It’s Gin o’clock! Three budget gins. The cost of living crisis has been tough on a lot of people and these days everything seems more expensive. Although the price of spirits has (at least in my experience) has not risen as fast as other food and drink there can still be less left in your pocket to splash out on luxury items. Like gin. The good news is that you don’t need to break the bank to get a decent mixing gin. The ongoing resurgence in popularity gin is currently enjoying has put a lot of more expensive luxury gins onto the market – and very fine and interesting many of them are too ..read more

Fly away with me. Frigatebird. It’s no secret that I’m a huge Tiki fanboy and am particularly awed by the work of Don The Beachcomber who single handedly created a cocktail genre nigh-on a century ago. Tiki drinks are once more in vogue with a plethora of modernist variations tagged onto the staples created by Don B and Trader Vic many of which rely on more recent products techniques. I recently challenged myself to come up with a new Tiki cocktail that used only the more limited assortment of liqueurs and spirits that would have been available to Don in the 1930s. It would need to be flavou ..read more

1,2,3 1,2,3 come get it now… Remember Your Name + riffing on classics. The dirty little secret of the craft cocktail movement (I dislike the term, but whatever) is that the vast majority of cocktails on the menu are just riffs on classic recipes. In fact I quite enjoy going through the modern cocktail menu – which is typically just a list of flavours followed by a price – trying to spot which one will be the Old Fash rehash, the Daiquiri derivative, the Manhattan mutation, the Collins conversion or the phoney Negroni. The tweaking of the age old classics might at first glance seem a little l ..read more

The Maine event. Remember the Maine. I first approached the Remember the Maine with the intention if riffing on it because I hate the name of this drink so much but then I remembered how good it actually tastes and have left my riffed version for a later date in order to share this hideously named drink with you. So about that. In 1898 an American warship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbour killing most of the crew. While it was known almost immediately to be a accident (burning coal and gunpowder not being a peaceful combination) the USA decided to blame the Spanish and proceed to nab the ..read more

Legends of the fall.   Fallback. This autumnal cocktail, which was created by the late legendary cocktailista Sash Petraske, caught my attention because of the somewhat unusual preparation instructions. According to his book Regarding Cocktails the ingredients are just built (cocktailspeak for poured into) in a whisky glass, a large ice cube added and then stirred until “sufficiently chilled”. This goes against everything we have been told about making aromatic style cocktails and almost all subsequent re-tellings of this drink attempt to normalise it by using the usual techniques of st ..read more

Mellow yellow. Humbaba. It’s official! Apparently we can all be much healthier if we get more of the wonder-spice turmeric in our bellies. Having no greater concern than our ahem collective healths I reckoned I could make my own little contribution to packing more curcumin into our diets. I hereby present the Humbaba, a twist on the Whisky Sour or perhaps more accurately (and appropriately) the Penicillin. If you are not familiar with turmeric is a wonderful spice much used in Indian and Persian cuisine with a pleasant bitterness, pungent aroma and incredibly intense rusty orange colour. So ..read more

You can leave me on the shelf, I’m an Edinburgh man myself.   Edinburgh Gin. Every now and then it’s a good idea to re-evaluate your house spirits. Why? Well, some spirits can be re-formulated by the manufacturer over time. Sometimes for the better and sometimes not. Also, tastes change: for example your palate can become more developed with practice – and ageing. And thirdly new products may become available to you that you would be wise to evaluate to see if they have a place as your baseline spirit. The gin market is particularly diverse and fragmented with an almost constant deluge ..read more

We’re jammin’, we’re jammin’, we’re jammin’, we’re jammin’, I hope you like jammin’ too… Blending rums: Dark Jamaican rum. The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed a funny looking bottle in my recent article on the MuMu. That would be my home blend of dark Jamaican rum and it occurs to me that such home blending of rums might be of interest to some of you. Quite a while ago we talked about infinity bottles which is tangentially related and might be worth re/reading but there are specific reasons for blending rums that don’t apply to other spirits. Rum is without question the most diverse o ..read more

The brothers gonna work it out… Naked & Famous + the Chartreuse Crisis. If we’re looking for modern classic there is nothing that fits the bill more perfectly than the Naked & Famous created by Joaquín Simó at Death and Co. NYC in 2011 as the bastard love-child of the only recently resurrected Last Word and the equally equally proportioned Paper Plane, itself created only a few years previously in the same city. If we’re looking for the ingredients to make one on the other hand we might have a problem – but we’ll get to that. Riffing on the Last Word the Naked & Famous, which I t ..read more

Txotx! Blackthorn and Patxaran. The Blackthorn is one of those awkward cocktails to write about as while it is arguably a “classic” it has also had several versions over the years. Over time this has settled into two versions but they remain wildly different. The “Irish” version consists of Irish whiskey, Italian vermouth, bitters and absinthe whereas the “English” spec is sloe gin, French vermouth, bitters and absinthe. Having said that, as far as I’m aware Irish whiskey doesn’t grow on a Blackthorn bush whereas sloe berries most certainly do, so I’m more inclined to side with the English v ..read more