Great with chocolate? Srsly?

So, we drove up to Beltramos today, up in Menlo Park. Found a *LOT* of the obscure ingredients we'll be needing for our cocktail venture. We even found Genever Gin! Woot! So now we got to try the Alamagoozlum for real. I made it with Boomsma Jonge Genever Gin, and Appleton Jamaica Rum. It's really really good. I measured very carefully (pulled out my measuring cups for *real* half to 2 ounce measure) and use Fee Brothers Old Fashioned (Angostura) Bitters instead of the usual angostura.

It's a great drink. I wasn't able to put in a lemon twist, so I used a couple drops of lemon bitters.

The surprise though, was when we were having a chocolate truffle for dessert. I grabbed my water to cleanse my palate afterwards, fully expecting to have a sour, bitter nasty taste in my mouth after the chocolate. The Alamagoozlum goes well with chocolate truffles! Who knew? It smooths it out into this rich, mouth-enveloping velvet flavor. I have *no* idea what is doing that. Alex speculates it's the chartreuse - apparently his grandmother only drank chartreuse after after eating chocolate. So, perhaps it's that.

I encourage you to hunt down the genever gin and the jamaica rum and make a real alamagoozlum. It's worht it.

Because we have chickens...

We have chickens; therefore, we have eggs. We have eggs that I trust. Therefore, we have egg whites for cocktails. Tonight, I used a yolk in a recipe and had leftover egg white. You see where this is going don't you...

So, we tried the Alamagoozlum revisited.

This time:
2 oz gin (Bombay Sapphire - I still don't have genever gin)
1 shot water
1 shot Jamaican rum (Myers)
1 shot Chartreuse
1/2 oz curacao
1/2 oz Angostura bitters
and of course
1/2 egg white (yes, I made two so I could use the whole egg white)

So - this time I used the full amount of chartreuse. And no agave to sweeten it. It turned out great. Intensely flavorful, not sweet (unlike the first iteration). I still want to try sometime with genever gin.

Alphabetically, dammit!

DH and I have decided to work our way through Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails by Ted Haigh (aka Dr. Cocktail) alphabetically! (DH keeps saying we don't have to go alphabetically but I insist that we do!)

We are not purists - we may (probably will) make other substitutions along the way. We have some constraints - no sugar syrup (we use agave instead). As I go, I'll post what substitutions we're making and notes about how we liked the drink (or not).

We started tonight with the Alamagoozlum Cocktail.

I was nervous about this one - I typically HATE chartreuse. OTOH - raw eggwhite is fine with us - we have backyard chickens so I *know* my eggwhites are fine in drinks.

The list of ingredients:
1/2 egg white (I used a whole, small eggwhite)
2 oz genever gin (I used Tanqueray)
2 oz water (cold filtered water)
1-1/2 oz Jamaican rum (I used Myers Dark rum - it's Jamaican!)
1-1/2 oz yellow or green Chartreuse (I used 1/2 oz green Chartreuse)
1-1/2 oz gomme syrup or sugar syrup (I used 1/2 oz agave syrup)
1/2 oz orange curacao (I used 1 oz blue curacao)
1/2 oz angostura bitters (! I did it but wow. Never saw that much bitters in any drink before!)

So, the verdict?
I liked it pretty much as is. DH didn't like it - too sweet for him. I enjoyed it - although it was pretty sweet. We both liked the complexity. I was surprised to enjoy it in spite of the chartreuse!

In the future, if we make this again, I'm going to try a different rum (Myers can be pretty sweet), a different gin (I want to try genever gin), more chartreuse, less curacao, and experiment with other bitters.

DH here: the overwhelming sweetness was quite reasonably defeated once DW took half my drink and topped it up with more gin, chartreuse, dash of lemon bitters, two dashes of lemon juice on my request. Guess this makes it a totally different drink (we'll need to name it!-) but I taste the original complex taste essentially unaltered, just relieved from the oppression of the excessive sweetness.

Next up: the Algonquin! I'm looking forward to it...