The Oh Boy!

So, watching too many commercials from Makers Mark for the Cocktail Party,  I bought some Makers Mark. I tried finding a recipe to use it with.  Ended up riffing on the Old Fashioned.

2 oz Makers Mark bourbon
1/2 oz cointreau
muddled orange slice
2-3 dashes angostura bitters

Shake with ice and a splash bit of cold water. Serve. Yum!

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.

No esoterica, just perfect balance

The Algonquin

This is a keeper. No esoteric ingredients. Everything easily accessible. We didn't need to make any substitutions. Just a perfect balance of flavor and fragrance.

The rye provides a nice background spiciness. The vermouth is fragrant but dry, and the pineapple smooths it out without making it cloyingly sweet.

The recipe:
1 jigger rye (I used Redemption Rye)
1/2 jigger dry vermouth (I used Noilly Pratt)
1/2 jigger pineapple juice

There is a variation which adds a dash of peach bitters and then it's called a Queen Anne. Now, I don't have official "peach bitters" but I canned peaches last year and put the peach pits, skins and clinging peach bits in vodka for a couple months. So I put in a dash of that. DH didn't like it that way - he didn't like the peach "aftertaste". I liked it though.

I also made a second cocktail with Old Overholt Rye. It wasn't as good. I was surprised at the difference it made. The pineapple was more pronounced, the vermouth less, and there was less spiciness.

Amaro Cora

I suspect we'll have to skip a couple here and there due to availability of ingredients. Bitters is one of the common culprits - especially the more esoteric ones. Happily, many of them are being revived due to the popularity of mixology.

I did manage, after much searching, to find a source that claims to let me order Amaro Cora, the heart of the next but one cocktail, the Amarosa. (Two of the sources referenced in the book didn't work: one is out of business, and the other is out of stock.) An Italian site I read claimed it was no longer being made. Crossing my fingers that the place I ordered, raederswine.com isn't just teasing about the availability.

Of course, the vendor had a $75 minimum order, so I took the opportunity to pick up the some other ingredients that I'll be needing for the future, including Cherry Heering, Applejack, and Plymouth Gin. I did tell them to contact me if they aren't able to fill the order for the Amaro Cora, since that's the point of ordering from them.

We'll see how long it takes to arrive. In the meantime, we'll just put a sticky note there and return to it when the ingredients arrive.