Tag Archives: mixology monday

  • Mixology Monday Cocktail: Alone, Bitter at the Beach

    December 17, 2012

    36 Comments

    Alone, Bitter at the Beach

    Alone, Bitter at the Beach

    mxmologo-2It’s time for Mixology Monday, and if you couldn’t guess already, this month’s theme is “Humbug”. Firstly we want to thank JFL at Rated R Cocktails for hosting this month and Fred Yarm at Cocktail Virgin Slut for reviving Mixology Monday. Now lets get to the theme:

    Lets face it the holidays suck, yeah I said it. You put yourself in debt buying crap people will have forgotten about in a month. You drive around like a jackass to see people you don’t even like, or worse they freeload in your house. Your subjected to annoying music, and utterly fake, forced kindness and joy. Plus if you work retail your pretty much in hell, so don’t we all deserve a good stiff drink? So for this Mixology Monday unleash your inner Grinch. Mix drinks in the spirit of Anti-Christmas. They can be really bitter and amaro filled. They filled with enough booze to make you pass out in a tinsel covered Scrooge heap. They could be a traditional holiday drink turned on it’s ear. Or they could be a tribute to your favorite holiday villain. If you celebrate Hanukkah or Kwanzaa then you still suffer through the holidays, so feel free to join in with your Anti-Holiday drink as well. Whatever it is add a hearty “Humbug!” and make your drink personify everything annoying or fake about the holidays.

     humbug6While “some people” here at the farm have similar crabby feelings about the holidays, some of us don’t (ahem), but we both immediately said “tiki” when we thought of “anti-Christmas” cocktails. And when you are in a long holiday line at the store and the items won’t scan, and the kids are starting to squirm, and nobody can find the manager, and the next person in line is sneezing on you and yapping about their sex life on the phone, and and now you will be late for dinner, and you just can’t listen to one more fu…..umm, you need a trip to the beach. And, if anything, a tiki drink is a trip to a beach. Far, far away…maybe by yourself.

    humbug3So now that we had a direction, we started in on our “anti-Christmas” cocktail. The Alone, Bitter at the Beach combines, light rum, golden rum, aged Jamaican rum and Lemon Hart 151 rum with lime juice, pineapple juice, passion fruit syrup, a dash of absinthe and a big dose of Bittermens Hopped Grapefruit bitters over crushed ice. Garnish with a lime wheel and the most cutesy, annoying holiday-themed item you can find. The Alone, Bitter at the Beach starts with pleasant notes of rum and citrus then you get the sweet / tart kick of the passion fruit and some heat from the booze. Standard tiki. But on the finish you get the herbal and anise flavors of the absinthe and a dry, almost tannic note of the hopped grapefruit bitters. We think the Alone, Bitter at the Beach fits the holiday season perfectly- too much good stuff that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth (literally and figuratively) and a bit of a headache.

    humbug1

    Our kind of reindeer.

    How did we get here? We stared with the Zombie as a template and then made sure to tune it to match the theme. Boozy? Oh yes. We took one of the booziest cocktails and added another ounce of aged Jamaican rum. Is that too much? Probably, but it is the holiday season, after all. Bitter? Medicinal? Well the absinthe and grapefruit bitters took care of that (and many tiki drinks do include grapefruit and absinthe, so we aren’t too far off the reservation). And we made sure to keep Falernum and allspice liqueur out of the drink- no pleasant holiday spices allowed. The garnish and cocktail napkin were our own special touches. Now if we only had a Grinch mug……

    humbugAlone, Bitter at the Beach:

    Ingredients:

    • 1 oz. light rum (El Dorado)
    • 1 oz. gold rum (El Dorado)
    • 1 oz. aged Jamaican rum (Appleton 12 yr.)
    • 1 oz. Lemon Hart 151
    • 1 oz. lime juice
    • 1 oz. pineapple juice
    • 1 oz. passion fruit syrup
    • 2 dashes absinthe
    • 6 dashes grapefruit bitters (Bittermens Hopped Grapefruit)
    • Lime wheel, for garnish
    • Christmas ornament, for garnish (optional)

    Assemble:

    1. Place all the liquid ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake thoroughly and strain into a large glass or tiki mug filled with crushed ice. Top with more ice if needed. Garnish with a lime wheel and something holiday-themed and overly cheerful. Serve with a loud “harumph!” or “humbug!”.
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  • Mixology Monday Cocktail: The McCovey Cove

    November 16, 2012

    24 Comments

    The McCovey Cove Cocktail.

    Time for another Mixology Monday! (We know it’s Friday, we like to be early.) This month’s online cocktail party theme is “Garnish Grandiloquence”  and our host is Joseph at Measure + Stir, one of the most innovative cocktail blogs out there (and one of our favorites). Here are the details:

    I’m always shocked by the way that an orange peel or a lemon peel can transform the experience of drinking a mixed drink from something mundane to something magical. In a similar vein, eating the olive in a martini will totally transform the imbiber’s perception of the drink. So this Mixology Monday, let’s really make a study of art of the garnish, by mixing up drinks where the garnish plays a central role in the experience of the drink. Of course, you don’t have to make a latticework out of orange peels, a pirate ship out of citrus, or a ferris wheel out of pineapple and squash, but it sure would warm my heart. This type of garnish is traditionally in the realm of tiki, but you could mix anything, so long as the garnish is the star of the show.

    Very cool, but a bit of a challenge, as we tend to keep our garnishes simple. But part of the reason we blog is to constantly improve our skills, so we got to work. Happily, we had an easy subject to work with, the San Francisco Giants’ second world series win in the last three years. As die-hard fans there was no question we would create a cocktail to celebrate. And our friend Sonja even gave us Giants cocktail umbrellas. Well, now we had one garnish, but motivated by Joseph’s Gourd Vibrations we decided to make the “glass” a garnish as well. And since the Giants are all about orange and black, we decided to use a hollowed orange with the SF logo and include a black (or very dark brown) cocktail. And after going through a bunch of oranges, we got our cocktail and named it after McCovey Cove, the body of water outside the Giant’s ballpark (knick-named after Giants’ Hall of Fame player Willie McCovey). Buster Posey was just named MVP, so we almost named the cocktail after him, but he doesn’t seem like the drinking type….

    As for the actual cocktail, the McCovey Cove is our adaptation of a Port Antonio, a tiki drink with gold and dark rum, lime juice, coffee liqueur and falernum. The Port Antonio is a good tiki drink that uses the coffee to add some aroma and slight bitter notes to cut through the sweetness of the rum and falernum, a “grown-up” tiki drink.  We wanted to go even more “coffee-forward” and developed the McCovey Cove. The McCovey Cove has aged Jamaican rum, high-proof coffee liqueur, Cherry Heering, lemon juice, allspice liqueur and a big orange twist (or hollowed orange) as a garnish. The McCovey Cove features a full orange oil and spice aroma followed by strong coffee and vanilla flavors backed up by the fruit of the Heering and the spice notes of the allspice liqueur. The lemon juice provides a backbone of citrus and acidity to keep the overall flavors bright and refreshing.

    A few notes on ingredients. We use Kahlua Especial, a 70-proof version of Kahlua in this recipe, we prefer the flavor and extra spirits. Most high-proof coffee liqueurs should work, but they vary in coffee flavor, so be ready to tune the recipe. As for the allspice liqueur (also known as pimento dram), it is a useful tiki ingredient featuring a full blast of holiday spices that are a great foil for sweet rum and citrus. St. Elizabeth makes a commercial version, but Alicia at Boozed and Infused has an excellent DIY recipe here. In a pinch, you can sub tiki bitters or Angostura for the allspice liqueur. Finally, Cherry Heering is one of the best cherry liqueurs and a worthy addition to any bar. Heering works equally well with gin, whiskeys and rum- go get some!

    Our thanks to Joseph for hosting this month’s MXMO and Fred Yarm at Cocktail Virgin Slut for managing the whole enterprise. It was great fun, as always. And we managed to slaughter only a “few” oranges making the McCovey Cove…but we think their “sacrifice” was worth it!

    The McCovey Cove:

    Ingredients:

    • 1 oz. Aged Jamaican rum (Appleton 12 year-old)
    • 3/4 oz. Coffee liqueur (Kahlua Especial)
    • 3/4 oz. Cherry Heering
    • 1/3 oz. Fresh lemon juice
    • 2 Dashes allspice liqueur (St. Elizabeth’s allspice dram)
    • 1 Large navel orange (or a big orange twist)
    • Cocktail umbrellas
    • Straw

    Assemble:

    1. Carve a design into the orange using a channel or paring knife, if you like. Position the carving on the bottom two-thirds of the orange.
    2. To hollow the orange, cut off just enough of the bottom rind of the orange to create a stable base, but don’t pierce the inner flesh. Then cut off the top third of the orange and carefully cut or scoop out the orange flesh (reserve for juice). A grapefruit knife is a helpful tool.  Set aside.
    3. Combine the rum, coffee liqueur, Heering, lemon juice and allspice liqueur in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until very cold and strain into the hollowed orange filled with fresh ice. Garnish with cocktail umbrellas and add a straw. Serve.
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