Cocktail Summer

Yes. In retrospect, it was clearly nuts.

But it was fun while it lasted. At least I think it was: I don't really remember it all that well.

Cocktail Summer is on indefinite hiatus.

On the road

Cocktail Summer is traveling. Back next week with new and even more exotic things to quaff.

Rain Killer

Cocktail Summer is all about the responsibility, don't you know, and so when we realized it was time to resume our experiments after an illness-related layoff, we decided to do it with a drink that only involved one kind of alcohol. Remember, kids: Restraint. Always restraint.

And so we come to the Rain Killer, as originally formulated at Steve Crane's Kon-Tiki restaurant chain, ca. 1962. Crane is best known in pop-culture history for being one of Lana Turner's seven ex-husbands and a cheerfully unapologetic gigolo and for rocking an ascot like nobody's business. He started the Luau in Beverly Hills in 1953, and was drafted by Sheraton to oversee its chain of Kon-Tiki bar/restaurants in 1958; they managed to hang on into the Eighties. Crane did too, finally dying of cirrhosis of the liver in 1985. 

And the Rain Killer? Delightful. Sweet, but no overbearingly so; the bitters and the lime juice bring the drink safely down to earth and keep everything in balance. It's a winner.

1/2 oz fresh lime juice

1/2 oz orange juice

1/2 oz pineapple juice

1/2 oz sugar syrup

1-1/2 oz white Puerto Rican rum

1 dash Angostura bitters

4 oz crushed ice

Put everything in a blender, saving the ice for last. Blend at high speed for no more than five seconds. Pour into a specialty glass. Garnish with a mint sprig and a paper parasol.

SCORE (out of 10): 7

Did we say "every day"? Heh! Okay, funny story...

 

We're no different than anybody else here at Cocktail Summer Labs, with the exception of our heroic intake of rum and falernum. We get tired. We get cranky. And sometimes we get a summertime cold that makes drinking -- yes, even drinking -- inadvisable. That's the case today. We're down with something that makes the Mouresque Cocktail feel like a weekend in Ocean City. So we're changing the plan. Altering the experiment. Moving the goalposts. From now on the stated goal of Cocktail Summer will be to mix and sample a new drink almost every day, all summer long. This feels like a much more realistic goal. Besides, if we had to drink tonight it would end very badly for all of us. 

See you when the fever breaks.

(Photo by Rob Sinclair)

Bacardi Cocktail

The Bacardi Cocktail is a lovely drink for a summer afternoon, or evening, or maybe the kind of summer afternoon that melts in a liquid, cocktail-based haze into a summer evening. What I'm saying is: Strong! It's basically a stiff shot of rum mediated by some lime juice and a little grenadine; the Bacardi and grenadine essentially serve as mellowing agents, holding down the sharp blast of the lime against your palate. And they do their job in a movingly unselfish fashion, by stepping into the background and kind of looking at the sky and whistling as you start weeping sentimentally about the first girl who ever said she loved you. At this point the lime shoulders its way to the front and holds you in its citrusy embrace just long enough for the Bacardi to clonk you over the head with a crab mallet and tell you to quit sniveling and man up. In other words, and I really can't over-stress this: This drink is delicious, and it is strong. Around Cocktail Summer Labs we call it "The Regretmaker."

2 oz Bacardi light rum

1 oz lime juice

1/2 oz grenadine

Shake with ice.

Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Note: The Bacardi Cocktail is a dead ringer for the Hawaiian Sunset, although it is maybe a shade of red deeper. Unlike the Hawaiian Sunset, however, the Bacardi is a pretty monochromatic affair. It's basically a tart, limey shot of rum. 

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Subtle it ain't. 

Complex it ain't. But delicious? Yes indeed.

SCORE (out of 10): 7

The Americano

Saying a drink has a beautiful color is like your mother saying that the girl her friend Essie wants to set you up with "is... Really, she has such a pretty face." It may be true as far as it goes, but it isn't what you want to lead with. So it is with the Americano. It really does have such a beautiful color. 

Do you want to know something, though? I'd like to be the sort of person who could enjoy an Americano. I really would. Such a person would probably have many fine qualities, a broad-mindedness with regard to taste and flavor chief among them. He would be the sort of person who could actually like a drink which is both blindingly bitter and achingly sweet at the same time. Such a person would have an appreciation for complexity and ambiguity. He'd be a person I'd like to get to know. We could sit and talk for hours about the affairs of the world, and I have no doubt I would benefit from his open-hearted approach to things. But while we were sitting there striking up an acquaintance, I'd be drinking a drink that didn't make me gag. Which is to say: Not this one. (Seriously, though: Float the vermouth on top of the Campari and admire the delicate interplay of colors. Then dump it.)

1-1/2 oz Campari

1-1/2 oz sweet vermouth

2 oz club soda

Build in an ice-filled highball glass.

SCORE (out of 10): 3

Mah-Jongg Cocktail

Continuing the trend toward simplicity today, to a much better end. The recipe, from Harry Craddock's Savoy Cocktail Book:

1 part Cointreau

1 part Bacardi rum

4 parts London dry gin

Shake with ice. Strain into a cocktail glass.

As I say, today's cocktail is a big improvement over yesterday's, but in truth that isn't saying much. And this isn't a drink I'd necessarily think about making again. The combination of the berry flavors in the gin and the sugary notes of the Cointreau and the rum is a bit odd, and in the given proportions the gin pretty much obliterates its fellow ingredients. The result is reminiscent of a Martini with the rum and Cointreau standing in for the vermouth, and that may be the problem: My palate, which I've noted previously is a boob, doesn't care for the Martini. If you're a fan of that prince among cocktails, though, you might want to give the Mah-Jongg a whirl. 

SCORE (out of 10): 5

Mouresque Cocktail

I really don't know what to tell you about this one. Except this: It could be used to euthanize dogs, or perhaps to induce them to commit suicide. The recipe is simplicity itself...

Build in an ice-filled highball glass.

2 oz pastis or Absente

1 oz orgeat

Top with water. Stir.

...and when I say "simple" I mean that it is simple in the sense that cruelty is simple, and hatred, and vileness. Say, do you like licorice? Almond? Flower water? Barley? Sure you do! Heck, who doesn't like at least one of these? Unfortunately, the Mouresque Cocktail contains ALL OF THESE, and the combination is as ghastly as you imagine, except to the degree that it is actually much, much worse. Its color calls to mind the underbelly of some sort of giant slimy bug, and its syrupy consistency reminds one of the trail such a bug might leave. Do you read me? Are you getting it? The Mouresque Cocktail is a foul, stench-ridden slice of hell in a glass. If anybody ever offers to buy you one, run outside, brace a chair against the door and burn the bar to the ground.

SCORE (out of 10): 0

Hawaiian Sunset

It's Day 8 of Cocktail Summer, and either I'm getting better as a mixologist (possible, but unlikely) or I'm becoming less discriminating (both possible and likely). Still: Is today's drink the best yet? Dr. Cecil says no, and gives the nod to the Golden Wave. I think the Hawaiian Sunset is the class of the field so far -- a beautiful drink with a pink-grapefruit color and a sparkling, bracing feel on the tongue, the sour and the sweet dancing close like Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in "It's A Wonderful Life." (I picked today's drink because I wanted to taste the orgeat, which was more or less MIA in yesterday's Coronado Luau Special, delicious as it was. And taste it I did. The Hawaiian Sunset has just a hint of a candy character, although that makes it sound much less subtle than it tastes.) Here's the recipe, which originated at Donn "Don The Beachcomber" Beach's Aku Aku restaurant in the Stardust Hotel, Las Vegas, NV, USA, sometime in the 1960s.

1/2 oz fresh lime juice

1/2 oz fresh lemon juice

1/2 oz orgeat syrup

1 tsp grenadine

1-1/2 oz vodka

Shake well with ice cubes. Strain into a cocktail or specialty glass.

By coincidence, I was reading about the Aku Aku just last night in Jeff "Beachbum" Berry's Sippin' Safari. I really can't recommend the book highly enough as a resource for recipes and as a fun, informative history of exotic cocktails. It's a great place to start, and a great read.

One last note: I'm getting into the habit of measuring very carefully. One of the lessons of the last eight days has been to respect the delicate suspension in which the many flavors of a good cocktail (particularly a good exotic cocktail) are held. I think the success of the Hawaiian Sunset is due in large part to the interplay of the equal parts lemon juice, lime juice and orgeat it contains. Maybe I am getting better at this. Or maybe the Hawaiian Sunset is just a little bit of pink-tinted heaven in a glass.

SCORE (out of 10): 9

Coronado Luau Special

It's a gray afternoon here in Santa Monica, so the only sensible thing to do was put aside the Tiki drinks and look at something sober, something strait-laced, something a respectable English gentleman might have ordered at his club. Therefore: Everybody hula, it's the Coronado Luau Special!

Invented by Bert Chan of the Luau Room at San Diego's Hotel Del Coronado, ca. 1962, the Luau Special is a mind-bending blend of four spirits and two syrups, plus a good quantity of healthful life-giving natural citrus in case your central nervous system shuts down from the fumes while you're preparing it. Gentlemen, start your blenders.

3 oz orange juice

2 oz fresh lemon juice

1 oz sugar syrup

1 oz dark Jamaican rum

1 oz light Puerto Rican rum

1/2 oz Grand Marnier

1/2 oz brandy

1/4 oz orgeat syrup

4 oz crushed ice

Put everything in a blender. Blend at high speed for no more than five seconds. Pour unstrained into a tall glass or Tiki mug.

That's the recipe as transcribed by Jeff Berry in Tiki+. He might well have added: Then get out of the way. The Coronado Luau Special is nobody's shrinking violet. (And if you can find some shrinking violet, what the hell: Throw that in too.) The lemon juice predominates, making this a more tart experience than you might otherwise expect; the rums, brandy and Grand Marnier, meanwhile, more or less meld into BFFs by the time you pour, giving the lemon and orange notes a lovely roundness. You might conceivably amp up the orgeat by a smidge, because if there were any almond notes in this drink they were running for their lives. Not that that's a complaint: The sourness of the drink is its calling card, and it's held in a delicious balance by the minimal involvement of the sweet. This would be a swell sipping drink for a hot summer afternoon; my research assistant Dr. Cecil suggests another few ice cubes in the mix to chill it down a bit. Either way, it's a winner.

SCORE (out of 10): 9 

Savoy Hotel Rickey

Today's cocktail is a lesson in the importance of precision.

The Savoy Cocktail Book should be the definitive source for the Savoy Hotel Rickey, no? As it turns out, no. The mix, as quoted in Cocktails+:

Serving vessel: glass.

a lump of cracked ice

juice of 1/4 lemon or 1/2 lime

Toss the spent fruit in the glass

1-1/2 oz gin

2 bar spoons grenadine

Fill with seltzer.

Can you spot the problem? Yep: It's the unspecified "glass." Picking something that looked more or less like the thumbnail illustration in Cocktails+, I elected for a double highball glass. This, as it turns out, is too much glass for this drink. Fill it with seltzer and the seltzer washes everything else away -- the grenadine, the gin, the lime, the maraschino garnish -- resulting in a drink with a lovely color and almost no taste. It's mildly refreshing, sure, and a good respite from the sweet, heavy exotics I've been looking at this week. But next time? I'll trust the Cocktaildb mix, which specifies a 9 oz glass and beefs the ingredients up accordingly. This one's a misfire.

SCORE (out of 10): 3

Blood and Sand

This one has a backstory.

The Blood and Sand is the house cocktail at the Dresden Room, one of the great old Los Angeles hangouts. According to Sippin' Safari, bartender Ray Buhen invented the Dresden's Blood and Sand in 1941 by "retooling" a recipe from the '20s for regular customer Tyrone Power. (Power was then shooting a remake of the 1922 Rudolph Valentino picture of the same name.) Trouble is, author Jeff Berry didn't say how Buhen retooled the drink, only that the original recipe was Scotch-based. On his website, though, Berry refers to the Dresden Blood and Sand as a Bourbon drink. Buhen would go on to open Tiki-Ti in Hollywood; later in the book Berry says that Buhen adapted the drink yet again at Tiki-Ti by switching the base spirit to Tequila. 

Cocktails+ lists three Blood and Sand recipes, all of them basically the same except for some small differences in proportions, and all based in Scotch. A few months ago, after a night at the Dresden and a day or two of sleep, I tried making my own Blood and Sand, using one of these standard Scotch-based formulas. And it was terrible. Undrinkable. I'm not a Scotch drinker, but that wasn't the problem: The Scotch-based Blood and Sand was just wrong. 

So here we are some months later, and I have a few hints as to the secret blend of the Dresden's Blood and Sand. Only one thing to do, in the name of Science: Try 'em both, substituting first tequila, then Bourbon for the Scotch. I've picked as my base recipe the one from Harry Craddock's 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book:

1 oz orange juice

1 oz Scotch whiskey

1 oz cherry flavored brandy liqueur (in this case, Cherry Heering)

1 oz sweet vermouth

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

VERSION #1 (tequila):

Result: Ghastly, but in a wholly different way than the Scotch-based version. The cloying sweetness of the Cherry heering and the vermouth combine in a lethal one-two punch of awfulness, obliterating the agave and resulting in something that could easily be bottled as Robitussin. These are, admittedly, not my favorite ingredients, but you have to believe that in the right proportions, and in combination with the correct co-ingredients, they'd yield a drink that wouldn't overwhelm the sweetness receptors in your tongue and make you long for the -- well, I almost said the "sweet release of Death," but that would be a poor choice of words in this case. The drink at least has a beautiful color, but you can't drink color. Sadly, you can't drink this either.

SCORE (out of 10): 2

Changing the plan on the fly, I decide to go with the proportions set down by Ted Haigh in his 2004 Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails, and dial back the sweet ingredients to 3/4 oz per.

VERSION #2 (Bourbon):

Better. Still not as good as the one they make at the Dresden, though, which is one of many reasons I hope the Dresden never ever goes out of business. (They also serve an excellent steak.) The Bourbon gives the drink a nice little hit of woodiness, and deepens the color a shade. And shouldering the vermouth and the Cherry Heering into the background -- gosh, that was a good idea for many reasons, not least among them that it allows the citric sharpness of the orange juice to make its presence known. You know that great moment when you go to see, say, Bruce Springsteen and the half-drunk knucklehead behind you stops bellowing the words to "Hungry Heart" long enough so you can actually hear Springsteen sing them, which is after all what you paid the price of admission for? That's what it was like for me when I could taste the orange juice.

That said, this version is still startlingly sweet, and lacks whatever that ineffable something is that makes you put down your first one at the Dresden and think: "That was tasty. Hey, let's do that again!" Nobody's going to think that after drinking either of these boys. My plan is to return to the Blood and Sand later in the summer and freelance a bit, perhaps adding a dash of orange bitters, or maybe a jolt of straight lime juice. In the meantime, I'm going to try to get my molars to stop aching.

SCORE (out of 10): 3

Golden Wave

Finishing the week on a high note, it's the delicious Golden Wave. According to Tiki+, "Jose 'Joe' Yatco won first prize at the 1969 International Bartender's Guild competition, held in Spain, with the Golden Wave. Joe was then the head bartender at the China Trader restaurant in Burbank," an establishment where the clientele was apparently either so xenophobic or so loaded that they couldn't be bothered to pronounce the relatively common name "Jose." I hope they were good tippers, at least, because the Golden Wave is a delightful drink -- sweet, with a hint of sharpness and a nice frothy head from its time in the blender. Here's the recipe:

1 oz unsweetened pineapple juice

3/4 oz fresh lemon juice

1/2 oz triple sec

1/2 oz falernum

1 oz light Puerto Rican rum

6 oz crushed ice

Put everything in a blender. Blend at high speed for five seconds. Pour unstrained into a tulip or other specialty glass.

The new flavor for me today is the falernum, which provides a note of cinnamon and allspice that decisively moves this drink into the "exotic" column. If you have tiki torches, you may light them now. 

Fun fact: The China Trader was, according to Critiki, the after-work hangout for the cast of the '60s detective drama "Hawaiian Eye," which was filmed at the nearby Warner Bros. studios. Let's hope they were good to "Joe." Wherever he is today, he has the thanks of one grateful cocktail blog.

SCORE (out of 10): 8

Scale this

Something I should have been smart enough to remember yesterday: The invaluable Cocktaildb.com has a feature that lets you scale ingredients according to number of drinkers and the size of glassware on hand. So if, say, you have non-standard 8.5 oz cocktail glasses and fourteen people clamoring for a Pegu Club -- or if, and I'm not judging, you enjoy serving drinks in your collection of limited-edition 64 oz Big Gulp cups -- you can punch in the variables and the recipe will scale accordingly. Or if you happen to be one crazed loner on an irrational quest, you can cut the standard recipe down without having to do math. Thanks, Cocktaildb, for slightly slowing the slow summer-long death of my liver. 

The Pegu Club Cocktail

My photography doesn't do justice to the extraordinary color of the Pegu Club cocktail, which was apparently born at the eponymous Burmese nightspot sometime prior to 1930, when the recipe first appeared in Harry Craddock's Savoy Cocktail Book. And that's a shame. At first glance the Pegu Club seems to be merely lime-colored. But closer examination reveals a subtle rosy tint from the orange bitters. It's like the first hint of dawn in a lime-green sky, if you can imagine such a thing. And I'd bet you could after one of these babies, because did I mention they're strong? Like, 2 oz. of gin strong. Here's the recipe, which Cocktails+ adapted from Gary Regan's 2003 The Joy of Mixology:

2 oz gin

1 oz triple sec

1/2 oz lime juice

Angostura bitters (to taste)

orange bitters (to taste)

Shake with ice, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

I'm telling you, this thing is delicious. It has a sharp citric kick from the fresh lime juice and a hint of juniper from the gin, but the triple sec sweetens it nicely and the bitters give it some grounding. (I'm getting hip to the trick with bitters, by the way: Use less. However much you reckon a dash to be, use half that amount.) The competing tastes are held in a delicate complementary balance, which seems as good a criterion as any for success in a cocktail.

This is a swell cocktail for a summer afternoon, which it happens to be as I write this. Bracing, a little astringent, and just sweet enough. A winner, and to the degree it's been forgotten (About.com says cryptically that it "was a hit until World War II," hinting at some dark wartime conspiracy), it deserves a rebirth.

SCORE (out of 10): 8 

Jungle Bird

Aaaah. This is more like it. The Jungle Bird is a lovely balance of citrusy sharpness, vegetal bitters and the sweetness of pineapple; the rum gives it a nice caramel bottom. It maybe hits the bitters a little harder than my natural taste would lean to, but my natural taste is an unsophisticated rube and I'm trying to retrain it to enjoy things that are less sweet than, say, a Mounds bar. Here's the recipe, which originated at the Aviary Bar of the Kuala Lumpur Hilton in the late '70s:

3/4 oz Campari

1/2 oz fresh lime jice

1/2 oz sugar syrup

4 oz unsweetened pineapple juice

1-1/2 oz dark Jamaican rum

Shake well with plenty of ice cubes. Serve unstrained in a double old-fashioned glass. 

The glass pictured, by the way, comes from Old Tony's in Redondo Beach, CA, a fabulous little slice of the 1960s where the drinks are stiff and the glasses are yours to take away.

Please note that the proportions above produce a whoppin' big cocktail that probably shouldn't be drunk in its entirety by anybody doing something so foolish as ingesting one cocktail a day for a whole summer. You could easily halve the recipe and have a delightful, refreshing afternoon drink. Or share it with someone you love. 

SCORE (out of 10): 7

Meet the new kids

Added a few supplies to the bar today. From left to right:

TRADER VIC'S ORGEAT ALMOND SYRUP. A staple in tropical drinks, Orgeat is (according to my new best friend Tiki+) a syrup whose principal ingredients are almonds, flower water and (sometimes) barley water. I'm a little troubled that the label identifies the Trader Vic's variety as "double strength," and by the fact that it comes in a plastic bottle, apparently because it eats right through glass. (Please note: "Orgeat" is pronounced "orzh-AH," as if you were expelling a peach pit from your esophagus.)

JOHN D. TAYLOR'S VELVET FALERNUM. Another flavored syrup, this time with notes of almond, vanilla, lime, allspice, clove and ginger. This is an intriguing palette of flavors, to be sure, and seems certain to stop my heart and cause my teeth to drop out of my mouth and fall to the ground. Fun fact: Velvet is one of two brands claiming to be the original Falernum. So there's that.

BLOOD ORANGE BITTERS. Just a fun combination of words, I think.

PAMPERO ANIVERSARIO RUM. Today's splurge, a beautiful dark Venezuelan rum that should substitute nicely in recipes calling for Demerara. It was shamefully expensive, but Roberto at Wine Expo swore it's worth it. Plus, two other things: 1) Click on the photo, then blow it up to full size and look at the color on that rum. It's a color you could lose yourself in and never come out, especially if you've been drinking rum. 2) It came in a little cowhide bag with ties up the back, like the chaps the cowboy from The Village People used to wear. Seriously: How was I supposed to put it back on the shelf?

GRANIER MON PASTIS. A Pastis, obviously -- an anise-flavored liqueur that used to be substituted for absinthe when you couldn't get absinthe without breaking The Man's laws. Seems to be potent: The recipe I have for a wonderful-looking drink called The Corpse Reviver No. 2 calls for exactly one drop of the stuff. Then again, you'd want a drink called The Corpse Reviver to have some muscle to it.

This wraps up the basic provisioning of the bar, because I'm now well-supplied for a variety of cocktails and also because if I don't stop buying liquors I won't be able to afford the house in which I keep them.

Halekulani Cocktail

Not an auspicious beginning. The recipe, which Tiki+ adapted from Sippin' Safari:

1/2 oz unsweetened pineapple juice

1/2 oz fresh lemon juice

1/2 oz orange juice

1-1/2 oz bourbon

1/2 tsp Grenadine

1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake with ice cubes, strain and serve in a cocktail glass.

Even with the additional sweetness of the orange/pineapple juice blend I had on hand, the drink had an unpleasantly sour and metallic edge. It may have suffered from the substitution of Bourbon (Noah's Mill 15-y.o., which is certainly too damn good a sipping whiskey to use for mixing) for Okolehao, a Hawaiian spirit which in its current incarnation seems to be, basically, Southern Comfort ("...an American whiskey liqueur sweetened by ti sugar extract," according to Tiki+). I had a bad experience with Southern Comfort in college -- hell, who didn't? -- and haven't been able to look at it since without gagging. If I make the Halekulani again, though, it might be worth investing in some. The drink did mellow down a bit with the addition of 1/2 tsp of maraschino cherry juice, but that's an awfully blunt instrument to use as a sweetener. The final product was refreshing, yes, and potent, to be sure (1-1/2 oz of Noah's Mill is a quick trip to HappyLand), but still a little on the astringent side for my taste.

SCORE (out of 10): 3

It begins

It came to me, like most self-destructive ideas do, in the middle of the night: "A new cocktail a day, all summer long."

I can't claim it's a good idea. I'm not even sure it's possible. But teaching myself something about the deep, rich world of the cocktail is a quest, and aren't we humans questers? Explorers? Isn't that the impetus that sent Lindbergh out over the Atlantic, Neil Armstrong hurtling toward an icy hunk of lifeless rock 200,000 miles away, Trader Vic Bergeron to mix rum and Curaçao and call it a Mai Tai? 

I have a few essential information sources to help me along the way: Jeff Berry's "Sippin' Safari: In Search of the Great 'Lost' Tropical Drink Recipes," and the invaluable iPhone apps Cocktails+ and Tiki+. I'm sure I'll add more as the summer goes along.

I have a reasonably well-stocked bar, and will supplement it as needed. Here's the opening roll call:

Bourbon

Cachaca

Rum (light and dark)

Vodka

Gin

Grand Marnier

Sweet vermouth

Tequila

Irish whiskey

Scotch whiskey

Cointreau

Campari

Cherry Heering

Framboise

Brandy

Triple Sec

Angostura bitters

Grenadine

Simple syrup

I have some basic bar tools: an American shaker, a spring strainer, a selection of jiggers, a hand-cranked ice crusher. I have little toothpick parasols, tiny plastic swords, a camera and a supportive wife. ("I get to drink 'em too, right? Knock yourself out.") 

So here we go. Join me on my summer-long quest, won't you?