Cocktails for Bonfire Night

Right from when I noticed, earlier in the year, that Guy Fawkes night (5th November) fell on a Saturday I had the idea of doing a themed Candlelight Club party, somehow creating cocktails with smoky, fiery flavours.

A few ingredients immediately leapt to mind. First was Chase’s Oak-Smoked Vodka, which is produced in limited editions (now on its second batch) by allowing oak smoke to infuse into the spirit for about a week in a specially designed smoke chamber. It’s an extraordinary taste—and not to everyone’s liking, as my partner observed when he wrinkled his nose and said it smelled like bacon. (I didn’t tell him that bacon vodka is a well-established concept.) But it’s also quite a subtle flavour. I tried various vodka cocktails, such as one called a Hot Tub which combines vodka with pineapple juice and prosecco, but the results weren’t very nice. It works fine in a Bloody Mary, but that’s quite a feisty cocktail for a delicate vodka (and many people are convinced it’s really a breakfast drink). So I decided it perhaps needed showcasing in a simpler recipe and ended up with a Collins/Fizz arrangement and hit on the idea of adding a bit of fruit body from sloe gin, a seasonal and rather English beverage.

Heart of Oak
2 shots Chase oak-smoked vodka
1 shot sloe gin (I used Hayman’s)
½ shot lemon juice
½ shot sugar syrup
soda water
Shake first four ingredients and strain into an ice-filled highball. Top with soda water.

The smoke is not at all puckering or cloying: it’s a subtle background dry waft, almost meaty, indeed like smoked duck or bacon. The sloes are again calm, dry and rather ethereal compared to, say, the blackberries in cassis (see below), with a hint of spice. With the pencil-lead juniper from the base gin this ends up a little like smoked game with a sloe and juniper jus. The lack of cloyingness to the fruit makes this a lean, refreshing number; just the thing to follow a country ramble in the late autumn afternoon—with a suggestion of dinner to come!

In the spring I was introduced to a ballsy product called Fireball, made from Canadian whisky blended with a cinnamon liqueur. Despite its name it’s not really hot, but has a vague pepperiness to its cinnamon spice. But for the name alone I thought it was worth including. One of the brand’s signature serves is a cocktail called Dub Dub’s Apple Pie, cleverly combing the cinnamon of the whisky with apple, a classic pairing. But Fireball is a pretty in-your-face flavour, with a medicinal quality that reminds me of surgical spirit (or rootbeer, depending on your drinking history), so I replaced half of the Fireball with calvados to calm it down a bit while emphasising the apple:

Hot Apple Pie
1 shot Fireball cinnamon whisky
1 shot calvados
1½ shots apple juice
1 shot lemon juice
10ml egg white
1 dash Angostura bitters
Shake all ingredients vigorously and strain into a Martini or coupé glass.

Even in this reduced quantity, the sweetness of the Fireball offsets the lemon juice pretty well, though some might want to add a bit of syrup. It is a lot like baked apple with cinnamon!

There is a well-established simple cocktail called a Smoky Martini which adds a small amount of whisky (most likely a smoky Islay malt or a blend with a high smoked malt content) to a normal Martini (often omitting the vermouth). In a party environment I tend to steer clear of cocktails that are basically all spirit, so I combined this idea with the Abbey/Bronx direction of lengthening it with a small amount of orange juice, plus a sweet-sour mix of sugar syrup and lime juice to give it body.

Smokini
1½ shots gin
½ shot Islay malt whisky
1 shot orange juice
½ shot sugar syrup
¾ shot lime juice
Shake all ingredients and strain into a Martini or coupé glass.

The flavour of this cocktail will obviously depend on your choice of whisky. With Bowmore it is fairly subtle but with Laphroaig it’s more up-front in its smoky, peaty, iodine character. But even using Laphroaig it makes a drink that Mrs H.—who basically doesn’t like whisky—declared to be very tasty.

Everyone seems to be using tea in cockails at the moment, so inevitably the idea of smoked lapsang souchong tea came up. There is a cocktail called a Smoky Old Bastard (on the grounds that it is a bastardisation of an Old Fashioned) that combines Bourbon, lapsang and maple syrup. I had some maple syrup knocking around so I gave it a try. I found it a trifle thin so I experimented with fruiting it up a bit using apricot (which I always think goes rather nicely with bourbon) and plum bitters.

Bonfire of the Vani-Teas
2 shots bourbon
2 shots cold lapsang souchong tea
1 shot crème d’abricot
½ shot lemon juice
¼ shot maple syrup (or regular syrup)
2 dashes plum bitters
Shake all ingredients and strain into a rocks-filled glass

The apricot liqueur adds sweetness so you don’t need much syrup—in fact you probably don’t much notice the fact that it is maple syrup, so I’m sure simple syrup would do just as well. The tannins in the tea dry it out, so it’s quite a refreshing drink, not hefty.

Finally, I wanted to include ginger, and ended up adapting a recipe from the 1940s called El Diablo. This is tequila-based, but I wanted something that better evoked the pagan horrors lurking in the English hedgerow, so I used gin instead, along with the ginger beer, lime and crème de cassis of the original, plus some of Monin’s extraordinary gingerbread syrup, mainly because it seemed seasonal.

The Horned One
2 shots gin
¾ shot crème de cassis
1 shot lime juice
1 tsp (5ml) gingerbread syrup
Ginger beer
Shake first four ingredients and strain into an ice-filled highball. Top with ginger beer.

The gingerbread syrup can be very overwhelming and, even with just a teaspoon, it and the blackcurrant are the dominant flavours—and they go together very well. (I see that Gabriel Boudier makes a blackcurrant and gingerbread liqueur, so I am clearly not the only person who thinks this.) To be honest you aren’t much aware of the gin and it would probably work well with white rum too.

I had just acquired some of Master of Malt’s chipotle (smoked chilli) bitters and was intrigued to try adding some, to turn up the heat of the ginger (some ginger beer has chilli in it), while again adding some smokiness, but Mrs H. persuaded me that it might be nice to have at least one cocktail that was neither hot nor smoky, so I let it lie. For now. Mwah, hah, hah hah…

G & Tea?

Beefeater 24's bottle looks like it belongs
among the Crown Jewels

Can booze and tea sit happily in the same glass? Oh yes.

You have to feel sorry for Desmond Payne. He’s a master distiller (formerly at Plymouth, now at Beefeater) who’s been at it for 43 years—but always charged with distilling to other people’s recipes. He lives with a portrait of James Burroughs, the Beefeater founder who developed the formula 150 years ago, glaring down at him from the wall.

Finally he was asked to make his own gin, a special edition that would end up dubbed Beefeater 24, and DBS and I were present at 69 Colebrooke Row for a celebration of it a few weeks ago. (Mind you, I notice that it isn’t so much his own gin as his own “expression” of the Beefeater house style. Always the bridesmaid…)

I’d heard a story that the “24” in the name referred to there being 24 different botanicals, but this turned out to be codswallop: the gin has 12. “But it is not about how many botanicals you have or how exotic they are,” says Desmond. “It is about how they work together. Getting the right balance is crucial.” In fact the “24”  refers to the 24 hours for which the botanicals are left to soak in the base spirit before the whole soup is redistilled into glorious gin. Mind you, the 24-hour maceration is common to all Beefeater gin*—so what makes Beefeater 24 different?

Desmond explained that he at first tried a host of likely botanicals, but without success. While he was in Japan he craved a G&T—but quinine was not allowed, apparently, so no tonic water. Seeking a similar dry, sharp hit, he tried iced lemon tea—and was inspired to try using tea as the direction for Beefeater 24. What could be more English, as English as gin? He found that green tea worked best as it imparted the aromatic elements he wanted but without an overwhelming amount of tannin. But the presence of the tea also changed the relationships of the other botanicals—back to the importance of balance again—so a lot of tweaking was required.

The raven lurking on the inside of the label

Finally he had an end result ready for testing by a panel of esteemed mixologists: people liked it—but didn’t really pick up on the tea. So he went back to the lab and added Japanese Sencha tea with a fresh, green, slightly seaweed quality, that brought out the top notes. He was afraid that his tea dose would oxidise during the regulation 24 hour steeping, but was relieved to find that the alcohol preserved it. (Round about this time he discovered that James Burroughs’ father had actually been a tea merchant with a Royal Warrant—would Burroughs have approved of Payne’s new direction all along?)

When a batch of gin—or the mixture of spirit and steeping botanicals that will become gin—is distilled, different elements of the flavour emerge in a certain order: the distillery will actually smell different at different times of the day. In practice the citrus notes come out first, then juniper, then coriander. With Desmond’s tea injection he found that the high aromatic notes emerged at the very beginning while the tannic elements arose after the juniper. It’s normal for distillers to discard the very first and last distillate from a batch, but Desmond ended up making a “cut” that was particularly picky—in fact he discards some 30% of the juice that comes out of the still.

So what does it taste like? You can immediately tell how careful Desmond was to stay within the Beefeater house style, which I always think of as rather ethereal in its construction, with a delicacy that makes me think of quiet civil servants in wood-panelled rooms, as opposed to some of the two-fisted gins strutting on to the market now. Yet there is a subtle tea perfume here too joining the orange notes in the midrange, and a smoky element, but much more delicate that simply adding a peaty whisky rinse to your glass as in some “Smoky Martini” cocktails.

The Earl Grey Martini knocked up for us at Purl

The bottle in which Beefeater 24 is clad has had just as much thought and attention lavished on it. The patterns in the glass are taken from Royal Doulton ceramic designs: back in the day the distillery, like most, also produced a range of liqueurs and these were bottled in just such ceramic containers. The distinctive red punt is a nod to the Crown Jewels (this is Beefeater gin, remember) and if you look through the “window” in the bottom left corner on the back you can see a raven printed on the inside of the front label. The legend goes that if the Tower of London’s resident ravens ever leave, the kingdom will fall. “So if you finish the bottle,” Desmond adds, “put the cap back on so the raven can’t escape.”

By interesting synchronicity, the idea of tea in booze seems to have cropped up quite a bit of late. At Purl a few weeks ago I came across their dry Martini served with an Earl Grey “air” (foam to you and me, though I gather there is a technical difference). This sits on the surface of the drink—looking rather as if the glass has just been washed up and not rinsed properly—and is actually one of the more convincing examples, in my opinion, of how molecular mixology can work. The tea flavour is all encapsulated in the foam: you hit it as you go in, but then strike crystalline Martini underneath, and the two elements are not just mixed all together. On a plate of food this separation of flavour elements is normal enough but it’s quite an achievement in a drink.

Two of David's homemade tea liqueurs

And of course how can we ignore Mr Bridgman-Smith’s recent experiments making his own tea liqueurs? I’ve tasted his lapsang souchong and his English Breakfast and I was mightily impressed. Homemade infusions have a tendency to fall into the “interesting, but…” category but I think he could convincingly bottle these and sell them at a farmer’s market somewhere. But the most interesting potential must be as a cocktail ingredient; at Graphic recently barman Adam took up the challenge and invented a smoky brew we dubbed the Fag Hag:

A Fag Hag cocktail

Fag Hag
30ml gin

20ml lemon juice

15ml lapsang souchong liqueur

10ml sugar syrup

20ml egg white

Dry shake the ingredients first to bind, then add ice, shake and strain into a glass.

You could probably achieve a similar effect using strong, cold tea and a little extra syrup.

Beefeater 24 is about £23 (or £29 if you buy it over the counter at Harrods)


* Beefeater claim that this 24-hour maceration is unique to them, but Hayman’s say their gin steeps for 24 hours, so do Berry Bros. and Rudd of their No.3 gin, Park Place about their SW4, and I have a feeling I’ve heard it about others too.