My love affair with the Negroni is quite a recent thing. I heard about it at the beginning of last year and was surprised to learn that I’d managed to miss out on one of *the* classic cocktails. I was still not entirely certain what one was until I went along to a ‘How To Make Classic Cocktails’ session with Jared Brown and Sam Galsworthy at the Sipsmith Distillery during London Cocktail Week 2010 – Sam is one of the owners (and general Man About Town) of the distillery and Jared is the master distiller. Jared’s main gigs are as a cocktail consultant, historian and writer and he brought a chunk of history to the table as he ran through a bunch of cocktails that night, but the Negroni is the one that still sticks in my mind, mainly as I though it sounded horrendous.

Simply put, a traditional Negroni is equal parts of gin, sweet vermouth and Campari. At the time the latter two ingredients were things that I thought I disliked so I came down on the side of being pleased that I’d not encountered the drink before, but on tasting it I realised that maybe I’d have to rethink my opinion of wine based aperitifs. The gin is very much a base flavour, providing mainly an alcoholic punch with a hint of its botanicals (especially the juniper); the Campari brings a base level of bitterness, as well as a hint of sugary sweetness; and the vermouth is the top dressing, the supplier of the more complex flavours.

The history of the Negroni, like many classics, is full of conjecture and stories, but the drink that the Negroni sprang from is the Milano Torino (later made more famous as the Americano, despite the fact that Campari wasn’t particularly well known in the US until after the cocktail changed its name), a mix of Campari (from Milan) and sweet vermouth (traditionally Cinzano, from Turin, aka Torino, was used) topped up with soda. Switch the soda for gin and you move from a sparkling aperitif to a classic three ingredient gin cocktail. The generally accepted story is that the substitution was first requested by Count Camillo Negroni at the Caffè Casoni in Florence in 1919. The Count was a bank manager, stock broker and gambler, and his family’s wealth and his connections helped him when the “Americano, Negroni style” took off. They opened a distillery in Treviso and produced a ready mixed version, the Antico Negroni 1919, and have continued to do so until the present day. However, that’s not the only story, as the Negroni family deny the existence of Count Camillo and instead claim that the drink was invented in the south of France…

The traditional recipe for the Negroni is simple, leading to much argument as to what the ‘perfect’ recipe is. Often the drink is made punchier and sweeter, with a 4/2/1 ratio used for gin/vermouth/Campari and Jared admitted that he’s been using a 2/2/1 ratio for years, with many compliments as to his making a Negroni ‘properly’ despite cutting back on the bitter Campari. He also admitted that in one of his first bartending jobs he was asked for a Negroni and not knowing the drink used his regular excuse to be able to look it up. “That’s a great drink, let me just check the proportions” makes you look slightly foolish when the proportions in question are equal measures.

I rather like the traditional equal parts recipe, but find that the vermouth used makes a great difference. I haven’t experimented all that much (as I didn’t go through that much sweet vermouth until recently, when I discovered that it works well on its own on ice) but currently, as inspired by Polpo and its sister restaurants, I like to use a mix of Punt e Mes and a lighter vermouth (such as Gancia or Martini Rosso). The thick and syrupy Punt e Mes makes a rather heavy drink on its own, but when cut with a less sticky vermouth it adds a richness at the back of the cocktail that you don’t usually get. If you try an Americano you can immediately see the impact the gin gives – not only the booze but the addition of fruity juniper and even more herbs, fruit and spice. However, I’ve not found much difference in the gins I regularly use, as I generally stick with classic London Dry gins that have a nice chunk of juniper – Tanqueray, Sipsmith and Beefeater have all made it into my Negronis in recent times.

Traditionally the drink is constructed in a highball glass, but I generally use a glass mug or stemmed glass, as I don’t have any decent highballs (as the Negroni is the only drink that I regularly have that I should probably use one for). It’s easy to make – pour in your ingredients, pack the glass with as much ice as you can fit in, give it a quick stir and you’re done. As ever, the ice plays an important part. It should be added in after the alcoholic components, so as not to melt and dilute the ingredients before serving, and it’s best to use large blocks as they melt slower – you want the drink to be cool rather than dilute in the regular 1/1/1 recipe. Getting the cocktail cold is important, as it tempers both the bitterness and sweetness of the ingredients, as well as toning down the complexity that you get from three different fruit, herb and spice infused drinks. To do things properly you should really garnish the drink with a slice of orange, but as I never have oranges in the house I never do. However, a single drop of orange bitters on top of the stirred drink before serving is enough to add the orange aroma and flavour for those who otherwise shun fruit.

So, happy World Gin Day. During the writing of this post I’ve run out of Campari so there’s no more Negronis for me tonight. Whatever your favourite gin drink is, whether cocktail, & tonic or simply “in a glass”, and even if you missed the day itself, please join me in raising a toast to the glory of juniper based spirits.

Actually, I have a bag of limes so maybe I should experiment with Gimlets instead…

From:

To:

With only a shake and the balancing of an overly large cinnamon stick. Yes, that is the same cinnamon stick that I used to stir my hot buttered rum. I am frugal.

And thus ends my whisky ‘deluge’. More of a spilled half empty bucket, but there will of course be more to come.

The recipe for this one is theoretically quite simple – melt some butter, pour it into some whisky, leave it for a bit and filter out the remaining solids. It’s not quite so simple in reality though. After adding the butter I shook up my jar to emulsify the mix and left it to settle. When it looked like it wasn’t going to settle any more I put it in the fridge to chill and the next morning scooped out the now solid layer of butter on top before pouring the remaining liquid through some coffee filters. This produced a gloriously golden liquid, much more yellow than the original whisky – Grants Ale Cask Reserve (the whisky that kicked off the creation of Innis & Gunn) – and completely clear.

I used about 50g of butter for 200ml of whisky and had a good amount of it settle out, so I suspect that I could use a bit less. However, I will probably still use the same amount next time as the butter was infused with the flavour of whisky and mixed with a bit of sugar made a rather tasty alternative to brandy butter to accompany my Christmas mince pies.

On the nose it was really buttery, matching the spiciness of the whisky to make a rich spongecakey mix. It goes a similar way with the taste, with any sharp edges to the whisky rounded off by the buttery flavour, more sweetness coming though and woodiness on the finish softened. While quite nice on its own it’s not quite something that I’d drink neat – it still has a roughness to it that I’m not fond of. However, I’ve been playing around with apple juice as a mixer for whisky and found that it worked rather well here – 3 parts apple juice to 2 parts butter washed whisky combined the butter and spice of the whisky with the appliness of the juice to produce something rather like apple pie in a glass.

Whisky experiment #1 – success!

Grants Ale Cask Reserve
Blended scotch whisky, 40%. ~£15 from Master of Malt.

Along with some mulled wine bubbling away on the bar and this month’s cocktail list there was also Andrea Montague mixing custom cocktails from questionnaires on drinkers’ tastes upstairs, a drink swap shop, a raffle and a cocktail making competition. The raffle is yet to be drawn, but it was for one of the Sacred Gin blending kits, with 6 bottles of spirits made with individual botanicals allowing you to build your own gin, in return for listing you 3 favourite gins, ready for an upcoming LCS event. At £85 the sets are a bit pricey but rather tempting and I still have my fingers crossed for my name to come out of the hat.

I brought a few things along for the swap shop, clearing out most of my experiment shelf in a dual ‘making space’ and ‘trying to get advice’ exercise. I took along some fairly unsuccessful horseradish vodka (that had gone turnipy over time) and liquorice vodka (that had lost most of its sweetness) as well as my grenadine from the other week and some very nice strawberry ratafia (that I will one day get around to writing up), the latter of which went down well with David Smith of Summer Fruit Cup. Of the other things on the table I was impressed by David’s Christmas Liqueur (which has led to me having a jar of mincemeat vodka maturing in the kitchen) and a few of the stranger infusions – an over the top tobacco bourbon and some bacon vodka being the ones that I can still remember. There were also a pair of bottles of damson gin from The Charles Lamb and 69 Colebrooke Row, showing a rather big difference in flavour (as you’d expect from one made traditionally and one in a lab) with the former being big and thick and the latter more refined and astringent. I rather liked the Charles Lamb’s…

The cocktail competition filled out the middle of the evening, with 6 teams competing in Ready, Steady, Shake – a Ready, Steady, Cook-alike where each team was given a box of ingredients and was asked to put together a cocktail in a few minutes. I teamed up with David and Clayton Hartley of the Institute of Alcoholic Experimentation, and we were promptly presented with a box containing a variety of things including an egg and some rocket pesto. We avoided the egg but made a fruity summer bloody mary, with lemon, lime, grapefruit and tomato juice, chilli pepper and a spoon of the pesto muddled and served over ice in a tall glass with a sage rubbed-rim, garnished with strawberries and sage. It was a bit too savoury in the end, with Clayton suggesting that muddling a few strawberries in the mix might have helped, but we still came a respectable third overall. We may have got extra points for using pretty much everything from our box (apart from the egg) but we were lucky not to be the team that got a tin of cat food (which was left, predictably, unused). The winning cocktail, The Narnia (with long and flowery description by Ryan Alexander), worked rather a lot better – 1 part lime and 2 parts gin muddled with mint, stirred with 1/2 a part nettle cordial, 1/2 a part maraschino, served in a tall glass over ice, topped with soda and agave syrup to taste and garnished with thyme.

All in all a rather good night and hopefully a taste of things to come. There seem to be plans for the next few months fomenting already and I’ll certainly be dragging myself along whenever I can.

Sacred Gin Blending Kits
Gin elements, 6 x 20cl at 40%. ~£85 from Sacred Gin.

Many thanks to the lovely organisers of the LCS, Callooh Callay, and Alex Kammerling, Giles Looker and Rebekah Dooley for both judging the competition and being so nice to our cocktail. Also, thanks to the various sponsors of bits and pieces in the goodie bag – I will hopefully have something appearing soon about the wonders of Fever Tree Mediterannean tonic water (made to go with vodka? Heresy!) and also have some Hayman’s Gin and Chase Vodka to tuck into, along with money off vouchers from Gerry’s of Soho and The Loft in Clapham. Keep an eye on the LCS website for an announcement of next month’s adventures…

Other than hearing it mentioned in adaptations of Dickens and other period pieces on the TV, I first encountered real life hot buttered rum at a Christmas party about 10 years ago. Every year I’d turn up on a Friday night and help my friend Neil prepare the increasingly impressive feast that became his yearly Christmas dinner. Served on the Saturday we’d start on the previous night, constructing a pile of desserts, several turkeys, stacks of veg and a yearly escalating number of sausages wrapped in bacon. We were joined by a number of other assistants that night, including booze buddy Adam who was in charge of drinks making to keep us lubricated as we prepared. He had decided that buttered rum was the way to go and without the safety net of a recipe combined butter, sugar and rum in cups which he and I promptly drank. Unfortunately the proportions were not quite as they might have been and I ended up sleeping on the floor of the kitchen (I think, the memories are predictably hazy) and cooking the next day was not as pleasant as it otherwise might have been.

Hot drinks containing booze have never really fallen out of fashion, popping up every year around Christmas without fail. The smell of mulled wine is ingrained into public consciousness as part of the season and the image of people standing in the snow with steaming cups of something to warm the cockles appears in the standard imagery. It makes sense to combine the warming effect of alcohol with actual warm drinks when the weather turns and the traditions of ‘hot toddies’ go back years, although their use as a cure-all for winter illnesses isn’t all that recommended these days. In medieval times, when the drinking of brewed drinks was preferred due to the potential of water contamination, hot spiced beers, ciders and wines (the foundations of mulling) were regularly served, with heating by the plunging a red hot poker into the drink living on until the times that fireplaces fell out of fashion in drinking houses.

As ever with older drinks there isn’t any particular set recipe and a quick search on the web led to me 5 or 6 different variations, but the core ingredients are the same – butter, brown sugar, rum and spices. Some involve cooking a mix of all the ingredients with water for hours to create a caramelised base to add rum to, some applaud the red hot poker method of heating and one intriguing looking one uses ice cream, but mine is rather simple and easy to make.

Per cup:

• 50ml dark rum (25 ml will work fine if you don’t want quite the hit of booze)
• 2 tsp butter (I used unsalted, but lightly salted should be fine)
• 1 tsp brown sugar (I used some quite sticky demerara – the darker the better)
• pinch of allspice (and whatever other ‘Christmassy’ spices you like)
• grated nutmeg and a cinnamon stick to garnish

Mix together the butter, sugar and allspice (as well as any other spices you want – cloves, extra cinnamon or whatever) into a paste – you can keep this in the fridge until someone wants a drink. Put the mix into a mug with the rum (I used some rather tasty Gosling’s Black Seal Rum, found at the back of the cupboard where it was left by my lovely landlord) and top up with boiling water. Stir until the sugar is dissolved and garnish with a grate of nutmeg. Instead of sprinkling some cinnamon either on top or into the mix I served it with a cinnamon stick as a stirrer, which seems to work nicely, imparting a hint of cinnamon and giving you something to mix the drink around with.

It’s really quite tasty – the spices and rich rummy sweetness rolling off the top with the steam of the hot water are, to me, the distilled scent of Christmas. To taste it is rich, with the fruitiness working with the butter to make something that’s akin to liquid Christmas cake and when you hit the bottom of the cup you can suck on the cocktail soaked cinnamon stick for a spicy reminder of what you’ve just finished. As the drink sits it will settle out into a buttery head (which isn’t particularly oily, having more the consistency of coffee foam) and rich sugary rummy liquid, and I rather like drinking it like this. However having a swizzly stick allows some mixing to make a more emulsified tipple with a consistency a bit like tea with creamy milk.

I suspect I’ll do some more experimentation with this over the season. Getting the texture of the drink right by making sure that the butter and liquids emulsify nicely is my first goal and getting some more caramel flavours in by cooking the butter and sugar mix before use sounds like a good plan. But mostly the red hot poker approach is something that I will have a go at as soon as I’m somewhere where the closest I have to an open fire is better than an out of fuel cigarette lighter…

Gosling’s Black Seal Rum
Dark Bermudan rum. 40%. ~£20 from Master of Malt

My first encounter with it was in France on a school trip where a barman with a small amount of English sold me and some friends a glass of grenadine and water, which he assured us was alcoholic, for a couple of francs. We assumed this was the bargain of a lifetime before we realised we had basically just bought some red flavoured cordial, with any booze watered down along with any flavour in the glass. It wasn’t until my days working in a student bar that I noticed it again, as one of my early duties was to run a satellite cocktail bar on busy Friday nights. We sold 4 or 5 cocktails including Sex on the Beach and The Slow Comfortable Screw, both chosen for their name and thus appeal to students as well as the simplicity of their construction and ingredients. However, we also did Tequila Sunrises, delighting drunken rugby teams as we rosied up jugs of tequila and orange with slugs of bright red grenadine.

Earlier this year an article popped up on American Drink, one of the finest drinks blogs on the web, talking about grenadine and including a variety of methods of making it. Being a fan of constructing drink ingredients in my kitchen I bookmarked it, bought some pomegranate juice and promptly forgot about it until this weekend. On the site they give three methods of making grenadine and due to forgetting to buy fresh pomegranates I decided to go for the ‘hot method’:

For 500ml of Grenadine:

• 500ml of pomegranate juice
• 250ml sugar

Bring the juice to the boil, reduce the heat and reduce by half. Remove from the heat, add the sugar, stir until dissolved and leave to cool.

As you can see from the picture, the results are a lot darker than the bright red scary grenadine you’ll often see on the back bar. Flavour-wise it’s just about as sweet but also has a nice fruitiness behind the scenes that I don’t remember from bought grenadine, which I suspect is made of sugar syrup, red food colouring and the concept of pomegranate.

I used Pom (aka Pom Wonderful) whose producing company is currently ‘working with’ the US Food and Drug administration to work out which of the various health claims on their website and bottles are allowed to appear. Reductions in prostate cancer, LDL cholesterol and erectile dysfunction are on the debated list but whatever the claims towards the wonderful super-food properties of pomegranates, the fruits themselves taste quite nice (even if they are a git to peel). However, the juice is often quite tart and not particularly tasty – while mine was cooking down it smelled, as warned by the LCS‘s Mark Gill, rather like turnips, and not in a necessarily good way. My grenadine is non-alcoholic and I suspect that the main reason for making alcoholic versions, as it’s way too sweet to drink on its own or in quantities high enough to spike up a drink, is to add shelf-life – if I don’t get through mine soon enough it’ll probably start fermenting, which will most probably not lead to tasty results and will mainly make the cork pop out of the bottle as CO2 builds up…

Along with grenadine recipes I also looked up some cocktails that use it – without some way of mixing it I would have to drink it mixed down as cordial, an experience that I don’t particularly want to revisit. The first and most obvious drink is the one I mentioned earlier – The Tequila Sunrise. Probably the second-most popular tequila cocktail after the margarita, it’s one that seems to appear on the ‘lesser’ cocktail menus, pubs and student bars that are all about pumping out fruit juice laced with a bit of booze in a high volume/low cost kind of way, and it’s easy to see why – white tequila, orange juice and a splash of grenadine: three fairly cheap ingredients that you can charge a chunk for simply by adding a swizzle stick and calling it a cocktail. It seems to have appeared in the 30s or 40s, invented by Gene Sulit at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel and along with the recipe I used there seems to be another less well known one (which I suspect is the original) – tequila, creme de cassis, lime juice and soda, which I think would give a more extreme dark to light sunrise, as well as some more interesting flavours. I decided to use slightly better ingredients than the usual nasty mixto tequila and Mr Juicy OJ, using 1 measure of Tequileño Blanco, 3 measures of not-from-concentrate juice and a splash of my homemade grenadine. If you pour the gloopy, heavy grenadine directly into the middle of the drink it sinks to the bottom and gradually mixes upwards, creating the signature sunrise effect. A couple of ice cubes in the top and my drink was done.

With my darker grenadine the red-through-yellow effect wasn’t quite as strong (being more a brown-through-yellow) and I was at first rather dismissive of the drink. However, after a couple of sips I had a bit of a reassessment – the pepperiness of the tequila works quite well with the orange juice, and the sweet fruitiness of the grenadine obscures the citrus sourness of the orange juice, bringing the whole lot together. Not something that I’d generally drink, eschewing fruit juice based cocktails as I do, but something I might have to try again when I finish writing this.

Unfortunately after the Tequila Sunrise I was fresh out of cocktail ideas for grenadine, but luckily the internet was there to aid me. A bit of searching through uninspiringly named, boring cocktails of the form ‘lots of juice, 2 shots of booze, splash of grenadine, enough garnish to impress a customer’ I came across one that intrigued me a little bit more – The Monkey Gland. Also known as the McCormick at the time, it was created in the 1920s by Harry MacElhone of Harry’s Bar in Paris and named for the experiments of Serge Voronoff, a man much interested in the use of monkey testicle transplantation to reinvigorate the sex drive and retard or reverse the aging process. The version I made was 2 measures gin (I used Sipsmith) to 1 measure orange juice and 1/4 measure grenadine, shaken hard with ice, strained into an absinthe washed glass and garnished with an orange twist. Or to be more exact a rubbishly cut strip of clementine skin. This is on the edge of what I consider to be too fruity a cocktail for me, with the original recipe calling for equal parts of orange and gin, but the single measure of juice creates a cloudy but translucent cocktail that allows the the flavours of the gin to come out. The orange and grenadine mix yet again work their magic leaving a sweet and sour base behind the gin that accentuates the botanicals, and the absinthe washing imparts a slug of anis to the nose and a little bit to the flavour. A nice one for the summer, but probably not one for an evening where I’m wearing two t-shirts and a jumper while sitting at my desk waiting for the first snow of the year. There are, as ever, many variations on the theme with a dash of absinthe being added to the drink (which was in the original recipe) as well as being substituted for Pernod or other anise, but my love of the absinthe washed glass forces me to champion the recipe I used.

I can see why grenadine isn’t all that popular these days – not many drinks use it and those that do aren’t generally considered ‘refined’ by the new wave of cocktails bars, featuring way too much fruit juice as they often do to fit in with the old fashioned ‘all must be booze’ approach that is becoming popular again these days (and has always been popular chez moi). Cocktail snob that I am it’s not something that I suspect I will be seeking out, but for those evenings when I think I haven’t quite got my five-a-day, adding a slug of home-made concentrated red goop into a glass of tequila and orange must make the drink count for at least two portions.

Simply put, it’s a tweak to an old fashioned, using bright red Peychaud’s Bitters, rather than the traditional Angostura, and rye whiskey, all poured into an absinthe washed glass. These days the modern sazerac is rye stirred with ice, sugar (syrup or a cube depending on the stirrer) and Peychaud’s, in some way then joined with absinthe.

While some bartenders add a drop to the mix I prefer to drop back to the recipe I was originally told and coat the glass with absinthe, which doesn’t add much to the flavour of the spirit directly, but adds everything through smell – when you bring the glass to your mouth the sweet aniseed hits you in the face just before you sip the sweetened, spicy whiskey.

I recorded a short video showing how I make them. Please forgive my dirty kitchen…

Mine comes out reminding me of a sweet shop – hints of aniseed overlaid with candy sweetness and spiciness, along with the red colouring of the drink fooling the brain into expecting a boiled sweet flavour all add to the scent of childhood, with an extra brain punching slug of booze.

If you want to know how to do it properly, then have a look at this video. He pretty much agrees with me, but says it much better. His accent is much more authentic than my Sussex sourced tones as well.

It’s become, along with the ‘Wet, slightly dirty Martini’ one of my standard drinks to order in a bar. So far they’ve generally been what I’ve expected, with varying levels of similarity (for good or ill) to the ones I make at home. However the one I had at Maze was both entirely different and also quite nice, which I wouldn’t have expected from the ingredients – Johnny Walker Black Label, Pernod, Angostura Bitters and a sugar cube, all stirred up with some ice. It may be an old cocktail and one not much known these days, but there are still a bunch of variations on the theme, many of them listed in bar bibles as ‘The Original Sazerac’… I still like mine the most.

Callooh Callay is a newish entry into the London Cocktail scene and one that I have been much remiss in not visiting more often – it’s about 5 minutes walk from my office and I’d been walking past it for months before I realised what it was. Tucked down Rivington Street in Shoreditch they’re a bar with a loose theme – Alice in Wonderland. This is now mainly expressed through their naming, although there is a general element of quirkiness to the place that fits in with the books surreality. It looks ‘just like a bar’ when you wander in, but the toilet walls are lined with audio cassettes (featuring numerous musical crimes) and the locked cupboard at one end can be opened by those with keys to reveal their members bar, The Jub Jub, complete with rotating guest bartenders and menus. They run regular drinks tastings, with brand ambassadors appearing on a monthly basis to talk people through their wares and the cocktails that the bar staff have put together using them.

The bar staff are led by bar manager Sean Ware, former advertising photographer turned award winning barmen, who worked with owner Richard Wynne to put together and open the bar. Sean was our host for the night and had put together a special menu of London cocktails, which he talked us through, with a hint of history as well as the contemporary twists you’d expect.

The menu started with a Hot Gin Punch. Callooh Callay are fans of punches, having just commissioned their own punch bowls after using the upturned horns of gramaphones to hold a four person portion of cocktail until recently, and it’s an idea with a long history, having become especially popular in Edwardian times. In traditional fashion one of the reasons why punches came to the fore was due to the lack of safe drinking water and groups sharing specially made cocktails was slightly more elegant than the small beer often imbibed. This punch was put together using Hendricks gin, Madeira, ‘winter spices’, pineapple, citrus, honey and, I assume, some hot water to make it all piping hot. You don’t get many warm alcoholic drinks these days, with a cup of mulled wine being most people’s exposure to the concept, but it’s something that I reckon needs more exploring. And not only because my previous experiments with hot buttered rum left me a drooling wreck.

Next on the menu was The Avenue. According to Sean this may well have been the first cocktail that was more than just spirit, ice and some form of sweet/sour citrus mix. Invented at the Café Royal and published in their 1937 cocktail book it was popular around the turn of the century. This version was made with Four Roses Small Batch Bourbon (a whiskey I first tried at a tasting session at Callooh Callay), Laird’s Apple Jack, passionfruit nectar, orange flower water and syrup. Sean made it with all the ingredients from scratch but did confide in us that it works better with flat Rubicon passionfruit soda… My only tasting note on it was that it smells and tastes ‘like red boiled sweets’. It was quite nice.

Next up was a John Collins, the 1986 ‘update’ of the classic Tom Collins, named for one of the potential inventors of the drink, first sighted back in the 1870s. In its day this was as popular and ubiquitous as the mojito is today and it still remains a constant of many cocktail menus. It’s a very simple drink, with this recipe calling for Bols Genever (dutch gin, as would probably have been used in the late 1800s), lemon juice and caster sugar. That lines up with the original recipe and the update invokes adding a lemon wedge and maraschino cherry, the latter of which Callooh Callay makes some very tasty examples of.

Next on the menu was a London Classic, Dick Bradsell‘s Bramble. A mainstay on any self respecting cocktail bar’s menu since its inception in the mid ’80s it’s one of Bradsell’s most famous creations. As usual with these things it’s quite simple but effective – gin (in this case Beefeater), lemon juice and sugar in a glass full of crushed ice, topped with a float of creme de mûre (a blackberry liqueur) and traditionally garnished with a lemon slice and two raspberries. Somehow I’ve only tried one of these once before and they are exactly as they seem – a gin and lemonade with a fruity float. That doesn’t stop it working very well though.

My first drink of the night was the next on the list – Clayton’s Special Cocktail, invented at the Savoy during the tenure of Ada Coleman at the turn of the 20th century. This was referred to as being like ‘a posh Bacardi and coke’ around our table and a circulated glass of the secret ingredient helped us understand why – Clayton’s Kola Tonic. This cordial was first made in Battersea and very popular, in a similar fashion to Coca-Cola’s origins in soda fountains in the USA, but is now made in Barbados and not widely known. It is a sticky orangey red syrup which tastes a bit like Coke syrup but without the caramel sweetness, with citrus and herbs coming through with a little bit of sweetness. Mixed with some some white rum, citrus syrup (a difficult to make combination of orange, lemon, grapefruit, sugar and distilled water) and a splash of fizzy water it makes a very interesting alternative to a Coke based rum drink. I did a bit of searching in the next week and turned up a bottle of Clayton’s at The Whisky Exchange – they thanked me for taking it off their hands because they don’t sell much of it. Since then I’ve done a bit of experimenting and while it isn’t concentrated enough to hold up as a regular ‘mix with water and drink’ cordial it is good at spicing up drinks that want a orangey kick.

Last on the list was The Ale of Two Cities. Put together by the 2008 Cocktail World Cup winning Team London for that competition, it’s a collision of England and New Zealand in ingredients, made from 42 Below Feijoa vodka, Punt e Mes vermouth, nettle cordial, malt syrup, granny smith apple juice and bitters. Feijoa is a fruit I’ve not seen before, but is eaten in a manner similar to kiwi fruit and is meant to be delicious, although easily perishable. The malt syrup is about half as sweet as sugar but gives a creamy head when shaken with the rest of the ingredients, allowing the drink to still have that head at the same time as not becoming overly sweet. Sean served it in a half pint beer jug, adding to the aley effect – a rather good looking and, according to the others, tasty cocktail.

We then repaired to the Jub Jub bar to bathe in neon (I was tucked in under a very pink 42 Below sign) and a run through the regular menu, watching as a group of London Roller Girls tucked into a gigantic bowl of punch through foot long straws. It’s a very nice bar, hitting the middle of the London cocktail bar range (drinks about £8) and adding enough quirkiness to push them out from the rest without becoming too annoying. The bar staff know what they’re doing and even though their drinks are much longer than the usual classic cocktails I go for there’s enough to tempt me towards the dark side – fruity cocktails.

Callooy Callay, 65 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3AY
Cocktails £8-10 (special offer of £6 for the cocktails on our menu when we visited), punch bowls £50 (and enough for at least 4 people).
Open Sunday-Friday 5.30pm-11pm, Friday 5.30pm-1am, Saturday 6pm-1am.
Sushi and Japanese starters served while the bar is open

Clayton’s Kola Tonic
Kola nut, herb and spice cordial. £6.95 from The Whisky Exchange

Situated right by Westferry pier on the former site of a Jamie’s bar it’s a restaurant of two halves – eating and drinking. Half of the restaurant is set up for sit down dining, the other with tall tables for more casual drinking with food. I think the same menu is served in both halves of the restaurant and it’s all spanish food, with a variety of sizes from small tapas dishes to main meals. I got to try some at the end of the evening and was very impressed – I’ll be coming back for certain, especially as it gives me an excuse to get the boat from London Bridge. I like boats. However, I was there to find out about the drinks.

While they aren’t Pepito, they do still have range of sherries with at least one entry in each of the major categories. We started the evening with some Tio Pepe Fino Palomino. Camino work closely with Gonzalez Byass and this is one of their key sherry brands. Served chilled it was light on the nose, but there was a hint of grass with some honey hiding behind it. To taste it was much dryer than the nose suggested, with green grass, yeast and dry grapes. Those flavours ended suddenly with a hint of sweetness and the whole lot was capped with a woody finish. I’m not a fan of dryer sherries, but this was quite nice, if not really my kind of thing.

To stick with the sherries for now, at the end of our meal we were presented with a choice of digestif. After a small amount of sweet talking I got to try both. I started with a Solera 1847 Oloroso Dulce. On the nose it had the pressed raisin sweetness of a darker sweet sherry as well a whiff of vanilla sponge cake. To taste it had cinnamon in with the raisins and a hint of apple, all sitting on top of a light yeastiness. I quite like sweeter sherry and this has definitely added oloroso to my ‘investigate’ list. The other dessert choice was a Moscatel (that I know nothing more about other than that). It was floral on the nose with light honey and a cloying perfumed floor cleaner astrigency. To taste the honey was dominant with the floral note hanging around and making the whole lot a bit intense and cloying. Not really one for me – a bit too much and more overpowering than the moscatel I have tried in the past.

The bar does of course have much more than just sherry. Along with the food we were served a selection of spanish wine, starting with a 2007 Val de Sil Godello – a wine made in Galicia in north-western spain. My notes are annoyingly light now that I’ve looked into the grape a bit more (as I’d not heard of or tried it before) and read simply ‘Sweet sugariness. Hint of lemon’. I’ve only more recently started getting into white wine and this is on the list of things to try again. From there we quickly moved on to reds, with a Viñas del Vero Pinot Noir 2008 as the first. On the nose it had a underlying bloody meatiness with a hint of salt and sour cherry. To taste it was piney to start with strawberries in the middle and a lightly sour finish with sweetness down the side of the tongue. We then moved on to a Cillar de Silos Torre Isilo, made with Ribera del Duero grapes. It had pine, almonds, redcurrants, dry card and sour cherry on the nose. To taste it had both sweet and sour cherries, a clove spiciness, some vanilla and a tannic woody finish. Rather pleasant.

Before I got to the eating stage of the evening I had a chat with a lady at the bar. She poured me a glass of 2009 Verd Albera (a rather nice peachy and lemony white wine) and after I did my normal waxing lyrical about spirits and cocktails she revealed that she was in charge of training the bar staff in the restaurant group and helped design the bars. The main design work is done by Interbar and currently (as of October 2010) the Camino Puerto del Canario bar is their flagship production – lots of fridges keeping wine at the right temperature (16°C for red, 6-7°C for white according to our tour), ice wells for chilling bottles and putting in drinks, and a general air of sensible lay out. After some further chatting about the wonders of whisky and cocktails (not what I expected in a Spanish bar and restaurant) I was presented with a whiskey sour. It was made with Four Roses small batch bourbon (which is a nice bourbon that I still need to grab a bottle of) and had a splash of Angostura bitters added for some spiciness, a twist I may have to try in the ones I make at home from now on.

The last beverage type to taste was their beer. They have the regular range of cold fizzy yellow Spanish beer (as well as, according to the menu, at least one Spanish dark beer), but one in particular caught my eye – Inedit, a beer designed in collaboration between Estrella and Feran Adrià. Adrià is the owner and genius/madman behind El Bulli, a 3 star Michelin restaurant that often tops World’s Best Restaurant lists (and that I very much want to go to, but with only 8000 diners per year and over 2 million booking requests [places issued via a lottery] I doubt I will any time soon, especially as next year looks to be the last season that it will be around) and along with St Heston of Bray one of my food heroes. Estrella approached him asking for helping in designing a beer to go with food and Inedit is the result of their work. On the nose it has wheaty coriander and a light sweetness. To taste it has a burst of malty sweetness, with flowers and a hint of citrus that stops dead and is followed by dryness. It’s quite strange how quickly the flavour stops, but it seems almost perfect for food and claims to be ‘the first beer to be designed to accompany food’ (a lofty claim that I can’t deny with evidence but am sure others can) – a burst of beer flavour followed by a hole that is almost marked ‘insert food here’. Tastewise it’s quite similar to Hoegaarden, but slightly lighter and much clearer in appearance. It’s not that available in the UK, appearing in Utobeer and other specialist beer shops but Camino is the only restaurant I know serving it.

Camino is most definitely on my list of places to visit again. I’m not a big fan of the layout bar side, with no general seating and the potential to become a noisy echo chamber as soon as it starts to fill, but their drinks menu is good and while similar it’s nicer than the other Canary Wharf drinking dens I’ve visited – it’ll be full of suits in no time… The restaurant was really good, an excellent addition to the crowded Canary Wharf scene and the easy access from the river (along with the accompanying view) is rather nice. To complete my need for sherry knowledge I still need to visit Pepito (and Camino: Cruz del Rey – they love the spanish names), but Camino: Puerto del Canario has filled the gap for now.

Tio Pepe Fino Palomino
Fino sherry. £3.50 for 100ml from Camino. £9.99 per bottle from Majestic.

Solera 1847 Oloroso Dulce
Oloroso sherry. £10.99 per bottle from Ocado.

Val de Sil 2007
Godello white wine. £32 per bottle from Camino

Viñas del Vero Pinot Noir 2008
Pinot noirred wine. £24.50 per bottle from Camino.

Cillar de Silo Torre Isilo 2006
Ribera del Duero red wine. £59 per bottle from Camino.

Celler Marti Fabra Verd Albera 2009
Mocatel, Garnacha, Empordà white wine. £20 per bottle from Camino

Inedit
Spanish lager by Estrella and Feran Adrià. 4.8%.

Many thanks to Krista Booker from Neon for finally finding an event I could come along to (and trying to push as many new boozes my way as she could through the evening), Andrew Sinclair from Gonzalez Byass for listening to me witter about how little I knew about sherry and cava, Richard Bigg, former wandering barman, now Camino boss and all round nice chap, and to the staff at Camino, who were smiley and helpful all night despite being confronted by 30+ freeloading bloggers.

I was wined and dined for the evening at Camino’s expense and they gave us all a rather nice goody bag (I ate the cheese from it on the way home). They even put me on a boat for a bit, which was nice. I will be happily paying my own money to go again though and I wouldn’t do that if they weren’t actually good.

69 Colebrooke Row (the bar’s address, not its name – it deliberately doesn’t have a name) is a small room next to The Living Room, just off Essex Road in Islington. It’s the new home of cocktail barman Tony Conigliaro, famed for various drink inventions and his more ‘molecular gastronomy’ style approach to cocktail making. From reading about Tony it seems that having worked in restaurant bars he started being interested in the modern cooking methods that he saw in the kitchens and started applying some of them to cocktail making.

To this end they make a lot of their own base ingredients at 69 Colebrooke Row, with the upstairs of the bar hiding a low ceilinged lab, full of bench gear for both production and experimentation. Part of the LCS visit was that Tony offered to take us all upstairs, in small groups as it isn’t all that spacious, and show us what he does up there. Due to the distilling laws allowing limited redistillation of already distilled alcohol (which I need to investigate more before buying things to blow up my kitchen – I was offered the chance to add a small still onto someone else’s order the other day and I was very tempted. I said no) Tony has two vacuum stills and one whose name I forgot but looked a bit like a column still. He uses these to produce various flavoured liquids, both alcoholic and water based. The low temperature that the lowering of atmospheric pressure enabled by the vacuum stills allows leads to the various ingredients in the distilling liquid being handled delicately and not cooked as much as they would be at a higher temperature. This leads to much more delicate products and different flavours being pulled out into the various liquids.

For example, their vodka, which they now sell over the bar for £12 a bottle, is made by grating horseradish into the base spirit (which I assume is vodka) before redistilling, which produces a great horseradish spirit that puts my experiments to shame (as I would hope, as I am not a cocktail expert with a lab above my own bar). On the nose it has crisp horseradish, as if you’re sniffing the surface revealed by snapping a root in half. To taste it has a butteriness mixed in with a light heat and vegetable bitterness, that lingers with the heat long after you swallow your drink.

Along with the horseradish vodka they also had a rose hydrosol (a water based extraction), which perfectly captured the smell of roses as well as the taste of flowers, some rhubarb vodka (for which they cook the rhubarb sous-vide to break it down before mixing with base spirit and redistilling) and vacuum bags packed with various things ready for experimentation, including wood chips. Outside of drinks there were also jars of green beans, pickling away in a variety of vinegars ready to become the final piece of their upcoming bloody mary (along with horseradish vodka, carefully constructed tomato juice and a black pepper tincture). I want a lab to construct drinks in…

After our lab tour I grabbed a couple of drinks, as it seems rude not to when visiting a bar. Drinks are £8 each for house cocktails, although the menu does also offer classics on request, and presentation and creation are predictably excellent. Behind the bar on the night we visited were Matteo and Ryan (who I’d heard tales of from SMWS staff as he worked in Bramble in Edinburgh before coming down to London after being crowned UK Best Bartender last year) and they calmly coped with random requests (with LCS co-founder Mark asking for ‘whatever you think would be nice’ from both of them over the evening).

I started with a Liquorice Whisky Sour, made from Cutty Sark whisky, Lemon juice and liquorice syrup. It was a beautiful drink, with a thick off-white creamy head covering the orangey liquid. It smelled of liquorice and smoky lemons and was an excellent balance of the whisky, citrus and sweet liquorice. Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of malt whisky in cocktails, with most of the delicate flavours being overwhelmed leaving just the general whisky-ness. In this case the wood and smoke were nice additions, but it didn’t quite work for me.

However, I did use the idea to make my own version last night: 50ml Woodford Reserve bourbon, 50ml home-made sour mix, 15ml liquorice vodka. It needs some work as the sours and vodka made things a bit sweet, as I use sweet soft liquorice to make my liquorice vodka. Luckily for me Tony gave me one of the liquorice pastilles that he grinds to garnish the Liquorice Whisky Sour to try, after I mentioned that I also wanted a centrifuge (his current Most Wanted piece of lab kit) as I’d been running my latest vodka experiment through coffee filters for a couple of days, and I see potential in making a sour liquorice spirit using them. For now I’ll make do with garnishing my drinks with crushed liquorice pastilles, as obtained from the Algerian Coffee House in Soho, as they do at 69 Colebrooke Row.

I followed this up with a Manhattan. However, Manhattan’s at 69 Colebrooke Row aren’t as simple as they sound. Tony is one of the increasing numbers of barmen who have been experimenting with barrel aging cocktails and the Aged Manhattan is one of the bar’s signature drinks. I foolishly didn’t ask how long it’d been aged for, but it’s probably somewhere between 6 months and a year. The creation is quite simple if time consuming (assuming Tony does this the same way as other bars) – the ingredients of the Manhattan (whiskey, bitters and vermouth [dry, sweet or a mixture depending on whether you are making a dry, sweet or perfect Manhattan]) are mixed without ice and then poured into a wooden barrel to mature. When they have reached the required age they are bottled and the drink is made by stirring the premixed cocktail with ice before serving. Having not tried a regular Manhattan at the bar I can’t say too much about the differences in the aged drink, but suffice to say it was the finest Manhattan I’ve ever tried – starting with a sweet kick before fading through spicy whiskey to a rounded dry vermouth finish, it was very good. I don’t think it’s picked up much from the barrel but it was very mellow, with the flavours of the ingredients well matched, quite distinct and very well balanced. They’ve just finished a 6 year old version, but as there was only one bottle and it was on the bar on Thursday I suspect it may already be gone…

It’s a strange place and not at all what I expected. The room is quite small, making me wonder how exactly they’d fit in the 40 people that is listed as the capacity, and the bar itself is also small, with barely enough room for the two barmen to move around and make drinks. Along with that it can get quite loud, with background music and a big crowd making it difficult to have conversations. However, at the same time it’s significantly quieter than most other cocktail bars and the close quarters adds to the atmosphere. The service is as impeccable and friendly, and the drinks are really very impressive, showing the bar team’s skill and love of experimentation. It’s not somewhere that I’ll be visiting every night, but there are some menu changes appearing in the near future and I’ll definitely be wandering down to see what craziness has appeared.

69 Colebrooke Row
House cocktails £8. Nibbles available.
They have a blog with announcements and other randomness.

Many thanks to Mark, Emma and Kate of The London Cocktail Society for organising the visit. If you want to come and play you can sign up on the site.