The Bevvy Alexander.  A cocktail for cold nights.

I’ve been needing to get this up for a while, and now I’ve just about missed the season, but there are some chilly spring nights to come.

The excellent request made by a lovely guest: a great cocktail that’s warm, for when the weather is cold

I looked around and found lots of cider recipes and coffee-based drinks.  I hate apple juice.  I like my coffee to be coffee.  Ultimately, I just made a good cocktail and added hot water.  This may sound cheap, random, not very well-considered, I don’t know, just sort of wrong.  My guest liked it, though.  And, if I wanted a hot drink, I’d like it too.

At the end of the day, the Bevvy Alexander is hot and it tastes good.  It looks good too, in a lovely sort of way.  What’s wrong with that?

Ingredients

1/2 darker rum

1/2 Stone‘s ginger currant wine

1/4 Maraschino liqueur

few drops lavender & bergamot infused vodka

a squeeze of agave nectar

Combine all ingredients in a teacup (they should fill about 1/3 to 1/2 of it) and top with very hot water.  Stir and garnish with a twist.

I feel challenged by making cold but warming drinks.  This is silly because all alcohol is warming, right?  True, but there is something to the way a drink looks, smells, and plays on the tongue that warms or chills well before ethyl becomes your mental tauntaun.  For example, I would argue that a Martini is an arctic drink (not just cold, but downright glacial, which is kind of awesome) while a Gin & Tonic is refreshingly cold (more like a June breeze or snow cone).  On the warming side – ignoring hot drinks – Egg Nog is warming (more a promise of warmth, like a cold pair of gloves) while a Pink Zipper is hot!  Damn hot!

A Pink Zipper (it’s pinker in reality)

Aspects of Hotness (in a Pink Zipper, that is…)

• Color – a subtle warming pink
• Tequila – it comes from hot places and retains that heat in the form of Midi-Chlorians, a special six molecule nano-carbon sub-atomical hot neutron plasma structure unique to plants grown south of the Freeze Your Keister line (this line is said to be moving south due to climate change – it even temproarily dipped south of Houston this month)
• Plasma (see Tequila) – the sun is made out of plasma, this stuff literally provides all warmth we known to Earth.  No plasma, no heat, no nothing (may not be entirely true as tectonic effects may generate some heat without a sun, but I’m not sure)
• Jalapeno (sorry, I’m not sure how to get a tilde on my ‘n’) – also from south of the FYK, jalapenos have a very high concentration of Midi-Chlorians, but still have a father whereas Habaneros may have been conceived by Midi-Chlorians
• Ginger – Not a Midi-Chlorian source, but totally has zip

The other ingredients are important too, though, because they make the drink balanced and enjoyable instead of searing and lethal – like the ozone layer!

Ingredients

1/2 Jalapeno-infused tequila

1/2 Tequila

2/3 Cointreau

1/2 a lime’s juice

1/3 Pomegranate juice

1/3 Agave nectar

1/4 ginger juice

Some frozen cranberries

Combine in a shaker and shake vigorously.  Serve up and garnish with frozen cranberries (or small jalapenos).

A few notes:

• The balance of infused/non-infused tequila depends on how strong your infused tequila is – use your judgment
• Infusing cranberries into the jalapeno tequila would be one more step of awesomeness
• May the force be with you

Pomplamoose (the band) is awesome, as I’ve said previously.  Pomplamoose (the word) is awesome. Say it with me, slowly to appreciate it, Pah-mm-p-la-mmoooooo-ssse.  So fun.  I’m even going to say it again to myself.  Really, thank you France for creating such a cool word for a pretty lame fruit.

I’m OK with grapefruit. I went through a period in college when I ate them every day (I even own grapefruit spoons as a result), but I have never been that enthralled with the flavor – certainly not with the name.  Grapefruits neither taste nor look like grapes.  The world wide web tells me they are so named because they grow in clusters on a tree.  This seems like a poor naming convention, as grapes are also fruits and had claimed the cluster format first.  “Pomplamoose” on the other hand – that is a name that suggests the pithy food that is this strange pummelo-orange hybrid.

Luckily someone else already graphed grapefruit’s place in the world (though I’m not 100% in agreement on all counts):

A Pomplamoose is much cooler than a grapefruit, regardless of taste.

Me being who I am (someone with a mixology hobby, let alone a mixology blog), I decided that I needed to create a drink honoring Pomplamoose (the band) and Pomplamoose (the word), while improving upon Pomplamoose (the fruit).  There are grapefruit bitters commercially available, but I wanted to really taste the fruit in my beverage.  I was also feeling too lazy for the trek to the east side to buy them.  The main problem with really tasting the fruit is that grapefruit juice is pretty unbearable.  I overcame this problem, but it wasn’t cheap or easy.

The Tessin Rinpoche Pomplamoose is heaven:

A Pomplamoose, in one of our set of new (to us) vintage glasses

Ingredients

1 grapefruit juice

1 Bols Genever (other Dutch genever probably works, but British gin won’t)

1/3 Dolin Blanc vermouth (again, sorry, run-of-the-mill vermouth won’t work)

1/4 Agave nectar

1/4 Cointreau

drop absinthe (I mean a smidgeon, barely a drop)

Combine over ice and stir madly.  Do not shake this one – the genever doesn’t like it, the Dolin doesn’t like it, the absinthe doesn’t like it, and the cloudiness just isn’t desirable.  Strain into a cocktail glass.  Garnish with a twist (lemon – the twist is actually more than looks here).

This is a SPECTACULAR aperitif.  It is highly drinkable, yet palate cleansing.  I generally post drinks that most anyone could make easily, but sadly this one is a little less accessible.  There isn’t any strange technique involved, but some of the ingredients are a bit hard to find and they’re expensive when you do.  I’m sorry for that.  That said, these liquids are well worth the time and money.

Besides, you get to say to guests, “would you like a Pah-mm-p-la-mmoooooo-ssse?”

Then you can listen to the band: