Good, Better, Best; Or Whatever

The Easter Elchies cocktail (Mr. Boston, page 179), named for some fucking house on the Macallan estate, calls for eight parts single malt scotch, one part Cherry Heering and one part Punt y Mes plus on dash of orange bitters.

Of course we didn’t use single malt scotch because WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD USE SINGLE MALT SCOTCH IN A COCKTAIL? I actually have a bottle of single malt here, maybe two, and honestly, I never know when to drink it. Most nights seem not to rise to the level of single malt. The bottle(s) just sit there. Weird because they’re not that much more expensive, or at least the single malt I get. Which is to say, if they cost twice as much, you’d think they only get tasted every two or three times you drink booze. Instead, it never gets drunk. I probably should just change that. It would be a more “mature” move.

So anyway, cheap blended scotch with that weird Polish cherry stuff I got and mostly Punt y Mes but also a little bit of sweet vermouth because we ran out of Punt y Mes. And . . . it was good! Uncle Goober noted the Rob Roy-plus thing going on. Oh, yeah, right — I always forget about that; variations on this-or-that. Would it have been more good with single malt scotch? Is that ever even a possibility?

When Cocktails Were Larger And Filled With Fruit

Continuing the foray into The PDT Cocktail Book, I alighted on the Eclipse Cocktail (page 113), which involves tequila, Aperol, Cherry Heering and lemon juice. As any good bartender will tell you, the first rule of mixology is to use ingredients you have; we had those ingredients.

The combination is good (most cocktails are “good” though, aren’t they?), less sweet and more nuanced than last night’s Persephone. Still fruity, but good. Tonight it occurred to me that we might be living a sort of cocktail time capsule in this book though — it was published in 2011, and I wonder if the trends from four years back were more fruitacious than today. The few times I’ve been out at real-life cocktail places recently it seems like the drinks were more angular and challenging than fruitacious. (“Angular” just popped into my head; I remember guitars being described as “angular” in days of yore; I have no clue what that means.)

To go back to the Eclipse, the proportions kind of blow the typical three-ounce cocktail out of the water: 2 ounces tequila and 3/4 ounces of each other ingredient adds up to [thinking] 4 1/4 ounces of beverage: yikes!

Blood and Sand (Cherry Liqueur, Cont.)

Too lazy to flip through the Mr. Boston for whiskey recipes that use Cherry Heering so I googled it. Found this recipe for a Blood and Sand: 1 ounce blended Scotch, 1 ounce orange juice and 3/4 ounce Cherry Heering. It was good but wanted it more boozy (perhaps that’s because of using the lower alcohol Nalewka Lwowecka). As a rule I avoid orange juice because alcohol and orange juice reminds me of a screwdriver, but this was definitely not too orange-y. For what it’s worth, I used Grant scotch, which isn’t the cheapest one on the bottom shelf, but it’s close. The bottle does have a charming triangular shape that I like to think is somehow space saving. I haven’t found a cheap go-to blended scotch mixer — part of it may be my ideas about what constitutes “cheap”; my go-to cheap bourbon has been Evan Williams and cheap mezcal has been that thing with the gnarly worm . . . [googling] . . . Monte Alban. Here are About.com some more recipes that look good; also, seems like there are variations on Blood and Sand.

Remember The Maine

You can usually follow, to a certain extent, the backstory of cocktail names in the Mr. Boston guide. Remember The Maine (page 192) does not fall into that category. The cocktail is 2 ounces rye, 3/4 ounce sweet vermouth, 1/2 ounce cherry Heering and 1/4 ounce pastis. What cherry Heering has to do with the USS Maine, I have no idea, but I was geeked to try this after coming across cherry Heering in all these recipes and never having it, then finally seeing it at one of the local liquor stores today. Full disclosure: I actually bypassed the cheery Heering luxe pack on sale (including two snifters) for a $12 bottle of some Polish stuff next to it called Nalewka Lwowecka. I guessed they were the same [checking] or apparently Heering is slightly more alcoholic.