-diluting the drink.
Strain into a glass.
Featured Video
History Of The Adonis Cocktail
The oldest printed recipe for the Adonis comes from the 1916 book “Jack’s Manual” by Jack Grohusko. The Adonis recipe in this book is 40% Sherry, 60% sweet vermouth, and 2 dashes of orange bitters. Though this recipe is older, a more authoritative source is the 1935 old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book by Albert Crockett. Crockett lists the recipe as 50×50 Sherry and sweet vermouth with orange bitters and states:
Named in honor of a theatrical offering which first made Henry E Dixey and Fanny Ward famous.
The play the author is talking about is an 1884 burlesque musical called “Adonis.” Written by, directed by, and starring Henry E. Dixey, Adonis was a famous play during its time. Interestingly, the bamboo recipe in Jack’s Manual and the Waldorf-Astoria is almost identical to the adonis. In the Waldorf-Astoria, is it the same drink. No difference at all.
The Adonis vs. The Bamboo Cocktail
The Adonis and Bamboo are the same drink with different names. In the 1935 Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book, both recipes are the same. No difference at all. The same recipe copy pasted, which is fine. Just keep in mind they are the same. Some books will distinguish between the two by making the Adonis 2/3 sweet vermouth and 1/3 sherry and the Bamboo 50×50 sherry and sweet vermouth. But the Waldorf-Astoria listed them as the same drink with different names, and the Waldorf-Astoria was a very authoritative source of pre-prohibition recipes.
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Course: DrinksCuisine: American
Servings
1
servings
Calories
100
kcal
Total time
3
minutes
Learn how to make a classic New York Sour
Ingredients
2/3oz2/3Simple Syrup
2/3oz2/3Lemon Juice
2oz2Rye Whiskey
1/2oz1/2Red Wine
Directions
Technique: Saxe Soda Shake
Combine all ingredients into a cocktail shaker except for the red wine.
Add one medium or two small ice cubes to the cocktail shaker and shake until the ice fully melts.
Without a strainer, pour the chilled and aerated drink into a glass.
Top with a dry red wine.
Featured Video
The History Of The New York Sour
The oldest recipe for the New York Sour comes from H. O. Byron’s 1884 Book “The Modern Bartenders’ Guide.” Although he refers to it as the “Continental Sour.” The Recipe is:
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 oz lemon Juice
2 oz whiskey or other liquor
Shake, strain, and dash the top with claret
Byron’s recipe is too dry to float wine on top so the wine would simply mix in. The next appearance of the continental sour is from George Kappeler’s 1895 book Modern American Drinks. His recipe is a bit more open and only describes it as a sour topped with red wine. Depending on how sweet the sour cocktail is it would be possible to float a dry red wine on top. His Recipe is:
Make a plain sour of the desired liquor and top off with claret
Claret is the British term for Bordeaux or a blended Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Not that it really matters. More importantly, the wine should be dry so that it will float on top of the sour. Also of interest is that the continental sour can be based on any sour with a float of wine. The preference seems to be toward whiskey, but the main quality is the addition of red wine at the end. This reminds me of the earliest versions of the Manhattan that could be any base spirit as long as it was mixed with Angostura bitters and sweet vermouth. Making these more of a style than a specific recipe. Within a decade, the Manhattan officially became just a whiskey cocktail, and by the early 1910s, the continental sour officially became just a whiskey cocktail along with its name changing to New York Sour.
The earliest use of the name New York Sour comes from the 1913 book “The Cocktail Book A Sideboard Manual for Gentlemen” by Fredrick Knowles. This is also a whiskey cocktail, but his recipe is impossible to float wine on top of because it has very little sugar. The recipe I am proving here is scaled to let the red wine float on top.
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Course: DrinksCuisine: American
Servings
33
servings
Calories
90
kcal
Total time
1
hour
John Pemberton’s French Wine Coca recipe
Ingredients
Kola Nut Extract
5g5Kola Nut
30g30Ethanol
Damiana Leaf Extract
30g30Damiana Leaf
60g60Ethanol
Cinchona Bark Extract
5g5Cinchona Bark
30g30Ethanol
Imitation Coca Leaf Extract
45g45Yerba Mate & Bay Leaf(imitation coca leaf Flavor mix)
90g90Ethanol
French Wine Coca Ingredients
1mL1Cinchona Extract
0.5mL0.5Kola Nut Extract
40mL40Damiana Leaf Extract
80mL80Imitation Coca Leaf Extract
40mL40Wild Cherry Bark Extract
40mL40Goldenseal Extract
500mg500Liquid Caffeine
10mL10Acid Phosphate
80mL80Simple Syrup
750mL750Red Wine
Directions
To make the extracts that can not be bought, Combine each plant and ethanol in four separate containers.
Kola nut and ethanol, damiana leaf and ethanol, Cinchona Bark and ethanol, and yerba mate and bay leaf and ethanol. Let them infuse for 3 days.
To make French Wine Coca, simply combine all the extracts, syrup, and red wine together.
Recipe Video
Warning! Do Not Make This At Home!
I am a professional recreating this historically significant recipe for experimentation and preservation of the recipe. Some ingredients can be dangerous if misused and can kill you. No illicit substances were used to make this; one should always consult a doctor before taking anything medicinal or making any changes.
Pure ethanol is highly flammable and explosive. Exercise great caution and care anytime you are working with dangerous items.
How Coca Wine Became Coca-Cola
French Wine Coca taste like Christmas mulled wine. Not just any mulled wine either but a really good one. I would describe the flavor of French Wine Coca as brown spices, sweet green leaf, and floral. Depending on the wine used, it can add fruit, citrus, earth, etc. Skys the limit with the wine used as John Pemberton never specified a type to use beyond “Red Wine.” This may sound different from what Coca-Cola tastes like, but I can see the similarities, having tasted the two.
French Wine Coca and Coca-Cola are made of subtle flavors, and it’s hard to differentiate between individual or primary flavors. Coca-cola is a blend of lemon, orange, nutmeg, coriander, cinnamon, vanilla, and orange blossom essential oils, and these flavors imitate the medicinal extract flavors in French Wine Coca before the wine is added. It’s not a one-to-one match, but the similarities are strong. One of the strongest flavors in French Wine Coca is the Coca Leaf Extract.
The two primary flavors of Coca-Cola are vanilla and coca leaf. Coca leaf extract has a warm sweet herbal tea-like flavor. People hike the Andes and describe chewing on the coca leaf as bitter, but when extracted with ethanol and then diluted, the taste is soft and sweet. When transforming French Wine Coca into Coca-Cola, Pemberton preserved the herbal medical flavors by using essential oils, using a sizeable amount of coca leaf extract, and replacing the wine flavor with more of a cream soda vanilla flavor.
About John Pemberton, The Creator Of Coca-Cola
John Pemberton was born July 8, 1831, in Knoxville, Georgia. In 1850 he earned his medical degree from the now-defunct Southern Botanico-Medical College of Georgia. Pemberton was a Lieutenant Colonel for the former Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. After being wounded in the Battle of Columbus, Pemberton eventually became addicted to opiates and tried to cure his morphine addiction with stimulants. Returning from the war, Pemberton opened a pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the medicinal drinks he sold was John Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, his version of the popular French Coca Wine, Vin Mariani. Pemberton’s French Wine Coca was sold as a cure-all panacea since it contained many different medicines.
In 1886 Atlanta enacted local alcohol prohibition, and Pemberton was forced to remove the wine from his French Wine Coca. He removed most of the medicines from the drink, except for the coca leaf extract, and set to make a new drink. He combined lemon, orange, nutmeg, coriander, cinnamon, vanilla, and orange blossom oils to create a new drink reminiscent of his French Wine Coca, and in doing so, he invented the “Cola” flavor. Unfortunately, Pemberton would not live to see Coca-Cola’s success. He soon after became sick with stomach cancer and sold the recipe to Asa Candler to pay for his painkiller addiction. John Pemberton died on August 16, 1888, at 57.
Imitation Coca Leaf Extract
Coca leaf is illegal where I live, but you can make imitation coca leaf extract with yerba mate and bay leaf. I have heard of using the ratio of yerba mate to bay leaf is 2/3 yerba mate with 1/3 bay leaf by weight. The extract is a 2:1 ratio of ethanol to plant. So for 120 grams of ethanol, use 60 grams of plant material. The 60 grams of plant material will comprise 40 grams of yerba mate with 20 grams of bay leaf.
What Is B.S. Color?
One of the ingredients I couldn’t figure out was what “B.S Color” was. The best guesses I could come to was burnt sugar and beet sugar color. I was unsure which it was, so I left it out. Burnt sugar sounds highly probable, but in other parts of his book, he refers to that dye as Brown Carmel color. It would be odd for him to use a different name on this one recipe. Beet sugar sounds good too, but again, I can’t know for sure. Seeing that it is just dye and offers no flavor, I figured it was best not to guess and not include it.
American Soda Fountain Culture And Medicine in the 19th Century
19th-century soda fountains were above and beyond anything most could imagine today. Using many of the same tools American saloons used to create cocktails, soda fountain drinks were expertly crafted and creative drinks. Soda fountains were the domain of pharmacists, and how many Americans filled prescriptions. Remember, pharmacists are chemists with knowledge of how to extract medicine and flavors from any herb, bark, or leaf and access to some of the most exotic plants in the world. They were not limited to manufactured bottles of alcohol, and a 19th-century pharmacist could run circles around most bartenders. Its parallel evolution alongside the pharmaceutical soda fountain created the unique American-style saloon. Soda fountains were shaking drinks before bars were. Shaking drinks predates the United States and was a common method for doctors and pharmacists to mix medicines in the 17th century. Here is a 1690s recipe for a treatment that clears the lungs that uses harts-horn, soda water, lemon juice, and syrup and is prepared by shaking. Not to say they invented the Boston Shaker, but the technique well predates American bars. The catalyst for this rapid evolution of bars and soda fountains was the invention of mechanically and locally manufactured carbonated water.
Sparkling mineral water was considered a healthy drink for its mineral content and alluring natural carbonation. But it could only be bottled at the source, and shipping was expensive. Even artificially manufactured soda water from companies like Schweppes was still costly to ship. That changed in 1832 when John Matthews invented a tank small enough to economically make soda water and fit under a bar. In just a few years, hundreds of his tanks were in New York alone. Pharmacies became a great place to get a refreshing medicated drink. Opium and chocolate were a popular combination. Absinthe originated as tapeworm medication. Angostura bitters were used to “clean the blood,” malaria, etc. Gin began as a kidney medication. Juniper berry extract is still used today for regulating renal function. Taverns and soda fountains shared many similarities and influenced each other over the next few decades. Pharmaceutical extracts became common at the bar, and cocktail tools and techniques became common at soda fountains. Soda fountains and bars found themselves in competition for patrons. Bars got you drunk, and soda fountains got you high.
However, things started to get out of hand toward the end of the 19th century. America’s drug and alcohol problems got severe. The temperance movement was gaining speed, and the federal government took notice of soda shops getting people hooked on narcotics. In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed, and the FDA was created, with its first job being the removal of narcotics in everyday food and drinks. January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment was ratified, and recreational drinking was made illegal in the US. The passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 killed the classic soda fountain. Pharmacists no longer profited from sodas since they could no longer add medication to their drinks, and pills were becoming more and more mass-produced. Pills were easier to sell with higher profit margins, so the soda fountains businesses were sold, and the decline began. Thus ending the classic soda fountain era. For more information, please check out Darcy O’Neil’s book “Fix the Pumps.”
0 from 0 votesOnly logged in users can rate recipes
Course: DrinksCuisine: American
Servings
1
servings
Calories
189
kcal
ABV
24%
Total time
3
minutes
Make a classic Yale cocktail
Ingredients
3dashes3Orange Bitters
1dash1Peychaud Bitters
1.5oz1.5Old Tom Gin
1oz1Soda Water
Directions
Technique: Simple Stir
Combine all ingredients in the mixing glass, except for the soda water.
Add ice to the mixing glass.
Stir the ingredients for 10 – 15 seconds. Try to avoid over-diluting the drink.
Strain into a glass and top with soda water.
Featured Video
The History Of The Yale Cocktail.
The Yale cocktail dates back to the late 1800s, and the oldest printed recipe I can find for it is from the 1895 book Modern American Drinks by George Kappeler. There are two main recipes for the Yale, this one and the Waldorf-Astoria recipe, and they are both very different drinks. They differ because the Waldorf-Astoria recipe is half Old Tom Gin and half sweet vermouth instead of a dash of Peychaud bitters. While the Old Waldorf-Astoria book was printed in 1935, it documents the recipes used by the bar between the 1890s to the 1920s. Therefore both Yale recipes are from the same period, and the two recipes are also both from New York. They were just two different recipes from two different bars.
Cocktails Inspired By The Ivy League Universities.
In the United States, there is a collection of 8 universities referred to as the Ivy League universities. The term is used to group the universities by their sporting league, but it also eludes their heritage. 7 of the 8 were universities before the American Revolution, Cornell being the odd man out, and hold themselves in high esteem. There are two other elite pre-revolution Universities, but they are too far from the others to be part of the same league. A sportswriter first coined the term Ivy League in the 1930s, describing the upcoming football season.
Like any good sports rivalry, each university in the Ivy League also has a cocktail named after them. The Harvard and Yale cocktails are the most famous of the Ivy League cocktails and for a good reason. As you can also see, I know absolutely nothing about team sports. I know there are balls and points, but past that, not much else. I was more of a D&D and Japanese manga kind of kid.
About George Kappeler And The New York Holland House Hotel.
Like the Waldorf-Astoria, the Holland House Hotel in New York had one of the best bars in the country. Interestingly both hotels were right down the street from each other, Holland House on 30th and 5th, and the Waldorf-Astoria on 34th and 5th, the present-day location of the Empire State Building. Opened December 7th, 1891, the interior of the Holland house was considered its prized jewel. The New York Times in 1891 praised its beautiful carved marble interiors, ornate rooms, and mosaic floors and described the hotel as a marvel of bronze, marble, and glasswork. Managing the hotel’s cafe and restaurant Bar was one of the top bartenders in the New York George Kappeler. He’s credited with inventing many famous cocktails, a few still popular today, and was the first to describe a classic whiskey cocktail as old-fashioned. He used the term old-fashioned to differentiate it from his other fancy and standard whiskey cocktails. George published his first cocktail book in 1895 and an updated second edition in 1906.
The good times did not last, though, and by the mid-1910s, most of the wealthy New York clients moved further north to park avenue, and the hotel started to fall on hard times. With the passing of the 18th amendment and the Volstead Act on January 17th, 1920, the hotel’s few remaining revenue streams dried up, and the hotel was sold. The Holland house closed that same year and was converted to an office building. The interior was gutted to make room for office spaces, and like the Waldorf-Astoria, a vital piece of American cocktail history was lost. Although, unlike the Waldorf-Astoria, the building is still standing on 30th and 5th next to Marble Collegiate Church. The grand interior is long gone, but it’s still fun to see the façade of the once-great Holland House.
Is The Prairie Oyster Good and What Does It Taste Like?
The prairie oyster doesn’t taste bad; it’s pretty good. You can barely taste the egg yolk. Mostly you taste the funky Worcestershire sauce and spices, which I think taste pretty good, and then the egg yolk pops and then goes down. I know that description is not very persuasive to trying it, but it’s surprisingly good. You will most likely like this if you like throwing back raw oysters, as it’s not too far off. The first prairie oyster you eat is for sure the hardest. You stare at it, and the drink stares back. Eventually, you realize you have no choice but to drink it.
Truth be told, I love this drink, and my family is disgusted by me eating them. Egg yolk is pretty mild, but the Worcestershire sauce and vinegar are what hit you. Optional toppings are either ketchup, hot sauce, or horseradish. I like the horseradish as it sends a good quick burn up the sinuses. So it’s a nice funk and burns.
The History Of The Prairie Oyster.
The prairie oyster starts to pop up in books around the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century. However, the prairie oyster appears to be a take on an authentic oyster dish. Like ordering a shrimp cocktail at the bar today, the oyster cocktail was an excellent go-to during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many books had oyster cocktails among their recipes, and the small bar bite typically was 5 or 6 shucked oysters in a glass, mixed with vinegar, lemon juice, hot sauce or ketchup, and salt and pepper. Serve with a spoon and let the patron dig in. In the 1891 book Boothby’s American bar, I also found a cocktail called the pick me up. The cocktail is Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, black coffee, and salt. The earliest example of the prairie oyster I could find is in the 1895 book “Drinks of All Kinds For All Seasons” by John Hogg of London. He presents the origin story that a few Texans were out camping when one fell ill and demanded oysters to heal him. They didn’t have oysters, but they had eggs. So they fixed up a drink of it similar to an oyster cocktail, handed it to their friend, and he suddenly got better. That story is not true (all the ones that fit together perfectly usually are not.), but it does offer a connection that the prairie oyster is based on a regular oyster cocktail. While there may be no definitive origin for the prairie oyster, it was probably invented around the 1890s.
Does The Prairie Oyster Actually Cure Hangovers?
No, of course not, but what it does do is it forces you to focus and get it together. The drink isn’t that bad, but most people will have to psych themselves out before throwing it back. It’s that few seconds you spend staring down at that funk-covered egg yolk, building up the resolve to do it, that perks you up. It’s jumping into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed. Just try it. I bet you have all the ingredients for it right now.
Is It Safe To Drink Raw Eggs?
As a word of warning, use pasteurized eggs if you can. Pasteurized eggs are still raw like a regular egg but with all the germs killed off. The FDA guesstimates that 1 in every 40,000 eggs has salmonella, which is super rare. For reference, there is a 1 in 8000 chance of dying in a plane crash, 1 in 5000 die from choking, and around 1% of sushi test positive for salmonella. I got these numbers from the FDA and the Wall Street journal. Pasteurized eggs are hard to find, so you can pasteurize them yourself or roll the dice. If you have one of those fancy sous vide devices, it’s straightforward to pasteurize them yourself. As someone who has had Salmonella poisoning before, it is one of the most painful things I have ever experienced. It feels like your intestines are possessed by the devil and fed into a paper shredder. About a day or 2 in, you start to think that you will die, and you hope for death to come quickly to end it. Again 1 in every 40,000. So incredibly rare, and if you get Salmonella, you’re much more likely to get it the same way I did, by eating food somewhere with no running water, where people don’t wash their hands. I’ve eaten countless raw eggs and have never gotten sick from raw eggs once.
Why You Should Try The Weird Stuff.
Nature loves courage, and always remember that no matter how weird or gross something is to you (be it food, drinks, clothing, music, entertainment, or anything), it’s somebody’s favorite thing in the world. You have to find out why. During your life, you will be presented with something (and I’m talking about objects and experiences) that you either find gross or strange (like the Prairie Oyster), and your first reaction is typically to make a face and reject it but don’t. Whatever it is you’re making a repulsed face at is somebody’s favorite thing in the world, and it is that happiness you should try and channel when experiencing anything new. It doesn’t mean you have to end up liking it, but you should always approach new experiences looking to find their joys. So take the risk and try something strange. I learned this from Anthony Bourdain. I remember watching No Reservations in college and hearing him say before he eats anything new that he “remembers this is someone’s favorite dish in the whole world, and my job is to find out why.”
The Medium Martini, Also Known As The Perfect Martini.
The last of the three main martinis, the medium martini, is perfect and combines the flavors of both the sweet and dry martini. The oldest printed martini recipe I could find is in the 1888 edition of Harry Johnson’s New and Improved Bartender’s Manual. His original 1882 edition does not provide a recipe for the Martini. The original martini recipe appears between the late 1880s and 1890s and is essentially a pre-prohibition style Manhattan with Old Tom Gin instead of whiskey. Harry Johnson’s recipe is half Old Tom Gin, half sweet vermouth, a dash of orange liqueur, two Boker’s (cardamom) bitters, and two dashes of gum syrup. If you look at my original pre-prohibition style Manhattan recipe, they are almost the same, save for the Old Tom Gin. But the recipe begins to change over the next decade until it settles on the more generally accepted 2 oz Old Tom, 1 oz sweet vermouth, and a dash of orange bitters with an expressed lemon peel. This was the standard martini until the 1910s, when the martini’s dry variation was invented and became very popular. The original martini becomes known as a sweet martini, and a medium sweet version that combines the two is also made.
Now while most bartenders from the 1910s through to prohibition know of the sweet and dry martini (Not all, though, even books like Hoffman house from 1912 and Jack’s Manual from 1916 only have the sweet martini), not all seemed to do medium martinis. Hugo Ensslin’s 1917 book Recipes for Mixed Drinks only list the sweet and dry versions. It’s not till the mid-1920s that you start to see the medium martini recipe being printed—beginning in 1925, books like L’art du Shaker by Dominique Bristol first published a martini named the medium martini. The recipe for the medium martini is precisely the same regardless of the book. 1/2 dry gin, 1/4 dry vermouth, 1/4 sweet vermouth, and most do not have a garnish for this drink. The exception to this is the Waldorf-Astoria’s recipe which has an expressed lemon peel and Spanish olive like the dry martini.
I chose to go with the Waldorf-Astoria recipe because I like the lemon oil and olive as a garnish. I think it makes the drink better. If you ignore the garnish, the recipe for this cocktail is the same from 1920 to the 1970s (I don’t own a cocktail recipe book from the 1980s). Somewhere after the 1970s, this started to be called a perfect martini. I can’t find exactly when or by who, but the name perfect martini is standard today for a medium martini. For all 3 of my martini recipes, I chose to go with the Savoy naming structure for martinis because it is the most straightforward and concise.
While not as alcoholic as a manhattan, it has much more flavor. For this cocktail, George Kappeler just put it all together. Both sweet and dry vermouth and both orange and angostura bitters. The recipe calls for just whiskey, but with all the herbal flavors in this cocktail, the spiciness of rye mixes well. Sadly this drink didn’t have much of a life outside of George Kappeler’s books and is absent from most any other book after. Give the Double Barrel a shot if you’re looking for a fantastic drink that was forgotten by time.
George Kappeler And The New York Holland House Hotel.
Like the Waldorf-Astoria, the Holland House Hotel in New York had one of the best bars in the country. Interestingly both hotels were right down the street from each other, Holland House on 30th and 5th, and the Waldorf-Astoria on 34th and 5th, the present-day location of the Empire State Building. Opened December 7th, 1891, the interior of the Holland house was considered its prized jewel. The New York Times in 1891 praised its beautiful carved marble interiors, ornate rooms, and mosaic floors and described the hotel as a marvel of bronze, marble, and glass work. Managing the hotel’s cafe and restaurant Bar was one of the top bartenders in the New York George Kappeler. He’s credited with inventing many famous cocktails, a few still popular today, and was the first to describe a classic whiskey cocktail as old-fashioned. He used the term old-fashioned to differentiate it from his other fancy and standard whiskey cocktails. George published his first cocktail book in 1895 and an updated second edition in 1906.
The good times did not last, though, and by the mid-1910s, most of the wealthy New York clients moved further north to park avenue, and the hotel started to fall on hard times. With the passing of the 18th amendment and the Volstead Act on January 17th, 1920, the hotel’s few remaining revenue streams dried up, and the hotel was sold. The Holland house closed that same year and was converted to an office building. The interior was gutted to make room for office spaces, and like the Waldorf-Astoria, a vital piece of American cocktail history was lost. Although, unlike the Waldorf-Astoria, the building is still standing on 30th and 5th next to Marble Collegiate Church. The grand interior is long gone, but it’s still fun to see the façade of the once-great Holland House.
Using The Right Ingredients.
Vermouth is always essential and worth sending a little more to get a quality product, but your whiskey will have the most significant impact on this cocktail. George Kappeler only wrote to use whiskey, but I feel a nice spicy rye whiskey with a bit of burn works well here. Bourbon is good, but it is too sweet and gets lost in the mix. The strong herbal wine flavors of the vermouth, the earthy angostura bitters, and citrusy orange bitters are better balanced by spicy rye. Also, since it’s only 1 ounce of whiskey, it needs to be stronger and have some burn to offset the 2 ounces of vermouth.
Absinthe was invented in the 1790s by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, a French Pharmacist living in Switzerland at the time, as a way to kill intestinal tapeworms. The Pharmacist figured that wormwood oil would be even more effective at killing worms if mixed with super high-proof alcohol. Absinthe would be bottled anywhere from 50 to 75% alcohol. To make it taste better if it was primarily flavored with star anise and fennel. In 1912 absinthe was banned for public safety because wormwood oil is dangerous in high doses, and people would begin to hallucinate at toxic levels. LSD had pink elephants, and Absinthe had the green fairy. It was replaced with other anise-flavored alcohols that lacked wormwood oil, and in 2007 the ban was lifted, and Absinthe is legally able to be sold again. This time minus the wormwood.
Absinthe Drip Without A Sugar Cube.
You don’t need a sugar cube if you don’t want to add it, but without some kind of sweetener, an Absinthe Drip is a bit too intense. I wouldn’t recommend not having some sugar added. Simple syrup and plain water will work fine too. The sugar cube does not affect the color of the cocktail and is there to make the high level of oils more palatable. Again this all goes back to when Absinthe was used as an essential medicine, and a common way to make medicine taste better was to add sugar. Also, the drip speed doesn’t matter; add the water fast or drip it slow. I’ve tried not adding sugar before, and it isn’t very good. It tastes like drinking the essential oils you would add to a diffuser. Also, the fountain and spoon are all part of the presentation and more theatrics than necessary to make the drink.
Why Does Absinthe Turn A Milky White Color In Water?
So there is quite a bit of star anise, fennel, coriander, and other wood oils in the absinthe. It’s these oils that give it its intense flavor and also provide its medicinal qualities. Lipids, like oil, are soluble in alcohol because they are very similar molecularly. Likes dissolve likes. Therefore the high percentage of alcohol and low percentage of water can act as a solution to the herb oil and keep them in a clear, evenly suspended solution. Once the alcohol to water ratio drops low enough, as in the case of this cocktail, the strongly hydrophobic oil is repelled by the water and separates from the ethanol molecule. The oil then bonds to other free-floating repelled oils. We perceive these large groups of suspended oil molecules as cloudiness.
Typically the oil molecules will keep bonding together until they form a fat blob of oil (pun intended) that floats to the top, just like a balsamic vinaigrette. This effect is called the Ostwald Ripening effect. But unlike balsamic vinaigrette, Absinthe with water will stay cloudy almost indefinitely. Why? The truth is, scientists, don’t fully know why. This effect is called the Ouzo Effect or Louching. The scientist discovered that at a certain point, the oil molecules stopped bonding together, and these small groups of oil floated evenly away from the surrounding alcohol, water, and other oil groups. And they don’t know why. Some of their guesses are that after the oil molecule broke free of the alcohol molecule, it picked up a slight negative charge. Once enough oil bonds together, the charge is strong enough to push away from the other negatively charged oil groups. Another guess is that maybe the Osmotic pressure kept them from further bonding together. This effect can be observed in any liqueur made from infused oil. The orange liqueur will do the same thing when adding water, Limoncello, essential oils, etc. It’s nothing specific to Absinthe but any oil-infused high-proof solution.
A noncocktail example is dissolving natural lipid-based, saponified soap in water to drive the point home further. Most “soap” these days are detergents and not true soap. Actual chemically correct soap is a combination of oils and glycerol. An easy-to-find natural soap is Dr. Bonner’s liquid Castile soap. Add it to water and see it turn cloudy like absinthe. The oils are bonded to glycerol and alcohol, and when the soap dissolves in the water, it turns a cloudy white color.
Absinthe And The Green Fairy.
Absinthe earned the title of the Green Fairy in the 1800s because of the madness it was said to give those who drank it. This madness was most likely the result of just drinking too many of them and getting blackout drunk, and at 50 – 75% ABV, that’s very easy to do. It is also possible that wormwood is toxic to humans at high enough doses and can bring about psychosis and eventually death. There is a saying that the only difference between a remedy and a poison is quality. It didn’t help absinthe’s image that many artists and social outcasts were fans of this cocktail, and some of their more eccentric behaviors were believed to be the results of drinking too much absinthe. So for better or worse, in 1912, Absinthe was banned in most of Europe and the United States and replaced in many cocktails by the much lower proof anise Liqueur. But if you would like to experience the cocktail that enchanted Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and many others, give this simple drink a taste.
The History of Julep Cocktails And Their Ancient Origins.
The history of the Julep goes back to ancient Persia (modern-day Iran). Rosewater was thought to have health benefits, and the word for rosewater in old Persian is Gulab (gul=rose, ab=water). Gulab slowly made its way to the surrounding Arabic cultures, and over time, the word Gulab changed to Julāb, and it was used to describe any sweetened medicinal syrup. Julābs eventually traveled to western Europe and England; syrupy medicines are called Julaps or Julapums. By the mid-1700s, there were all kinds of julaps. Rosewater julap was called Julapum Rosatum and was used for treating Heart issues. Julapum tabaci was a tobacco-infused syrup for treating asthma, Julapum sedativum was opium syrup Julapum Stomachicum was a mint-infused syrup used to settle upset tummies. I found many kinds of other Julapums, but this is good enough. Also, most of what I found was written in Latin, and google translate can only do so much. A medical journal I found online from the 1750s calls for a Julapum Stomachicum to be a peppermint-infused sweetener mixed with sherry. What we today consider a mint julep emerges around the early 1800s. The British 1827 home medical book Oxford Night Caps refers to a mint julap as a mint syrup mixed with brandy that a parent can make to ease the upset tummy.
With its unique drinking culture, the mint julep took on a different identity in the United States. Mint juleps were dressed up and made fancy for saloon patrons looking to get buzzed. The oldest printed recipe for this saloon-style julep comes from Jerry Thomas’s 1862 edition of The Bar Tenders Guide. The formula is one table-spoonful of white pulverized sugar. And 2 1/2 tablespoonfuls of water and mix well with a spoon. 3 or 4 sprigs of fresh mint. 1 1/2 wine glass Cognac brandy, dash with Jamaica rum, and sprinkle white sugar on top. Jerry Thomas also has recipes for a gin julep, whiskey julep, a pineapple julep, pineapple syrup, and gin cocktail.
The mint julep stays a brandy cocktail for a very long time, and most bartenders and recipe books copy Jerry Thomas till around the late 1800s. Books in the late 1880s mention how the once-loved julep had fallen in favor of other more complex cocktails and is typically something only the older men order. Around this time, the mint julep recipe replaces brandy for bourbon. The first instance of this is in the 1888 book Bartender’s Manual by Theodore Proulx, where he has his recipe for a mint julep that uses bourbon instead of brandy. Whether this change is accidental or intentional, it would happen when the cocktail begins to fade from the bartender’s repertoire. As decades passed, the mint julep and whiskey julep merged till it just became standard to make a mint julep with whiskey.
Variations Of The Mint Julep.
This specific version is the whiskey julep variation of the mint julep. Had you ordered a mint julep in the 1800s, you would be given a brandy cocktail instead, but the whiskey variation is the most common one made today. All the other variations of the mint julep are almost entirely forgotten today, and almost everyone only knows of the mint julep. Jerry Thomas had recipes for a gin julep, whiskey Julep, pineapple julep, and a plain brandy julep. Harry Johnson added the Champagne Julep too in his 1882 book Harry Johnson’s Bartender’s Manual. An 1885 book called New guide for the hotel, bar, restaurant, butler, and chef by Bacchus has nine different Julep recipes. They are not worth listing here as they are all quite lousy.
Getting The Ice Right In A Julep.
I feel the most essential part of any julep is the crushed or shaved ice you will pack the cup with. This cocktail should have the spirit of a snow cone that tastes sweet of mint and booze, and the ice should be rounded over the rim. Otherwise, it comes across as old-fashioned if you don’t pack the cup with ice, and the julep should be more of a refreshing hot daytime summer drink and not a smoky old nighttime bar drink.
Before people started calling this an Old Fashioned, it was just a Whiskey Cocktail. Prohibition brought about a massive paradigm shift in the way cocktails were made. Before the ratification of the 18th amendment and the start of prohibition, lightly flavored, high-quality spirits were popular among many drinkers. You can identify these vintage-style American cocktails by a couple of ounces of a base spirit lightly flavored with no more than 2 or 3 dashes of other flavorful ingredients and just enough sweetness to cut the spirit’s burn. With the start of prohibition in 1917, the quality of most liquor greatly diminished, high-quality spirits were priced out of most people’s range, and most trained bartenders left the profession and got jobs that were not illicit. Suddenly overnight, there was a loss of quality products and knowledge. The cocktails that gained in popularity were the highball and sour style cocktails. Not to say they didn’t exist before this but prohibition had made them more popular. Highballs and sours were slightly easier to make and had more significant amounts of strong-flavored ingredients that helped mask the taste of poor quality spirits. The epitome of this is the tiki drink, which was created during prohibition and saw the first tiki bar open in Hollywood, CA, in 1933, immediately once prohibition ended. If an older individual wanted to order a whiskey cocktail like they remembered having before prohibition, they would need to ask for a whiskey cocktail made in the old fashion. Keep in mind that prohibition lasted for 16 years. A person turning 21 in 1917 was now 37. An entire drinking generation had grown up not having access to this kind of cocktail.
Before prohibition, the bitter used in this classic cocktail was Boker’s Bitters. Unfortunately, the company that manufactured Boker’s Bitters was already on hard times in the early 1910s, and with the start of prohibition, they closed their doors forever. Those that knew the recipe ended up taking it to their graves. Angostura Bitters ended up replacing Boker’s since people could not get this classic ingredient or even find people who knew what it was made of. Oddly enough, a bottle of Boker’s Bitters was found in the 2000s in a deceased man’s attic, and the very old tincture was reverse-engineered. It was primarily a primarily Cardamom bitter with other citrus and spices flavors. Since this discovery, Cardamom bitters made in the Boker’s style have started popping up on store shelving.
The other lost ingredient was gum syrup which was replaced with standard simple syrup. It’s not that gum arabic disappeared, but gum syrup is difficult to make and can take quite a while to emulsify fully. Untrained prohibition-era bartenders didn’t have the skill or patience to make an ingredient that most speakeasy drinkers didn’t even want.
What Does The Whiskey Cocktail Taste Like?
The classic whiskey cocktail still taste strongly of bourbon and has very forward caramel and oak flavors, but the bitters add almost an Indian spice to it. The boker’s style bitters add a cardamom, cinnamon, herbal, citrus flavor that taste very much like traditional spices for Indian food. The small amount of gum syrup thickens the consistency giving the drink a velvet full body. the body is similar to that of a red wine. To me it’s completely different from a modern old fashion. I can see reasons for preferring one over the other as they are very different from each other and both are an acquired taste.
Make Sure To Use The Right Bitters.
The cardamom bitters are the most essential ingredient in a pre-prohibition-style whiskey cocktail. This one ingredient completely changes the direction of the drink. Angostura has a dark heavy, spicy, bark, earthy flavor, but broker’s style cardamom bitters are bright and fragrant with Indian spices and citrus flavors. The Gum syrup does play a nice role in changing the body to more of a milky full-body red, but regular simple syrup will still work fine, but the bitters define this cocktail.
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