The Double E (in front of a lamp EE favors, but that I do not)

The Double E’s story begins when EE learned to order her cosmos with gin quite some time ago.  She got on alright ordering in this way (“I’d like a cosmopolitan, but with gin instead of vodka”) – which always resulted in one of the following:

- a very confused waiter who didn’t know what’s in a cosmo
- an eye rolling bartender who makes all pink drinks the same way regardless of the request
- a bartender who takes the opportunity to ask the other ingredients as well because he has no clue how to make a drink.

This pattern was smashed on a rooftop in rome one fine may evening. The astoundigly competent Italian waiter acted like he’d been talked down to and says, “of course, you want a swanky cosmo”.   This proper name provided no relief to EE’s subsequent ordering at other places, but it is a better order at home.

Fast forward to this spring when we got lazy about going to the store and ran out of cranberry juice.  The simple substitution was pomegranate.   This variant had no name, it was simply the illegitimate child of our irresponsibility, but one that EE took a shine to.  Then we went to a family weekend at a beach house and the drink earned a name.

Lo and behold, another person one could accurately refer to as EE (much less cute, more gruff, and harder to please with a drink, but still very loved) really liked this drink as did everyone else.  So I named the drink for its following of Double Es and began making pitchers of them everyday at about 5, you can guess where things went from there.

The Double E:

Ingredients

1 gin (I was using Bombay Sapphire)

3/4 Cointreau

1/2 Pomegranate Juice

Juice from 1/2 a lime

Combine ingredients over ice and shake well.  Serve up.

EE and I headed to the Empire Hotel this week for a drink in the Lobby Bar.  It’s in our neighborhood, and EE loves their logo (duh), which is not only monogrammed on everything monogrammable, but also forms the pattern of the carpets, and serves as door handles on all the double-doors:

Anyway, the most recent drink menu has a title like, “Try a Gossip Girl Cocktail”  WTF?  Really?

Let’s consider the problems.  The:

a) show is absurd (not that you personally are absurd if you like it, but the show IS – you know it).

b) characters are teenagers and have not been drinking long enough to possibly have knowledge worth emulating.

c) characters are teenagers who really shouldn’t be drinking at that level (without getting into a bigger debate over what the drinking laws should be).

d) drinks ACTUALLY REFLECTED IMMATTURE TASTES.

I took one look and said, “I’ll have a negroni.”  EE, bless her soul, ordered one.  She claims she felt rushed to make a decision.  It involved an Atomic Fireball.  She asked me what an Atomic Fireball is just after ordering.  Candy.  It is a piece of candy.  The rim was encrusted with sugar - the most sugar I’ve ever seen on a rim.  The thing tasted like a strange, flat Cherry Coke served in a martini glass with a sugared rim.  Nasty.  The kind of thing you might like if your standard breakfast consists of Mountain Dew and Sour Patch Kids on the school bus.

EE re-orderded a classic margarita.  Meant in the best possible way, this type of admission-of-ordering-error and assertiveness-in-correcting-it is not very characteristic of EE, which should really underscore how horrific the drink was.  To the hotel’s credit, they just switched out the drinks and never charged us for the freaky one.

The lobby bar of the Empire Hotel.  Cool place, good bar, nasty cocktail menu.

The sad thing is that the Empire Hotel bar is really cool.  The ambiance is great, but more importantly, they are skilled drink-makers!  My negroni and EE’s margarita were perfectly executed.  The bartender was fast; the waitress was attentive.  But the drink menu was disgusting!

We went to the hotel restaurant, Ed’s Chowder House, after cocktails.  Confounding us further in regards to the drink menu is the fact that Ed’s drink menu is AWESOME.  I had a spectacular West Side Gimlet.  EE had a great jalapeno-infused margarita (feeling scarred by her Atomic Fireball attempt at branching out, my sweet EE may be back to margaritas for a while now).  The oysters were great, the service was again great.  I highly recommend it.

Bar of Ed’s Chowder House at the Empire Hotel.  Awesome.

Lesson: Skip the lounge bar and walk upstairs to Ed’s.

Moral: never design drinks for high schoolers.

(EE-craftiness: part of a heart garland.)

I love Valentine’s Day.  I view it as an ideal holiday, and strenuously disagree with those who consider it to be over-commercialized, depressing, and all the rest.  Valentine’s is a bright spot in in the otherwise desolate month of February (at least in the Northeast).  Even before the days of EE, I was always happy to invite a pretty lady to be my valentine (and in my limited experience, ladies always enjoy being a valentine).  What could be better than fine dining, and perhaps the exchange of an extravagant gift or two, with someone whose company I enjoy?  Share the love, that’s what I say.

(Only on Valentine’s Day will your friends give you this card.  Hopefully.)

This year, EE and I somewhat reinterpreted our traditional Valentine’s celebration: we threw a cocktail party!

We hosted about 30 guests, a mix of singles and couples, for the express purposes of Valentining and having cocktails.  The goal was not to provide dinner - it was to provide an extra oomph of glizt and glam (and maybe even gossip and drama) to whatever evening people may or may not have planned for themselves.

In preparation for this momentous event, I went to work creating some drinks that fit the occasion.  The challenges/criteria were:

• 3 colors – EE often thinks in colors, so we determined the need for a red drink, a pink drink, and a white drink.
• Glassware – we only have so many of each type of glass, and wanted to avoid plastic.  The drinks had to spread across tumblers, stemmed wine, and stemmed cocktail glasses.
• Flavors – needed more than one type of flavor profile for a range of drinkers.

The results were (bearing their Valentine names):

Passion

Color: Red

Glass: Tumbler

Flavor area: Bitter

Ingredients

1 Tequila

3/4 Campari

3/4 Blood Orange Italian Soda (I bought this at Whole Foods)

1/3 Sweet Vermouth

drop Orange bitters

A muddled cherry (buy the frozen ones)

Muddle the cherry, stir vigorously with ice and all ingredients except the soda.  Strain into serving pitcher, add soda and stir gently.  At the party, I mixed batches of these in a pitcher, which we put out with an ice bucket and the correct glassware.

Blush

Color: Pink

Glass: Cocktail

Flavor area: Lightly fruity, easily accessible gin

Ingredients

1 Bombay Sapphire

1/4 Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur

1/4 Kumquat liqueur (you have to make it yourself – a post for another time – substitute Cointreau)

half a Lime’s juice

drop of Cranberry juice

Combine all ingredients with ice in a shaker and shake vigorously.  At the party I shook up batches and funneled them into a good-looking clear liquor bottle that I had de-labeled and cleaned.  The bottle was then left in an ice bucket next to the correct glassware.

Lovely

Color: White (ok, it’s yellowy, like white wine is white.  But true white is a pain)

Glass: Wine

Flavor area: Light, aromatic, refreshing, and sweeter

Ingredients

2 Seltzer Water

1 White Wine (something dry and simple – I used an Austrian wine made by Berger)

3/4 St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur

1/4 Dry Vermouth

1/4 Dolin Blanc Vermouth

Combine all ingredients and stir.  Or, if using a siphon for the seltzer (a superior way to go), just add the seltzer last and allow the blast of seltzer to do the mixing.  For the party, I had some old french lemonade bottles with flip-tops that I put batches into and then topped with seltzer.  We left the bottles in a bowl with ice next to the correct glassware.

Note:  Sadly, we had such a good time at the party that we didn’t take any drink/party pictures.  Sorry, that was lame of us.  Here’s a final photo:

(My present to EE this year – they are antique sterling stirrer-straws. I was a little wary of giving her something cocktail-related, given it’s kind of my own hobby at all, but she does seem to like them very much.)

]]> http://www.tessinrinpoche.com/2010/02/15/a-valentines-threesome/feed/ 1 http://www.tessinrinpoche.com/2010/01/28/non-alcoholic-mixology/ http://www.tessinrinpoche.com/2010/01/28/non-alcoholic-mixology/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:32:46 +0000 Bertessa http://www.tessinrinpoche.com/?p=789

An N.A. Cleanser.  Serve it on the rocks, or in a flute.  With brunch, or at cocktail hour.

If you read lots of drinking/mixology blogs, you will have noted that January is practically international sobriety month.  Everyone needs a break after the holidays.  Here in Tessin land, we try for a little more balance by having non-drinking days every week (as opposed to a lot all at the beginning of the year).

Sometimes, though, the lure of drink-having ritual, or a desire for a new flavor, beckons when we do not want any alcohol.  Or we have a guest (like EE’s young cousin) who wants to feel part of the party, but can’t have alcohol.  I have also been informed that pregnant ladies do not lose their desire for tasty beverages even though they cannot imbibe fine spirits.

To support such challenging periods in life, I make some N.A.s.  I have not perfected the N.A. - I  can’t make one that really seems correct served up in a martini glass, and I am over-reliant on seltzer – but I have made some tasty beverages:

N.A. Pomegranate Lime

1/2 Pomegranate juice

1/4 Agave nectar

juice from 1/2 a lime

Mix the above ingredients and then top off with 3 times as much water as mix.  You can use sparkling or still, rocks or not.

N.A. Ginger Clementine

1 clementine orange, peeled

1/3 grapefruit juice

1/4 ginger juice

a few frozen cranberries

Muddle the ingredients (be sure to pop the cranberries), and then shake.  Top off with just twice as much seltzer as mix.

Sometimes, we need to go a step beyond a tasty N.A. to an N.A. that will correct some of our non-N.A. excess.  In those cases, I tend to make a batch for the household/group, because everyone probably feels about the same way.

N.A. Cleanser

handful frozen blueberries

handful frozen cranberries

1/3 ginger juice

1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper

Combine above and muddle.

2 pomegranate juice

1 cranberry juice

1 grapefruit juice

2/3 agave nectar

Mix in remaining ingredients and stir well.  From here you need to add water, still or sparkling, with ice or without.  It’s pretty versatile really, but EE says I have to warn that all that juice really may cause your body to flush itself out (maybe not the worst given the circs, as long as you’ll be near a restroom).

A few notes:

• Always use pure fruit juice with no sugar added – no cranberry cocktail, just the cranberry juice
• Anywhere I say agave, you could use honey or simple syrup, but I like the agave flavor
• The seltzer will work better if it is from a siphon – that way the blast of water mixes everything up

A drink target could involve an objective property of the drink being designed: flavor (spice, citrus, basil), glass-type (cocktail, highball, solo cup), color (red, clear, orange), garnish-use (onion, brussel sprouts, licorice)… really anything that describes some aspect of the drink.

Another drink target could be a concept, feeling, or vibe that the drink should impart.  This type of criteria is trickier because it is inherently more subjective, but it is often my most effective method when mixing for those I know and love the most.  Since I’m a home mixologists, most of my guests are in this category.

As an example of designing a drink by feeling, I have two recipes for the same feeling.  The two recipes are nice because they illustrate differences of interpreting the same mandate, and because one is simple, the other complex.

EE said to me one Thursday, when making omelettes – something she’s very, very good at –  ”I’d like a drink that tastes like herbs, like in Provence.”  Nevermind that neither of us have been to France outside Paris.  I thought I got the idea: fields of lavender, soft skies, not too sweet, not too anything. 

In my head, at least, I saw something like this:

Fields of Provence, with lavender flowertops and soft light, is a good example of a concept or feeling a drink can seek to capture.

The result was the light and relatively simple:  

Flowertops:

Ingredients

1 lavender-infused gin

1/2 Dolin blanc vermouth

1/3 St. Germain’s elderflower liqueur

5 drops lemon bitters

couple leaves of mint

Shake vigorously.  Serve up.  Garnish with a flower, piece of fresh lavender, or any herb you have around (you know, make it pretty).

Unfortunately (but not that unfortunately, as come on, we’re talking about mixology here), this isn’t what EE had in mind.  She refined her request by saying, “No, no, it needs to be red and yellow too!  Like a tablecloth.”  She was thinking of vibrant, Provence-style linens, and of something much more earthy.  Ah!  Got it.  The concept of rich, aromatic soil is a much more challenging flavor, because it is quite complex. 

The Provence-style linens EE was thinking of, to complement her omelettes.

Still Provence, but more earth, and red soil - the Terroir.

The result was a drink that got high marks for meeting the desired target, and for just being a great drink:

Terroir de Provence (Cheesy name, yes, but there are enough ingredients to merit the grandiosity.  As I say, I’ve never been there, so there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek involved in this whole project):

Ingredients:

1 lavender-infused gin

1/2 sweet vermouth

1/2 St. Germain’s elderflower liqueur

1/3 basil-infused bourbon

1/3 Bols genever

splash of brandy

whisper of dill-infused vodka

a little freshly grated ginger

Stir.  Serve up with an herbal garnish (EE voted for a rosemary sprig).

Two great drinks (Flowertops for me, Terroir for EE) to accompany a simple meal at home. 

Bon apetit.

Coordinated variations on a strong milieu are good for any party, whether at a home, a restaurant, or somewhere bigger and grander.  The Plaza’s setup allowed for a calmer, well-lit, introductory space with gorgeous architecture in which to have a drink and settle in.  Guests could then move up to a darker, swanky lounge and nightclub atmosphere – complete with a bar made out of ice!

Did the ice bar really add a lot?  Was it worth reviving memories of sea-sickness in cruise ship casinos?  I’m not sure, but it definitely beats the perfunctory folding table covered with cheap white linens.

The ice-encased cocktail menu atop the bar made of ice

I had high hopes for the home of the fabled Oak Room (which I like extra because they have a website background similar to ours here), not to mention of ELOISE.  I was a bit disappointed, but the mixology was definitely a step in the right direction.  There was a cocktail menu (encased in ice) – a clear sign that someone’s heart is at least in the right place.  The menu tended toward the sweet, vodka, and champagne.  None of these are my thing.  No worries, they had a full bar, so you could call your drinks, almost.

If you, gentle reader, should soon find yourself with the task of negotiating a hotel bar package:

It is unfortunate that even the home of such a great bar can’t pass my simple dive-bar sizing test with their party bar package.

In classic “full bar package” fashion, there was plenty of great booze, but no liqueurs, bitters, digestifs, aperitifs, fresh fruits or juices.  One of the bars managed to not have dry vermouth (they were very ashamed of that, to be fair).  I don’t believe that hotels should be allowed to sell bar packages without guaranteeing at least a bottle of Angostura bitters.  This one correction would open a world of simple classics any bartender should be able to make.  Imagine what would happen with the introduction of Campari.

This is the kind of detail over which to get serious.

Brides, grooms, and mother-in-laws to-be, listen up! Bertessa says: Bitters and Campari at the bar(s) = better than flowers in the bathroom.  Not that they were present at my my own reception (the Campari, not the flowers – which were most certainly there).  But I have since gotten a little bit older and a whole lot wiser, maybe…

For all the shortcomings of hotel bar packages, it is fun to see more people wandering around with martini glasses (even when filled with green apple martinis – I was really shocked to see that early ’00s trend) than beer bottles.  We are heading the right direction.  And the Plaza is a sweet place to party.

Cranberry-infused Gin with Tonic (plus some squirrel candles)

EE and I are uber-excited to be hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year!  Because we live far from our families, and because I’m working on Friday, we are staying in Manhattan.  This will be our first chance to see the parade, and our first major holiday together without the presence of relatives.  (Relatives that may be reading this: we are very sad not to see you.)  To make the best of the situ, we have teamed up with pals to build a guest list that is an ideal mix of friends, friendly colleagues, relatives of guests, and people we haven’t met.  I’m particularly fond of the last guest category as having people who I’ve never met at the table seems very in keeping with the sharing and giving themes of the holiday.

The most surprising aspect of planning for this Thanksgiving has been the manner in which people seriously consider the invitation to come over.  We kept hearing, “Sounds great, but I’ll only come if I can make and bring X, Y, and Z.”  This response has been a huge relief, because I’m not pressured to provide people with the special dish they associate with giving thanks.  For my part, I love the traditional Thanksgiving spread: turkey (ours is a bronze heritage bird raised on pasture upstate by Wendy), stuffing (I’m making oyster stuffing with my Grandmother’s recipe), pie (I can’t bake to my own standards - luckily others are providing this), etc.

The one aspect of the feast that isn’t embedded in any childhood traditions: a concept of perfect Thanksgiving cocktails.  This is an amazing opening for the home mixologist, and I’ve been working on ways to fill the void.

A few general principles I’ll be mixing by:

1. Have fun
2. Don’t judge; serve people what they want
3. Honor the season, somehow
4. If not the season, a well-worn concept of the Thanksgiving holiday

There are some challenges to consider:

1. Large groups
2. Diversity – just because you may be related, doesn’t mean you like the same drinks
3. Long time-periods (waiting for the turkey to cook)
4. Crowded kitchens

Some tactics I’ll be trying:

1. Infusion – easily (I promise, see below) handles principles 3 or 4.  An infusion allows a novel drink without too many ingredients to mix.
2. Long drinks – they’ll help people keep pace, be refreshed, and stay out of the kitchen.

Cranberry-infused Gin & Tonic

Infuse the gin

Buy some raw cranberries.  Take a jar, fill 1/8 with cranberries, just cover the cranberries with gin and muddle (basically just pop most of the cranberries).  Fill jar with gin.  Leave overnight to 24 hours.  Strain out the cranberries.

Use the infusion to make a Gin and Tonic as described here, but garnish with frozen cranberries instead of lime.

Refresher course on making a Tessin Gin & Tonic

Turkey Carver

Ingredients

1 Bourbon

1/4 Maraschino liqueur

1/8 Fernet Branca

1/8 Kahlua

Squeeze lemon juice

Stir the ingredients in a tall glass filled with ice and top with tonic.

Kitchen Commander

Ingredients

1 Rum (whatever you’ve got)

1/2 Stone’s Ginger

1/4 Cointreau

a few cranberries (frozen or otherwise)

Shake (have to break down the cranberries a bit).  Pour in a tall glass filled with ice.  Top with sparkling water.  Garnish with frozen cranberries.

160 Degrees (or Is The Turkey Ready?)

Ingredients

1 Bourbon

3/4 Stone’s Ginger

1/3 Pimms

dash Anisette

2 drops Peychaud bitters

Stir, strain into a cocktail glass.  Garnish with a lemon twist.

160 Degrees

Of course, wine will be served with the meal, but I’ll leave wine blogging to others.  Hopefully some of these drinks may inspire a cocktail or two at your festivities this week!

Some fun pics of the squirrels (they are way too fun; I can’t wait to light them):

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:

I’d settle for aeroplanes having cocktail shakers, but I wouldn’t mind an aeroplane shaker…

I’m not exactly a frequent flier, and I don’t usually drink when I fly, but an overnight trip to Chicago gave me the opportunity to see what I could do with American’s coach beverage selection.  Since American also has wi-fi onboard, I can also write this blog (very awesome except that the people next to me get a sneak peak).

Making drinks in coach is no easy feat.  An evaluation of the circs:

Ingredients

• surprising range of basic liquors
• multitude of  high fructose corn syrup-based mixers
• citrus in tiny chunks (though I’ve never seen such tiny pieces of lime elsewhere)

Obstacles (freshness and quality complaints about the mixers aside) – lack of…

• Vermouths
• Liqueurs
• Bitters
• Hardware (mixers, muddlers, strainers)
• Garnishes (beyond those little citrus chunks).

On the big plus side, the flight attendants are way more accommodating than I feel they should be.  Their primary responsibility is passenger safety, they have a lot of people to serve, and yet they will humor some dude asking for random drink ingredients.

I understand that they don’t have room for everything on that cart, but really, just a little vermouth would open up a whole range of possibilities.  I’m sort of shocked that they haven’t started selling little martini sets in plastic shakers.  For $10 you could get a little souvenir shaker that comes with  gin and a tiny packet of vermouth.  They could provide the ice and a twist from the cart.  Some airlines are venturing into this realm, but my trip is for business, and hence getting where I need to go, on time, was my main consideration.

While the TSA’s 3-1-1 rule would easily allow for a baggie with ample liquor and vermouth to make drinks, we’re having fun here, not being weirdos.  Aside: EE preemptively forbade me from carrying around my own bitters, as some do with Tabasco, pepper mills, and artificial sweetener - actually not something I had thought of, and not a bad suggestion.

Drinks On A Plane – What I Came Up With

• Scotch & Ginger Ale.   I made this on the way out, last night, using Dewar’s white label, Canada Dry, and lime.
  1. Pour 1/3 the scotch over ice
  2. Top with Ginger ale
  3. Squeeze some lime
  4. Stir
  5. Repeat until the scotch runs out
  6. Resist the urge to drink the remaining ginger ale – it isn’t a good chaser

• Gin & Cranberry.   A classic.  I made it on my flight coming home tonight, using gin, cranberry, and lime.
  1. Fill 1/3 the glass with gin
  2. Top with cranberry juice
  3. Squeeze lime
  4. Stir
  5. Maintain the 1/3 gin, 2/3 juice ratio

Of course many other classics are possible on a plane:

• Gin & Tonic – always possible, but typically lacking enough gin to tonic.  An ideal situation, when traveling with 2 people, is to get 3 little gins and 1 tonic to make a drink for each of you.   For whatever reason, this feels more right to me on a train.  A discrete trip to the snack car and a return with 2 little G&Ts is a very sweet gesture, or so I’ve been told.
• Rum & Coke – debatable as to its classic cocktail merits, but it is definitely a good way to go if you just caught a flight for warmer climes.

Maybe I’ll be more prepared with ideas when I start my holiday travels.  Maybe there’s a reason I tend to abstain on planes.

EE was making dinner last weekend, her first Sunday chili of the colder months, and I was puttering around in my mixology cabinet, trying to create a chili-friendly cocktail.  EE had left some New York sharp cheddar cheese on the counter cut and waiting to garnish our bowls.  The temptation was too great: I infused something with cheddar.

Infusing liquors sounds a bit intimidating, you say?  It sounds complicated and technical, not something for the casual home mixologist?  No!  Infusions are incredibly simple.  Put something in a sealed container with a liquor and voila!  A custom drink and flavor that you can’t get anywhere else.  This allows for incorporating local, seasonal ingredients, and for creating something really unique without having to pay a fortune for a rare bottle of X.  Given the simplicity, the ability to custom-craft flavors, and the cost-effectiveness of the deal, you can expect to hear me suggesting infusions frequently.

I poured about a cup-and-a-half of Sazerac rye whiskey over about one cubic inch of cheese broken-up into smallish chunks.  Whiskey seemed like the natural spirit for a cheddar flavor.  Rye seemed like it had the best balance of earthy, sweet, and cutting notes.  Sazerac seemed better to risk on this venture than my Rittenhouse because Sazerac is sweeter, and honestly, I don’t like it as much.  The concoction sat for three days, and on the third day the cheese was strained.

Opening the infusion, tasting the cheese (blech), and straining.

I was a bit surprised by the fat floating on the top of the rye, and the cheese chunks were like an inedible whey (new rule: don’t eat anything that has been the infuser, ever).  However, after I poured the rye through a tea strainer and a coffee filter, the Sazerac had a pleasant umami flavor that wasn’t present before.  More importantly, the finish on the whiskey was unmistakably cheddar flavored.

Chedda Rye getting strained through a coffee filter.

Chedda Rye is worth having as a stand alone drink – sip it on the rocks when you want whiskey with a little more body.

Not being content to let such a creation go undisturbed, I decided to create a cocktail with it as well.  EE made the brilliant suggestion of doing something with apples, but we have zero in the apple department (this is such a good idea, though, that I saved some Chedda Rye for future creation).  Lacking apples, I created an evening sipping drink that is pretty good.  It is sort of like a Bloody Mary, but not as sharp.  We’ll call it the Chedda Rye Mary

Ingredients

3/2 Chedda Rye

1/3 Dubonnet

2-3 grape or cherry tomatoes

dash Tabasco

Cut the tomatoes in half.  Combine all ingredients in a shaker and shake.  Strain well to avoid tomato seeds.  Garnish with a cheddar cheese twist.

Maybe this is an unexplored area of mixology for a reason, but the results weren’t bad.