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.

On The Avenue and beyond

The Avenue is another of those cocktails requiring "exotic" ingredients. No, not the "orange flower water", although some folks might have trouble finding that. I refer, instead, to Passion Fruit Juice. (Or nectar. Or Puree. Or... ) I spent an afternoon running around searching for this ingredient. Whole Foods *used* to stock it. Doesn't anymore. Closest I could come was Passion Fruit Orange Juice concentrate in the frozen section of my favorite grocery, Piazzas Fine Foods.

So, I tried it with that.

1 oz bourbon (I used Jim Beam)
1 oz Calvados
1 oz passion fruit juice (I used passionfruit orange juice)
1 dash grenadine (I used Stirrings Real Pomegranate Grenadine)
1 dash orange flower water

The recipe calls for it to be garnished with "a carnation boutonniere". Yeah. How precious. I went wihtout the boutonierre. Eventually, deciding it was too smooth and sweet with no bite, we added a twist of lemon and then a dash of lemon bitters. Too late, I read that if you substitute for the passionfruit juice, that you probably want to skip the grenadine and add a dash of lemon juice instead. I think trying it that way will make it quite refreshing and summery.

We skipped the Aviation - we're both fans and love it. We make it the old way with both Maraschino *and* Creme de Violette. It's one of our favorite "hot-tub" cocktails. Beautifully pale blue, tasty, with enough tantalizing hints of florals and botanicals and enough tartness to not be cloying. It's a simple enough cocktail too -

2 1/2 oz gin
3/4 oz lemon juice (fresh is best of course)
a couple dashes maraschino
a couple dashes violet liqueur (creme de violette)
lemon twist garnish
(I often add a cherry as well.)

 The Barbara West is a cocktail I had high hopes for. Gin, sherry, lemon juice, angostura bitters? What's not to like. Unfortunately, it was too much sherry and also too lemon tart.

2 oz gin
1 oz sherry
1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
dash Angostura bitters

 I'll have to try this again with a more forward gin (I used Gordons) and less lemon juice, to see if we can get the balance right. It has potential.

Riffing on recipes - Amarosa 2.0?

Okay, so Amaro Cora is not made anymore. (The place I tried to order from contacted me to let me know that was a mistake on their website.) I searched and found an Italian website about bitters that explained it’s no longer being made. Darn!

Okay - next best: try riffing on it with amaros I can get. Since we own campari, I tried with that.

First try:

1 shot gin
1 shot campari
1 shot kirschwasser

WAAAAAY too much campari. Totally dominated by the campari flavor. Never mind. Not doing that again!

Next try:

1 shot gin
½ shot campari
1 shot kirschwasser

Much better! Balanced, bitter but not overly so. All the ingredients obviously play their part here, including the twist of lemon. I do want to try with Aperol some time, as I suspect it’ll be a bit closer to the “real” cora flavor.

And off onto a tangent:
Lillet Amarosa:

2 shots Lillet Rose’
½ shot kirschwasser
½ shot gin → brought up after tasting to 1 shot gin

Almost. Adding the extra half shot of gin brought it to a decent flavor balance.

DH’s comments were -- the Lillet Rose' version is like dating a girl who wears long socks and has her hair made up in tresses -- and can’t go out with you on Sunday morning ‘cuz she goes to Church then of course.  Can be wonderful and sweet, if you can stay awake...

The Campari version is like dating a girl who wears torn fishnet stockings, has plenty of tattoos, and has her hair in a Mohawk.  You may or may not be able to build on this but one thing is sure -- you won’t be bored!-)

Update: I ended up only drinking about half mine. The gin was definitely affecting me pretty strongly by the time I had tasted the versions. So, I gave the rest of mine to DH and switched back to water. (See - this is why I do fancy cocktails - I'm such a lightweight I can only handle one, so I might as well make that one worthwhile. )

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...