Acetio | Blogma

I made 4 more infusions, cilantro, fenugreek, nutmeg, and dill. None would have been my first choice, but I'm getting to the back of the spice cabinet, and thought there might be some surprises.

Cilantro:
- Attractive yellowish grass green color
- Unidentifiable smell - definitely not the smell of cilantro, but if anything it smelled like chicken soup - very odd
- Almost flavorless
- Ethanol flavor very present
* Not a contender

Fenugreek:
- Had to use ground
- Pale yellow color
- Strong maple smell. Adding water brought out a smokiness. It really smelled like breakfast at a diner
- Mild smoky taste. Not bad but not interesting
- Mild ethanol harshness
* Also not a contender, but both of these give me ideas for using them in cooking

Nutmeg:
- Had to use ground
- Cloudy orange color
- Pleasant nutmeg aroma
- Turbid when water added
- Harsh ethanol flavor
- Camphor taste reminiscent of the cardamom extraction
* Also not a contender, with confirmation that chai extraction is definitely out

Dill:
- Very deep green color
- Very clean aroma, slight dill, mostly just clean, a bit like thyme
- Slight dill flavor
- Alcohol harshness/heat cut significantly
* Should be added to mix based on color, clean aroma, and mellowing quality

So, the dill extraction was the only good one, and the biggest surprise. It could be good just on its own. Imagine a martini made with Hendricks gin and a dill-based liqueur. It would taste like a dill pickle.

My final recipe as of now is:
3 parts tarragon
2 parts coriander
2 parts dill
1 part laurel

In the continuing effort to create my own amaro/bitters/digestive (in the style of Fernet or Campari or Gin or Angostura Bitters) I've been infusing various herbs in alcohol to help me decide which to add to my master mixture.

I bottled a few 2 weeks ago and tried them yesterday and today.

The tarragon was very nice and could be a very good infusion just on its own. It will have a dominant place in the mixture, just as juniper has a dominant place in most gin recipes. The Laurel added good aroma but mostly was notable for how it mellowed the harshness of the alcohol, a quality that most of the herbs didn't have. The thyme didn't really offer anything but the smell of thyme. The rosemary leeched a lot of proteins into the infusion, making it cloudy. The color and aroma it added were not good enough to overcome the cloudiness. So tarragon 'yes', laurel 'probably', and the other two 'probably not'.

If I were to make a bunch now I would use 3 parts tarragon, 2 parts coriander, and 1 part laurel.

Sage, nutmeg, and ginger will be the next to try.

Matt

I've made beer about ten times. Only one of the batches was what I would call good. And unlike years ago, there is so much good craft beer available now, it's no longer practical for me to homebrew. Besides, I don't need the calories.

I made wine once (once on purpose, a few times by accident) and it wasn't good. Not bad, but not good.

The next step is to home distill, which I've done successfully once. The contraption was quite a sight, as well as a quite a fire hazard. After weeks of prep and hours of work, I got about an ounce of rather harsh, but genuine moonshine.

Thinking of the cheapest and easiest way of doing some kind of DIY booze, I decided to try infusing vodka.

My choice of infusor (as opposed to infusee) was chai tea. Of all the gimmicks and trends with booze generally and infused vodka specifically, I hadn't seen chai tea - infused vodka. So I got some cheap stuff and dumped in a bunch of chai tea (the real stuff with whole cloves and cardamoms, etc.). The result was very smooth but not that tasty. Something in the mix (I think the cinnamon sticks) helped mellow the bite and there was no heat from the alcohol. But I'm not a fan of the flavor of cinnamon outside of apple pie, and something else in the mix gave the flavor an astringent quality. The problem with chai is that there are so many ingredients I couldn't identify the good bits from the bad.

The next step was to do batches with individual ingredients from the chai so that i only used the subset of ingredients that contributed positively.

Vodka worked OK but then I learned/realized that vodka (the cheap stuff, anyway) was essentially industrial ethanol mixed about 50/50 with water. I can buy grain alcohol (chemically the same as the stuff Brazilians use to fuel their cars) for about $10 for a half gallon.

I decided to infuse small amounts of grain alcohol with cardamom, cloves, corriander. I took small bottles and poured in 1/4 cup of the grain alcohol and one teaspoon of the spices (whole, not ground).

I let them sit a few weeks and then tasted by filtering out the bits (with a coffee filter) and mixing the now-infused alcohol with water (1 part alcohol to 2 parts filtered water. I had tried 1:1 but the alcohol burned too much) making it about 30% abv by my estimation.

The results:

All came out slightly yellow, like urine in the bowl, basically.

- Cloves: Far too harsh and bitter. This was surely at least part of the problem with the original chai vodka

- Coriander: This was a bit of a lark since I did not expect it to be good, but it was the best of the bunch. A slight grassy taste but more complex than that. I would use this again, perhaps as bitters in a cocktail with other ingredients. It was pleasant by itself too - not sweet.

- Cardamom: Also harsh and similar to camphor. It tasted like cleaning solution. I had high hopes for this one since I think of the taste of cardamom to be an essential part of chai tea.

Every herb and spice release different flavor compounds depending whether they are soaked in water, oil, or alcohol - and some end up better than others. This is why vanilla extract is an alcohol solution while clove and orange extract are usually sold in oil form.

So I'll try more but keep coriander in mind as one to do again.

The WSJ has an article about Fernet, an amaro, or herbal liqueur.

"As a cocktail ingredient, Fernet-Branca is piratical, commandeering most any drink that allows it aboard. In the 1930 "Savoy Cocktail Book," there is a drink called a Hanky-Panky made with equal parts gin and sweet vermouth with a scant dash or two of Fernet-Branca. But the book also includes a cocktail made of two parts gin to one part each sweet vermouth and Fernet-Branca. An indication of just how quick the bitter liquor is to bully other flavors, that drink is called a Fernet-Branca Cocktail."

To me it tastes like a shot of Listerine with a splash of cola in it.

It seems to be more popular in San Francisco than anywhere else in the States.

Branca is the most popular brand in the States but there are many others.

a tad more on Wikipedia

One of the good things (the one good thing?) about spending time in Delaware is that Dogfish Head is the local beer.

The greater Philadelphia area in general is great for craft beer, with lots of small brewers starting all the time, and established high-quality breweries such as Victory and Tröegs close by.

My new favorite beer is Dogfish's Burton Baton a 10% abv oak-aged imperial IPA

From the site: "For Burton Baton we first brew two 'threads' or batches of beer: an English-style Old Ale and an Imperial IPA. After fementating the separate beers in our stainless tanks, the two are transferred and blended together in one of our large oak tanks. Burton Baton sits on the wood for about a month."

As Mike says, it's an "ender" in that after a glass of Burton you're pretty much set drink-wise for a while - it ain't no session ale.

I remember when New York City experienced a shortage of bitters when there was a sudden spike in popularity of drinks such as the Old Fashioned or the Manhattan (possibly dues to the prevalence of those drinks on the show, Mad Men)

(The classic Angostura bitters are easy to get in Delaware. It's sold in most grocery stores I've seen)

The A. B. Smeby Bittering Company came up with the brilliant (and in hindsight, obvious) idea to make local bitters.

Their flavors vary rather far from the Angostura bitters that I'm used to, which smell and taste of something like cloves and nutmeg:

Apple Cinnamon with Molasses
Licorice-Nectarine
Highland Heather
Cherry Vanilla
Forbidden
Diesel
Spiced Cranberry
Black and White (as in the cookie)
Lemon Verbena
Hibiscus Rose

They don't seem to make a gentian root flavor, which is what the angostura bitters are made from. Gentian grows in Tobago and not in the Brooklyn area, and they claim that "Flavor ingredients are sourced from within New York State"

I'm not sure a Manhattan made with "Cherry Vanilla" bitters would even count. Still, a fun idea.

I don't have a name for this (I think you need to do something twice before it's worthy of a name).

What I like about this drink is that the spiced rum and orange juice work together in such a way that the resultant flavors are not identifiable. You would not say it's a fruity drink or a creamy drink. You just can't put your finger on it.

1pt Orange Juice
2pt Spiced Rum
3pt SOUR MIX:

• 1pt lemon juice
• 1pt SIMPLE SYRUP:
  • 1pt sugar
  • 1pt water

Mix the above in a cocktail shaker with ice. This froths the juices slightly giving a fuller texture in the mouth.
Pour into 2 glasses (or one big one) and add seltzer/club soda to taste. Using about twice as much seltzer as everything else (so about 12 parts in this case) seemed to work well.

Orange Juice: The juice here is a flavor, not a base, similar to how you would use something like Grand Marnier, or vermouth in an American-style martini - The martinis I had in France had more vermouth than vodka

Rum: I used Captain Morgan-brand spiced rum - the spices complimented the orange juice very well

Sour Mix: Sour mix is really just equal parts simple syrup and lemon juice (or other acidic flavor). You will have lots of sour mix left over. Just keep it in the fridge. It tastes better than what you buy in the store and has no HFCS.

Simple syrup is just equal parts sugar and water. You may want to heat it in order to guarantee that the sugar dissolves, but that isn't necessary.

Sugar: I used less-refined cane sugar from a co-op food store, which gave the resultant syrup a light brown color. Brown sugar could be interesting

Another way to make it, without making the sour mix separately is:
1 jigger sugar (use agave syrup or confectioner's sugar, otherwise it may not dissolve entirely)
1 jigger lemon juice
1 jigger orange juice
2 jiggers rum
(the water was omitted, but we can make up for that by using a little more seltzer)
One 12oz can of club soda

When we were in Iowa we heard stories of Templeton Rye, a whiskey made in illegal stills during Prohibition that was supposedly one of Al Capone's favorites. It was kept in 1-gallon metal cans and smuggled 400+ miles due east to Chicago. The bootleggers sometimes buried the cans at drop points along the way, and my grandfather, as a little boy, would dig up the cans and sell them for 50¢

We visited the distillery, but on July 3^rd and 4^th pretty much everything in the state was closed. We looked around for where we might buy some, but it seemed to be sold out everywhere.

So we were happy when we were visiting Chicago and discovered that Lush West Lakeview Liquors, a local liquor store (with a very good selection of beer, even some of the more obscure Dogfish Head ones) had several bottles. We got two.

My Uncle Tom said that back in the day the stills were actually in Dedham, Iowa - one town over. The moonshiners called it Templeton Rye to confuse the federals.

Wikipedia entry

Templetone Rye site

The bar was not crowded but soon would be. The after-work crowd always
arrives at 5:15: 20-something men in colored shirts and black pants
with gel in their hair, initially talking about interest rates and
mutual funds but eventually collapsing into not-yet tired stories of
pranks done at their fraternities when they were in college. For every
10 white men there were 2 Asian men and one black guy

The women always arrived between 5:45 and 6:00. The happiest ones were
tall and blond and slim with big teeth, and the other women tried to
be tall and blond as well. For every 10 white women there were 3 Asian
women.

The bartender had an Irish accent and looked like his nose had been
broken a few times. The waitress was a little heavy with a large
chest.