The Slightly Lower ABV Sazerac

I often mentioned that my Nr.1 recipe of choice is the Old Fashioned. It’s also a quick and easy way to experience how a spirit behaves in a cocktail. If that spirit is a brandy, cognac or rye whiskey I would probably go for a Sazerac style of drink which is actually a variation on the Old Fashioned. Why? Because these bold spirits work so well together with the extra anise flavors of this drink. 

No, Soberano is not the housebrand of my good friend Soberon, it’s a sweet Spanish brandy at only 36°. This is a product made by Gonzalez Byass, the producers of the best sherry wines. You can expect a soft and silky texture, with a full body. Lots of oak and roasted nuts. The name ‘Soberano’ is related to ‘Sovereign’ (in Spanish the v is often pronounced as a b), this brandy was created to highlight their relationship with the King of Spain. 

I received this bottle of Soberano Solera Brandy on the same day as a new bottle of Absente. It’s almost like a match made in heaven. This calls for an easy sipping Sazerac, slightly lower in alcohol. 

Henri Bardouin Absente is my favorite brand of Absinthe. I always have the 55° Absinthe in my homebar. This new flashy bottle (which looks absolutely stunning in any bar) is much lower in alcohol, only 26°. It would suit better in what we generally categorize as liqueurs. The 55° is also defined as a herbal liqueur, but with 55° it’s as strong as your base spirit. 

The Slightly Lower ABV Sazerac

Ingredients
60 ml Soberano Solera Brandy
10 ml Sugar syrup
2 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters
A few ml of Absente 26° for a rinse

Method
Rinse the glass with Absinthe (Swirl it around, you want a thin coating of absinthe on the complete inside of your glass) and add icecubes. If you don’t use too much Absinthe, just leave it in the glass. It there’s too much Absinthe left on the bottom, discard it. Because this cocktail is a bit lower in alcohol, you could discard the icecubes too. If the glass and the cocktail are both cold enough, this should give you a perfect experience. I actually like my Sazeracs with a huge block of ice, which will cool the drink but won’t add much dilution. I was almost out of ice, so had to settle for the smaller cubes.

Stir the Soberano brandy with sugar and bitters in a mixing glass with lots of ice. Strain the cocktail into the chilled and rinsed tumbler. Garnish with lemon.

Disclaimer : All pictures and texts are copyrighted by Geert Conard and Esito Management & Communications unless stated otherwise in the article. While some items might have been gifted by the producer or distributor, these are in no way paid promotions or recommendations.

Toy Revolver

How to simplify a cocktail that only has three ingredients? The Revolver is a lesser known variation on the Manhattan. It’s basically a mix of Bourbon and coffee liqueur with a few drops of orange bitters. The magic extra ingredients are a few drops of oil expressed from a piece of orange peel and warmed up with a lighter. Spectacular when done properly, and it absolutely adds an extra aroma dimension to your drink. Most home bartenders won’t bother because it’s a skill that really needs some practice. 

How can we simplify this in a way which also adds a more or less similar effect to the drink? We could add a mist of orange extract. This is extremely easy to make yourself. Do you ever eat oranges? Just add the orange peels to a closed jar with vodka. Let it rest for a couple of weeks. Strain and filter. Put it in a cheap spray-bottle. 

Toy Revolver

Ingredients
60 ml Bulleit Bourbon
15 ml Coffee liqueur
2 dashes of Orange bitters
Home-made orange vodka spray

Method
Stir together in a mixing glass with lots of ice. Strain in a chilled coupe. Spray with the orange infused vodka. No garnish is really needed, but you can add a dehydrated orange wheel if you want. 

Disclaimer : All pictures and texts are copyrighted by Geert Conard and Esito Management & Communications unless stated otherwise in the article. While some items might have been gifted by the producer or distributor, these are in no way paid promotions or recommendations.

The Old Fashioned Mexican - El Ron Prohibida Reserva 22y

Question of the day: Cocktails with exclusive or expensive spirits – Yes or No?

A cocktail can only be as good as the ingredients. If you use poor quality ingredients, it will be much harder to get to a delicious result. For home use I would recommend to pick the ‘normal’ range of products, which is widely available in liqueur stores. Creating cocktails with high end spirits is a whole other ballgame. I have seen it done successful, for example with the ‘Green Club Card’ menu at Bar Burbure in Antwerp. They brought very clever variations on classic cocktails, but lifted up to the absolute maximum in flavour. Often they also paired it with a bite to create a complete taste experience.  

Experimenting with high end spirits is of course expensive. That’s why you need to limit the fails. Always start from a classic recipe and slightly adapt the recipe. I’ll give you a practical case. Let’s say we start with the father of all recipes, the Old Fashioned. This cocktail only contains a good quality spirit, sugar, bitters and ice. The sugar is the easiest part to adapt. In liqueur stores you will find a whole range of sugar syrups that you can try in your Old Fashioned. Swapping the simple syrup for honey or vanilla syrup will absolutely add something extra. These are both very safe tries with brown spirits, but if you use gin as your spirit, you could even try cucumber syrup. The sky is the limit. 

The same goes for bitters. Traditionally the Old Fashioned is made with a few dashes of Angostura Aromatic bitters, but you could easily swap this for other bitters that complement the flavors of the spirit. I have made some great Old Fashioned cocktails with walnut bitters or orange bitters. Adding 10 or 20 ml of Amaro is a similar variation. It adds a herbal touch to your drink. 

Another nice option is to cut back on the sugar and add some sweet sherry to the mix instead. This will add sweetness but also a nice silky layer. An Old Fashioned with some Pedro Ximenez sherry added is called a Velvet Old Fashioned.  

The new bottle on my home-bar today is a very nice Mexican rum, El Ron Prohibido Reserva 22y. If you like whisky, you know that 22 years is already pretty long. For Rum it’s even more impressive, because this spirit ages in a much warmer climate. A 22y old rum can be compared in aging with a 40y old whisky, at least!

I don’t want to spill too much of this rum, so I opted for a (safe!) nice and tasty Old Fashioned. 

The Old Fashioned Mexican

Ingredients
60 ml El Ron Prohibido Reserva 22y
10 ml Vanilla syrup
2 dashes Angostura Cocoa Bitters

Method
You can easily stir this one up directly in the glass. Or you can mix it in a mixing glass with lots of ice. Strain your drink into a tumbler with fresh ice. Garnish with a sweet amarena cherry.

Disclaimer : All pictures and texts are copyrighted by Geert Conard and Esito Management & Communications unless stated otherwise in the article. While some items might have been gifted by the producer or distributor, these are in no way paid promotions or recommendations.

The better half of the Reverse Headbutt - with Smeets Jenever

A daily shot of jenever is the secret recipe for a long and happy life. That’s the remedy that’s passed on from generation to generation. One of the real pioneer brands was Smeets. They started exactly 100 years ago in Hasselt. A couple of weeks ago Tom Smeets asked me if I was interested to receive an “experience box” with his new book around this famous shot of booze. Tom is the great-grandson of founder Gerard Smeets and now runs his own communication company. He is still very much involved in the jenever business started by his family. I received a nice giftbox with a book, a sample of jenever, a glass, a barspoon and even a ready-made cocktail. The cocktail was ‘Gerry’s Gimlet’, which I’m not going to discuss on the blog but I’ll throw a picture in the stories when I sample it. I decided to re-shake another nice cocktail from the ‘Jenever Revival’ book.

Let’s talk about Boilermakers, the typical drink where you serve a shot of whiskey next to your beer. I’m not talking about beer-cocktails like the Mexican Michelada, but two separate glasses in front of you. In Belgium and the Netherlands there is a similar tradition with a shot of unaged jenever and a pilsner beer. It’s called a headbutt. 

If you want to reverse this story, you have two problems to solve. You need a very tasty cocktail, which is strong enough to stand up against the beer. And you need a beer which doesn’t overpower the cocktail, but lifts it up. Bartender Jurgen Nobels developed his own version of this ‘Reverse Boilermaker’ for Smeets Jenever. It’s called the ‘Reverse Headbutt’ (or in Dutch ‘Omgekeerde Kopstoot’). 

Today I’m mostly interested in the cocktail-part of this drink (also because I don’t really like beer), but you can easily pair this cocktail with a 50 ml shot of dark Stout-beer to turn it into a ‘Reverse Headbutt’. The cocktail is an Old Fashioned style drink which adds multiple flavors to the Jenever, without really mixing (or messing) it up. It’s a spirit forward drink that lifts up and enhances the Jenever. 

The Better half of the Reverse Headbutt

Ingredients
60 ml Smeets Jenever
3 dashes Angostura Aromatic bitters
4 dashes Angostura Cocoa bitters 
1 barspoon of vanilla syrup

Method
Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with lots of ice. Stir for 15 seconds to cool and blend. Strain into a tumbler with fresh ice. Garnish with orange. 

And there is more...
Oh yes, you might want to take a look at our Instagram. Normally I stopped doing contests or give-away's, but since I really like books with cocktail recipes… three lucky people will receive a Smeets Jenever experience box !!! 

Disclaimer : All pictures and texts are copyrighted by Geert Conard and Esito Management & Communications unless stated otherwise in the article. While some items might have been gifted by the producer or distributor, these are in no way paid promotions or recommendations.

Tropical Martini - Señor Weber Oro

Tikidrinks are popular all around the world. But in most cases, you either like ‘m or you don’t. If you don’t like tikidrinks, the prejudice is often “too much juices”. Let’s try to do tikidrinks in another style and keep it very simple with equal parts. 

A Martini-style drink always needs a good base spirit. For this one we picked Señor Weber Oro, a golden rum from Destilaria H. Weber in Brazil, a well known distillery for excellent Cachaça spirits. 

The Weber distillery launched two new rum products : Señor Weber Blanco and Señor Weber Oro. Made with sugarcane molasses, Blanco rests for a year in a stainless steel tank before bottling, while the Oro is rested in three woods, passing through barrels of amburana, balm and American oak.

Tropical Martini

Ingredients
30 ml Vanilla Vodka (You can make this yourself by throwing a vanilla pod in your bottle of vodka and let it sit for a few days)
30 ml Señor Weber Rum Oro
30 ml Clement Mahina Coco
A splash of pineapple juice (I actually squeezed a wedge of fresh pineapple)

Method

Add everything to your shaker with lots of ice and give it a good shake. Fine strain in a Martini glass and garnish with pineapple.

Disclaimer : All pictures and texts are copyrighted by Geert Conard and Esito Management & Communications unless stated otherwise in the article. While some items might have been gifted by the producer or distributor, these are in no way paid promotions or recommendations.

Beachcomber on the rocks : Casa Magdalena rum

It’s Friday… let’s have a tasty cocktail tonight !!! 

This week I received a huge box with new spirits to test and sample in the next weeks. Almost half of the bottles are rums. And what’s even more rare, a couple of white rums. I think they might be the first white rums I ever received for testing. We have tested lots of aged and spiced rums in the last years. 

Let’s try a few classic recipes that really benefit from a high quality white rum.

The first bottle I’m using is Casa Magdalena Ron Blanco from Guatemala, made from Magdalena sugar cane, harvested by hand. You can taste earthiness and grassy aromas born from the rich ashes of the three volcanos surrounding the distillery : Agua, Fuego and Acatenango. The light golden color reminds that the rum was aged on American whisky barrels and filtered to remove the color. 

Beachcomber on the rocks

Ingredients
60 ml Casa Magdalena Ron Blanco
20 ml Triple Sec
20 ml Fresh lime juice
2 dashes Maraschino liqueur
2 drops of simple syrup

Method
Shake with lots of ice. Serve in a tumbler with fresh ice. Garnish with a flower and pineapple leaves. 

Disclaimer : All pictures and texts are copyrighted by Geert Conard and Esito Management & Communications unless stated otherwise in the article. While some items might have been gifted by the producer or distributor, these are in no way paid promotions or recommendations.

Jack's Whiskey Lemonade

By the end of last year I received a pretty large “Apero-giftbox” from Delhaize, handpicked by my Secret Santa, Matthias. I also got the opportunity to put together a box for Myriam, a great foodblogger. 

Of course I’m also mixing up cocktails with some of the ingredients. Today’s recipe is created by Hannah Van Ongevalle. Hannah is part of Belgium’s best known cocktail-dynasty, the Van Ongevalle’s from Knokke. After starting ‘The Pharmacy’ with her dad, she now runs her own ‘Tipsy Cake’ consultancy and owns ‘The Motel’, the best looking cocktail-kitchen in Belgium, which is also available for workshops. 

No reason at all to doubt her recipes, because a couple of years ago (2014), Hannah was awarded ‘Belgium’s Best Bartender’ at the prestigious Diageo competition. 

Jack’s Whiskey Lemonade

Ingredients
40 ml Jack Daniel’s Old nr.7
10 ml lemon juice
15 ml Triple Sec
10 ml Fino sherry
Fever Tree Ginger Ale

Method
You could just throw these ingredients together in a tumbler, but since one of the ingredients is lemon juice, the result might be a better after a shake. Add all ingredients, except the Ginger Ale, to your shaker with some icecubes. Shake for 15 seconds and strain into your cocktail glass. Add fresh ice. Top with a splash of Ginger Ale. Garnish with a slice of orange. 

Disclaimer : All pictures and texts are copyrighted by Geert Conard and Esito Management & Communications unless stated otherwise in the article. While some items might have been gifted by the producer or distributor, these are in no way paid promotions or recommendations.

Magical cocktails with Illugin Gin

In the glass, most gins look pretty much the same. But they all have a very different bouquet of tastes and aromas. This Gin is different in every possible way. It’s not a London Dry Gin and it has a very sexy color, which changes while you mix your drink. 

Illugin is a new gin by a small company located at The Belgian coast. In a market that’s swamped with small batch gins, they wanted to launch a new Belgian gin. But it had to be a special one. A real eye catcher with a wonderful taste.  

The most important difference with the average gin in your supermarket : This is an Old Tom Distilled Gin. Slightly sweeter than a London Dry Gin, dryer than a Dutch Genever, but certainly not so sweet as some sticky Spanish gins. 

Illugin contains a selection of botanicals such as coriander, caraway, angelica root and blueberries. And here comes the magical part - Among the botanicals used to produce this gin, there’s also a flower that adds “color changing magic” to your drinks. Illugin markets this flower as a secret, but this isn’t the first color changing gin I’ve seen. The flower that’s responsible for this party trick is the Clitoria Ternatea, also known as the Blue Pea or Butterfly Pea, originally grown in Asia and used mainly in tea.

It’s really fun to play with and it will amaze your guests. The color changing happens easily by adding some citrus or tonic to your drink. This colorful gin doesn’t contain any artificial colorants, only natural botanicals. 

So this might not be the first Butterfly Pea Gin I’ve seen, it’s definitely one of the tastiest. I really love the taste and aroma of this Old Tom Gin and had lots of fun playing around with it. I used it in three serves this week, which were all pretty and delicious: I mixed up the obligatory Gin & Tonic (watch the cool video on Facebook and Instagram, it’s made with my smartphone by my 9y old daughter !!!). 

After that I also mixed up a Gin Sour and a Martinez. The Martinez is a classic recipe that really needs an Old Tom gin to get it 100% right. For the Gin & Tonic I used a 1/3 ratio with a neutral Indian Tonic. For both cocktails I’ll add the recipes below. 

Magical Gin Sour

Ingredients
50 ml Illugin Old Tom gin
30 ml Fresh lemon juice
10 ml Simple syrup
1 egg white

Method
Add all ingredients to a shaker with just ONE single icecube. Shake hard for 10 seconds.
Add more ice and shake again for 10 seconds to cool it down. Strain in a pre-chilled coupe. 

Magical Martinez

Ingredients
50 ml Illugin Old Tom Gin
25 ml Starlino sweet vermouth
7 ml Leonce Extra Dry vermouth
7 ml Maraschino liqueur
1 dash Angostura bitters

Method
Stir all ingredients together in a mixing glass with lots of ice. Strain into a pre-chilled Martini glass. Garnish with a Maraschino cherry. 

If you can handle a slightly more difficult bar-skill, also express a piece of orange peel above the glass to spread some of those fantastic oils. Throw away the peel, don’t put it in your drink. 

Disclaimer : All pictures and texts are copyrighted by Geert Conard and Esito Management & Communications unless stated otherwise in the article. While some items might have been gifted by the producer or distributor, these are in no way paid promotions or recommendations.