New Cocktails! Part 1.

Last Friday we added 6 new cocktails to our repertoire. New cocktails have one hot drink, two aperitifs, two dessert cocktails and an all day drink. All of them are quite cheap compared to our other cocktails, but that doesn't mean they are lesser quality or simpler than our other cocktails. We'll give you the whole recipes, all ingredients, amounts and techniques we are using to make them. This would be quite long post because of it, because we are using quite complicated techniques to make the infusions and other flavorings for these cocktails. Thats why we decided to divide the post in two parts.

First, the hot one:

Canelazo

Canelazo is a traditional spiced hot drink from the highlands in Ecuador. The original canelazo recipe is made by boiling water with cinnamon and sugar or panela, and then it is mixed with a local sugar cane alcohol called punta or aguardiente. Because we don't have punta or aquardiente, we are making ours with Pisco. Because the Christmas time is coming and most Finns have used to drink Glögg (mulled wine) at this time of year, we added some bitter orange peels in the mix to give more familiar flavor profile and to make the drink more complex.

Canelazo.

Canelazo

20 ml Pisco

10 ml Canelazo syrup

Hot water

2 dash Orange Flower Water

Build in a ceramic mug and stir. Garnish with dried apple slice and cinnamon

Canelazo syrup

makes 500 ml

750g Demerara sugar

25g Bitter orange peel, grounded

3 Cinnamon sticks

600 ml water

Combine all ingredients in a sauce pan, bring to boil and let it simmer for 10 minutes. Cool it down and store in glass bottles in the fridge. Lasts around 2 weeks.

Then the Aperitifs:

Yoghurt Gimlet

The Gimlet was promoted and drunk by British officers back in the 19th Century. Citrus juice was a gift from the Gods to sailors, as it prevented them from catching scurvy – a brutal, painful and sometimes deadly disease brought about by vitamin C deficiency.

Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Desmond Gimlette (served 1879 – 1913) is cited by some as the namesake of the Gimlet. Acting as a doctor to sailors, he administered gin with lime in order to mask the bitter taste. Allegedly, he introduced this to his shipmates to help them swallow down the lime juice as an anti-scurvy medication. British sailors, though – unlike their superior Naval officers – had rum rations, and so used to mix this in with their lime. The drink became known as ‘grog,’ and so great was their consumption of this ‘medicine’ that sailors soon became known as “Limeys”.

Another credible etymological story is that the concoction was named after the hand tool, which was used to bore into barrels of spirits on Navy ships – a gimlet.

Yoghurt Gimlet.

Rose’s Lime Cordial has played a central role in the story of the Gimlet, as it was the accessible and necessary sweet fruit preserve of choice by sailors. The cordial was first produced by Scottish entrepreneur Lauchlan Rose in 1867 and was the world’s first fruit concentrate. Rose patented the process in a move that quickly paid off, as later that year a law was passed that all vessels should carry lime juice and serve it as a daily ration to their crews.

Yoghurt Gimlet has the same structure that the original Gimlet had, substituting the sweet element of lime cordial to Bols Natural Yoghurt Liqueur. The end result is smooth, a bit sour and savory white and frothy coctail.



Yoghurt Gimlet
25 ml Gin
15 ml Bols Natural Yoghurt Liqueur
15 ml Lime Juice
Shake all ingredients with ice and double strain into a Coupe. Garnish with Basil leaf.

Rum Manhattan

The Manhattan is classic cocktail featuring American whiskey, Italian vermouth and aromatic bitters. The most common legend suggests that the drink originated at the Manhattan Club in New York City in the early 1870s, where it was invented by Dr. Iain Marshall for a banquet hosted by Jennie Jerome (Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston) in honor of presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden. The success of the banquet made the drink fashionable, later prompting several people to request the drink by referring to the name of the club where it originated—"the Manhattan cocktail". However, Lady Randolph was in France at the time and pregnant, so the story is likely a fiction.

Rum Manhattan

However, there are prior references to various similar cocktail recipes called "Manhattan" and served in the Manhattan area. By one account it was invented in the 1860s by a bartender named Black at a bar on Broadway near Houston Street.

Our version of Manhattan is kind of a crossover of two quite common Manhattan varieties, Cuban Manhattan and The Fourth Regiment. Cuban Manhattan is made with Cuban rum, sweet and dry vermouths and aromatic bitters.The Fourth Regiment is from 1889 and it uses ratio 1:1 of whiskey to vermouth and three kinds of bitters; Orange, Celery and Peychaud's. We take the best of both; rum instead of whiskey, more vermouth and use 2 kinds of bitters.



Rum Manhattan
20 ml Dark Rum
20 ml Italian Red Vermouth
2 dash Orange bitters
1 dash Aromatic Bitters
Build in On the Rocks glass filled with ice and stir briefly. Cut out an orange peel, squeeze aromatic oils over the cocktail and drop it in the glass.


In the next part we'll be talking about our all day cocktail, POG, and our dessert cocktails.

Jussi

A guy who is really passionate about stuff. Like cocktails. And beer. And cocktail history. And Molecular mixology. Oh, and food science! and and and...