Cocktailians

Infinity Bottles

I've never been one to jump on a bandwagon. (for one thing, I just keep falling off.) So now that the cool kids over at PUNCH have declared them passé, last week I started an infinity bottle. Not to create a house blend or as a mode of self-expression: the much more prosaic truth is that I realized I had a bunch of whiskey bottles with only a bit left in them, and I don't have a ton of shelf space. I did have a couple of old one-liter 86 Co. bottles on hand, though. 

That first PUNCH link above led me to the Infinity Bottle app, well worth the $2-3 it costs, which lets you record what you've stocked your bottle with, how much of each spirit you put in, and will even keep track of the running proof, volume, pours, and any notes you might have. Though one of my rules for myself was NOT to overthink this, it's kinda neat to see the cumulative effect of all these different whiskeys, and I imagine it'll be interesting to chart the bottle's evolution. I actually started two infinity bottles, one with bourbons and one with ryes. (though I really like High West's Bourye, I thought it wiser not to attempt combining the two, at least for this novice blender.) My only other rules were to try to mix the rarer whiskeys with the more common ones, and not to crack open any sealed bottles just to add them to the infinity bottle. (When I get around to opening some things I have on the shelf, such as the Elijah Craig 12 I snagged before it went NAS, or the Willett Family Estate Bottled Rye, they'll be fair game. I don't want to be precious about this. When I next open a bottle of new stuff, I'll throw in a couple ounces too.) And I'm happy to mix the top shelf with the very-good-but-hard-to-find (I miss the days when Buffalo Trace wasn't allocated and was readily available) and the more-prosaic-but-still-very-drinkable. After all, like a solera system, every pour from an infinity bottle contains at least a trace amount of everything that's ever been in there, so I'm getting a teensy bit of Stitzel-Weller whiskey from the Blade & Bow, for instance, and a bit of the Michter's 20 Year Single Barrel. And on the rye side, every sip will get a little bit of Red Hook Rye, one of the most spectacular whiskeys I've ever been lucky enough to taste. (I looked up what a different bottle from the same barrel as mine sold for at auction...gulp. No regrets, though, as this is special stuff that's meant to be enjoyed.)

Since I took the above screenshots, I've tasted an ounce from the bourbon infinity bottle. Not bad! A little burny, but has that mellow sweetness and baking spice, with a smidgen of pepper as well. This does make me respect master blenders even more; blending whiskey is an art, even when you're not trying to ensure consistency from batch to batch and across multiple barrels. I'll never forget attending a Spirited Dinner at Tales of the Cocktail one year, in which Trey Zoeller of Jefferson's Bourbon gave a talk about blending bourbon (N.B.: he's very, very good at it) and invited some participants to blend their own live on stage. Suffice to say that his years of expertise very much showed.

It's nice to have the pressure off, though: this is something for me and for my friends. I don't need it to be amazing. I like that it's an ever-changing history of the things I've tried, and that's good enough.

Hot Buttered Rum

After work last night, I was trying to get my daily 10,000 steps in, so I walked from the far West Side of Manhattan over to East 34th Street, then took the East River ferry to Astoria, Queens and walked home from there. It was cold - not the 9°F of this weekend, but the wind chill took the apparent temperature to around 20°F, especially over by the river and while I was on the water. 

So when I got home, all I could think of was having a winter warmer, something with some oomph, which naturally led me to the Hot Buttered Rum. (Listening to the appropriate episode of one of my favorite drinks podcasts while en route helped nudge me in that direction, tbh.) There are two main schools of thought on how to build the HBR: one involves making a "batter" with sugar and butter and spices (and sometimes vanilla ice cream!), and then adding a knob of that batter to rum and hot water. This seems like it would work well at busy bars (and some bars have several different batters, all with different flavors, as riffs on the master recipe), but I was home, and cold, and who has time for that? The other school of thought is far more minimalist; for them, a Hot Buttered Rum involves (aside from a little sweetener) simply heat, butter, and rum. This is the approach adopted in New England, which is where they know from cold. And where they know from rum. As Bill Norris writes in Birth.Movies.Death.:

Not long after the colonists set foot upon Plymouth Rock and began to carve out a future in the New World, the Triangular Trade brought molasses in quantity into New England, and with excess of organic material comes distillation.  Up until the time of Prohibition, New England was a major rum producer and the label of origin on your casks or bottles of rum were just as likely to read “Providence,” “Medford,” or “Boston” as they were to read “Cuba,” “Jamaica” or “Guyana.”

In those days before easy rail, air or road shipping, great quantities of the stuff were consumed in the local market, and rum was the house pour as soon as you got north of New York or New Jersey.  Take your rum, and mix in sugar and water, and you have, for simplicity’s sake, a sling if the thing is made with cold water and a toddy if that water is hot.

For best flavor, go for a dark Caribbean rum, ideally with a little funk to it. A dark Jamaica rum like Myers's is good, but if you can get a Jamaica potstill rum such as Smith & Cross it's even better. Demerara rums from Guyana (try the El Dorado 8) are also very nice indeed. I used Cruzan Black Strap for its molasses/toasted-marshmallow notes. I probably didn't need to, as the Cruzan is fairly sweet as these things go, but I took this suggestion to add a bit of allspice dram to add even more baking-spice notes.

But wherefore the butter? In a cold damp clime, without benefit of good insulation, I'd think that adding some fat to the drink would stick to one's ribs and help warm you through, making a warming drink that much richer. The earliest citation for a buttered beverage I could find was somewhat medicinal - in 1584's The Haven of Health, Elizabethan doctor Thomas Cogan gives a recipe for "Buttered Beere, which is good for a cough or shortness of winde" (no guarantees about COVID-19 prophylaxis here):

(Transcribed, as the above is kind of hard to read: "Take a quart or more of Double Beere and put to it a good piece of fresh Butter, Sugar Candy an ounce, of liquorice in powder, of Ginger grated, of each a dramme, and if you would have it strong, put in as much long Pepper and Graines, let it boyle in the quart in the manner as you burne wine, and who so will drinke it, let him drinke it as hot as he may suffer. Some put in the yolke of an egge or two towards the latter end, and so they make it more strengthfull." Doesn't sound too bad, actually.)

Samuel Pepys' diary mentions "buttered ale" as a recreational drink three times, the earliest in 1662, less than eighty years after its medicinal application above. 

The traditional method of heating one's rum, or ale, is of course to plunge a red-hot poker into the drink, as in this recipe from Esquire. However, not having a fire (beyond the gas stove) in my fourth-floor walk-up apartment, I resorted to the electric teakettle, and built my Hot Buttered Rum as follows:

Fill a mug with boiling water. Dump it out after a few minutes, add a teaspoon or so of Demerara sugar and an ounce-ish of boiling water. Stir to dissolve the sugar. Add 2oz. rum, 1/2 oz. allspice dram, 2 dashes Angostura bitters, 2 dishes 18.21 Havana & Hide bitters, 2 dashes Crude "Big Bear" coffee & cocoa bitters, and a pat of unsalted butter (I did about a 1/4" thick slice from the stick). Fill the mug with more boiling water, stir briefly, and grate some nutmeg over the top.

Are you not warmed?