Cocktailians

The Imbible

All of us cocktailians -- and drinkers generally -- have a common hero. More than Harry Craddock, or Jimmy Russell, or Donn Beach, or even Jerry Thomas. No, who we really should bow down to is good ol' Ethyl Alcohol, which lubricates social situations, makes us feel great if we use it right, and has even saved our lives. 

That's one of the big points that Anthony Caporale makes in his Off-Off-Broadway show The Imbible: A Spirited History of Drinking, now playing Friday nights through October 3 at the Huron Club at the SoHo Playhouse. The production was mounted for the New York Fringe Festival, and it was one of 13 successful plays chosen out of 220 or so for an additional run as part of the FringeNYC Encore Series. I went this past Friday night and had a grand time. Imagine a lecture on the 10,000-year history of alcohol...but with jokes, callouts to audience members, live demos, visual aids, original songs, goofy costumes, and The Backwaiters -- a trio of a cappella singer/actors who contribute harmonies in styles from barbershop to disco. It's rollicking, charming, and delivers a ton of information on my favorite subject without taking itself seriously, so it all adds up to an enormously enjoyable evening out. It's a fantastic value, too -- for your $21 ticket you get three cocktails thrown in as well. (Where else can you get three drinks for $21 in SoHo on a Friday night, to say nothing of the history lesson and a show?) The history is solid, and so's the entertainment.

(Photo copyright Dixie Sheridan, 2014.)

Caporale is a busy guy: he's the US brand ambassador for Drambuie, he runs the Art of the Drink web video series, gives talks at Google, and heads the Beverage Studies program at the Institute for Culinary Education. But he made a few minutes available to talk when I caught up with him recently. Here's our conversation, lightly edited:

Cocktailians: You have theater experience in your background -- what made you think of combining theater and booze?

Anthony Caporale: It's funny because the theater part predates the booze parts. I started acting when I was eight years old. I always tell people the reason I got into bartending was because I was acting...I had a mechanical engineering degree that I wasn't thrilled to use, and started out working in a restaurant, and got behind the bar after a month or so. I always tell people that I felt like from that point on, it was a Broadway play that I could perform every night -- and I only had to audition once to get cast. For me, that's what bartending has always been about. That two-month summer job turned into a lifetime of bartending full-time, even when I was working in engineering.

What I really enjoy is teaching and training people. I got into helping people open restaurants: I've opened probably close to two dozen restaurants, from mom & pop places up to $14 million operations like [Brinker International's] Maggiano's. The longer I spend in this field, the more I see that you really have to view the whole thing as entertainment. The biggest companies -- the Disneys, the TGI Friday's, et cetera -- they all get that the experience they're delivering is entertainment, but the product can vary. It can be food, movies, whatever...but they all see that what people want is the entertainment. 

I'm the national brand ambassador for Drambuie, and when I started going around the country and doing lectures, what I realized was that the best presentations were the most theatrical, when I incorporated comedy and made it high-energy. I've been involved in theater companies in New York for 15 years or so, and started a theater company a couple years ago focusing on new plays. A friend who is a theater producer saw my Manhattan Cocktail Classic presentation and said, "Anthony, I think you have a show here." Everybody wants to know as much as they can about cocktails and spirits, and so four years later, my associate producer and I tried to get it into the Fringe Festival this year. We spent three insane months producing two full-length shows for the Fringe Festival, and I've been absolutely blown away by peoples' reaction. We've sold out every show so far, and we're looking at our eighth straight sold-out show. We got four stars in Time Out, our photo on the cover of the New York Times Arts section -- I just about fell over.

 

What Have I Been Drinking Lately?

I've had some pretty good drinks in the past couple weeks, and wanted to showcase cocktails from three of the more interesting places I've had them.

Thursday night, I had the Summer Silk (formerly the "Maïs d'Été") at Marseille in Manhattan, as part of their Corn Festival -- all the restaurants in the Tour de France Restaurant Group were celebrating sweet corn this week, one of my favorite parts of any summer. The menu includes several corn-based dishes (I greatly enjoyed the charred corn salad and the roasted scallops with jalapeno-corn mousseline and popcorn beurre blanc), but also features two corn drinks. Aviram Turgeman, Beverage Director for the Tour de France Restaurant Group, told me that since the chefs were featuring corn in their menus, he thought he'd come up with a corn-based cocktail.

The Summer Silk is a bourbon sour, and I thought the most interesting twist was that the drink is sweetened with a housemade corn-silk syrup -- not the high-fructose variety that sweetens sodas and the like, but a simple syrup that tastes like just-picked sweet corn. Turgeman said that he originally experimented with corn purees, but that "the starchiness of the corn in a puree almost gave it a dairy consistency" that was undesirable in a drink. Going back to the drawing board, he "basically took the silk from the husk and cooked it with water and sugar. And surprisingly enough, the syrup smells and tastes like freshly-boiled corn. Mixing that with bourbon, which is made mostly of corn, was a given to me. The oloroso sherry is in the drink mainly to give it an oxidated note, and it's a way to facilitate the alcohol there; I could have gone with 2 oz. bourbon, but the bourbon would have dominated it, and I wanted to give it a little more roundness and nuttiness. The pineapple juice gives it the texture and the froth, and the Peychaud's bitters were because they're all-American, just like the corn." The drink's garnished with a few caramelized popcorn kernels, another unusual touch: "I tried to slice the cob and make a wheel on the edge of the glass as a garnish, but that was a little over the top, and I wanted an edible garnish", Turgeman noted.

I didn't quite find the sherry flavor in there, but I get that it modifies the drink, and it does kind of harmonize the various moving parts. Turgeman noted that he has to be careful when he makes the syrup, because some batches come out with more or less corn flavor, so he reduces it as necessary to make the sweetness and corn flavor consistent across the batches. 

Summer Silk

• 1 1/2 oz. Woodford Reserve bourbon
• 1 oz. housemade corn silk syrup*
• 3/4 oz. fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 oz. pineapple juice
• 1/2 oz. Lustau oloroso sherry

Shake well with ice and double-strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and finish with 3-4 small dashes of Peychaud's bitters floated atop the froth. Float 2-3 caramelized popcorn kernels as a garnish.

*Corn Silk Syrup

Combine 1 quart (400g) fresh corn silk, 1 quart water, and 1 quart sugar, and stir occasionally while bringing to a boil. Once boiled, lower the temperature to a very low simmer for 5 minutes, then remove from stove, cover with foil for 30 minutes, strain into a clean container and label. The liquid should be amber and smell like corn, and will keep in the refrigerator for 2 days.

Turgeman also came up with a non-alcoholic corn-mint lemonade which I didn't try, but which sounds good: place 10 fresh mint leaves in a mixing glass, add 1 1/4 oz. of the corn-silk syrup, and muddle well. Add 1 oz. fresh lemon juice, 1 1/2 oz. cold water, and 1/2 oz. pineapple juice. Shake well with ice, and strain into an ice-filled highball glass. Garnish with a mint leaf sandwiched between two caramelized corn kernels on a cocktail pick and serve with a straw.

The Corn Festival ends after tonight, but Turgeman says the Summer Silk and Corn-Mint Lemonade will both be available at Marseille and Cafe d'Alsace for at least a few more weeks, until the end of summer. 

On Monday, I went to Má Pêche, the Midtown outpost of the Momofuku empire, for the latest installment in its guest bartender series. 

What's Your Pleasure? Isaac's Heading To New Orleans

It looks like Isaac's heading through the Gulf, bearing down on Louisiana. I just talked with my pal GJ Charlet (aka "The Internet's Undertaker"), who lives in Zachary, LA, not far from Isaac's projected path. He says they're expecting a lot of rain, but that the storm doesn't seem to be shaping up to have nearly the destructive power of Katrina or even Gustav. Good thing! They are prepared and ready. Stay safe, y'all.

Anyway, a slightly-different Isaac already rolled through New Orleans -- at Tales of the Cocktail last month, DiSaronno and Tia Maria brought TV's most iconic bartender, Ted Lange, to their "Guilty Pleasures" tasting room at the Royal Sonesta Hotel. Amaretto is a crowd-pleaser and, truth be told, kind of a punch line among cocktail geeks -- see Jeffrey Morgenthaler's "I Make The Best Amaretto Sour In The World" post, in which he amps it up with cask-strength bourbon -- and conjures up mental images of fern bars populated with aggressive hair, shoulder pads, and little black dresses.

DiSaronno had fun with it, though, and turned their tasting room into a real party, saying that their mission is to "bring fun back into bartending." And it really was a great time -- '80s music (good '80s music!) was pumping, people were dancing and grinding, bicycle-powered blenders were whipping up drinks, and flair bartending ace Tobin Ellis was mixing up Amaretto Sours. (Good ones, too, and I say that as someone who's generally not into nut-flavored liqueurs.) As far as Tia Maria goes, I have no idea why it doesn't have a higher profile. It's one of the big two coffee liqueurs, of course, and while both Kahlúa and Tia Maria contain vanilla, I feel that Tia Maria's vanilla note is more pronounced.

Ted Lange himself was working the room, posing for pictures and talking up the sponsor's products. He was incredibly nice and friendly to your reporter, and took a moment to chat. He filled me in on his long and interesting career: his first screen appearance was in the Wattstax documentary in 1973, he made his Broadway debut in "Hair", and yes, he's still close friends with Gavin MacLeod. Lange wrote and directed several episodes while working on "The Love Boat", and has been a screenwriter, playwright, and director since. His latest play, "Lady Patriot", premieres September 7 at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles.

He told me that one of his earliest acting lessons, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, was to be wholly present in the moment, and to serve those around you -- which isn't too far from the philosophy underlying the work of any good bartender, he observed. (He told Robert Simonson of the New York Times that he'd gone to bartending school after the first season of "The Love Boat", so he could brush up on some of the basics.) He works in the drama field, but Lange disdains personal drama, mentioning that he's fired more well-known actors from projects he's helmed in favor of less-well-known actors who could get the job done and not create negative energy on the set. He mentioned that everyone's on the same side in a play or a movie/TV set, and that if people aren't willing to work together for the common goal, there's no reason to put up with their drama. "Life's better when everyone has fun", he noted, and drew the comparison with bartending, where the goal is to please the guest and make sure everyone has a good time.

Bootlegger Blues

This week's The Moth podcast tells a whirlwind story of how L. Gabrielle Penebaz of The Saint Eve discovered absinthe through her lust for Donald Sutherland, and how her pursuit of just one taste of the real concoction led her to create a short-lived but enthusiastic community of partygoers who wanted the same thing. (Here's a direct link to just the story.)

The Moth holds regular readings around town and across the country, and their excellent podcast distills the best of the stories told at their theme nights. They're not all cocktail-related, but they are, every single one of them, varying degrees of fascinating.

'By the way, after these two drinks, you're really cute.'

On last night's episode of "The Colbert Report," Stephen brought on David Wondrich, curator of Esquire's Drinks database and the author of Imbibe!, to whip up a cocktail called "The Colbert Bump."

Considering some of the connotations of the word "bump," I'm glad this went as cleanly as it did, and that straining it through one's beard, no matter how impressive it may be, is optional:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Colbert Bump Cocktail - David Wondrich
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

Watching him make it, it seems the Colbert Bump is as follows:

• 1 oz Cherry Heering Liqueur
• 1.5 oz Gin
• 0.5 oz Lemon Juice
• a splash of soda water, to taste

Serve in a tall glass over ice. Repeat until your poll numbers rise, as they inevitably will.

High-Tech Cocktails with Dave Arnold and Nils Norén

There are perks to writing a cocktail blog. Not only do I occasionally get free bottles of booze sent to me (I have a big backlog of ingredients to write about), but there's also the odd party invitation now and then. One of the best, though, is getting to hang out with people like Dave Arnold and Nils Norén of the French Culinary Institute. (Remember Dave? He invented the Red Hot Poker.)

Besides teaching culinary technology and other things at the FCI, Arnold and Norén have a great blog about "tech 'n' stuff"; the "tech" part includes things like an exhaustive-but-fascinating primer on how to use a rotary evaporator to distill flavors, and the "stuff" part has all kinds of cool things, like The Skoal! Project, inspired by a badass 1967 photo of Max von Sydow shooting akvavit.

The upshot for the cocktailian reader? On June 12, Arnold and Norén are teaching a demonstration class on high-tech cocktails, and they were nice enough to give me a sneak preview. It began in typical mad-scientist freewheeling style, as Arnold told me that "everyone should have a carbonation rig." (I'd been looking at the Sodastream as an option, but Arnold waved that away and showed me his big CO₂ tank he'd gotten from a welding-supply house.) First, Arnold and Norén -- wait a sec. You know, "Arnold and Norén" is good journalistic style, but this was a fun, goofy hour spent with a bunch of totally down-to-earth technical wizards. I'm gonna call 'em "Dave and Nils" instead. And that way I don't have to copy-and-paste that little accent over the E.

First Dave and Nils carbonated some water for me. Dave said "I don't drink flat water -- it's like bad seltzer." Fine, you say -- what's so impressive about fizzy water? Well, it was certainly fun to see made...the bottle is chilled and crushed (so there's minimal air inside), then attached to the CO₂ line and the bottle inflates with a loud pop. Shake it a few times, and there's your seltzer. Dave then showed me water carbonated with nitrous oxide instead of CO₂, which was interesting; the bubbles were smaller and less prickly-aggressive on the tongue, and the resulting seltzer was noticeably sweeter. Then, Dave and Nils carbonated some more water, mixing the gases (at about 75% CO₂/25% N₂O), giving me the FCI house blend of seltzer, which was very refreshing. This sold me: I'm totally gonna get me a carbonation setup...but Sangamon's Principle aside, I'll probably stick to the CO₂.

Dave told me that he and Nils were interested in teaching the class June 12 because "it's a good way for us to show the stuff we're working on. We can't really do these things at the restaurant, so it's a good outlet for us." He then divided the techniques he and Nils would demonstrate into "reasonable", semi-reasonable" and "unreasonable" for the home cook, and said they'd show all three.

Dave, on using liquid nitrogen:

He uses it to chill glassware -- who has time to mess around with ice and water? You've got drinks to make!

Dave and Nils like to use pieces of pickled watermelon rind for garnishing cocktails...but they don't always have enough time to pickle them. So what do they do? They shave pieces of watermelon rind and "flash-pickle" them in a vacuum with lime juice and simple syrup -- the air is sucked out, and then when the vacuum seal is broken, the air forces the lime and simple into the watemelon rind, impregnating it with sweet-and-sour deliciousness.

You can do this with a vacuum pump, but the "semi-reasonable" solution for the home mixologist involves a large syringe, which can pull a vacuum enough to pickle the rind:

Dave and Nils also made me a refreshing "Gin & Juice" -- gin with clarified grapefruit juice (they add 1/2 % gelatin to grapefruit juice, freeze everything, then thaw it while straining through cheesecloth), then carbonate the whole thing. ("Gin loves bubbles", Dave told me. They also make their own tonic water with the carbonation rig.) The clarified grapefruit juice was interesting, with a very deep flavor but no pulp or traces of bitter pith.

I also sampled a solid Martini -- gin and vermouth mixed with liquid nitrogen to cool it, plus a dash of simple syrup and a pinch of salt. Pour the whole thing over a cucumber slice, then flash-pickle it in the vacuum pump, and you have a Martini-infused cucumber!

Nils then made me a "Swedish Chef", another intense, oddly refreshing drink with an unusual flavor combination. What, you want the recipe? Here you go: caraway-infused vodka (which smells exactly like good rye bread, confusing my nose), clarified apple juice (if it's not sour enough, they just add a dash of malic acid), a splash of St. Germain, a splash of Dolin dry vermouth, and a splash of cucumber juice. Garnish the whole thing with a slice of cucumber that's been flash-pickled with Plymouth Navy Strength gin.

Places for the high-tech cocktails demonstration class and tasting on June 12 are still available -- I know I'd buy tickets just to see these guys grilling hot dogs.

Red Hot Poker

Dave Arnold is the Director of Culinary Technology at the French Culinary Institute. More relevantly to this space, he's also a mad scientist, with a strong mixological bent.

He's invented a "Red Hot Poker" that's electrically heated to over 1700°F, which he then plunges into drinks, caramelizing the sugars and adding a toasty note to their flavors. Arnold told me in a recent interview that he's simply updating "the oldest boiling technology", pointing out that people originally boiled liquids in hollowed-out wood or clay pots by dropping heated rocks into them. (You see vestiges of this method in the superheated stone or iron pots used for Korean dolsot bibimbap.)

Arnold said that in the late 17th- and early 18th-centuries, a popular drink in what would become the US was a "flip" (no relation to the slightly-more-common "flip" style of cocktail with eggs, a sort of a creamless eggnog.) A flip consisted of ale, rum or brandy and sugar or molasses. The bartender would heat a "loggerhead" -- a tool consisting of a long pole with a ball on one end and a handle on the other, originally used to melt pitch -- in the fire and use it to heat the drinks. These flips were popular roughly until the Civil War.

After reading John Hull Brown's "Early American Beverages", Arnold became interested in flips and loggerheads, and decided to experiment with them. He first picked up some soldering coppers -- solid copper rods used in welding and soldering -- and heated them on the stove. Those infused a slight copper taste and "left little black flecks of metal in the drink", so they were unacceptable. He then built a small insulated box with a bendable heating coil inside, to warm a loggerhead-like poker...but that box got too hot: "We put a chicken heart in there, and it basically exploded." Vaporized poultry hearts aside, the iron poker also left a noticeable taste in the drinks. Next, he tried a high-temperature stainless-steel alloy, but that wasn't a terribly good conductor of heat, and it didn't heat the drinks with quite enough oomph.

So finally, he settled on an internally heated rod made from an esoteric nickel-based alloy, and he hooked it up to bendable heating coils and all kinds of thermocouples and other gear to control and monitor the temperature. When he demonstrated it to me, though, the equipment was recalcitrant, and he fought with it: first having to find a way to run it without blowing a circuit breaker, then discovering a short circuit and re-soldering it in front of me. The fixed version didn't have a working thermocouple on it, so the digital temperature display wouldn't be reliable. The indefatigable Arnold would have to gauge the temperature by eye. And monitoring the temperature is important: the Red Hot Ale cocktail he created ignites at 1700°F, the Red Hot Manhattan he also serves ignites at 1750°F...and the heating element burns out at 1800°F. Delicacy and a keen eye were going to be absolutely necessary.

(Before he got around to fitting the poker with a temperature display, Arnold had to learn what, say, 1700°F looks like. "The one reference we had", he said, "was 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.'")

So he set to measuring out Ommegang Abbey ale, Courvoisier Cognac, a bit of simple syrup (since the poker's caramelizing effect takes some of the sweetness out, he mixes the cocktails a bit sweeter than usual), lemon juice, and some Regans' Orange Bitters, stirred them, and set them alight with the poker. The beer foamed wildly as he agitated the poker, and when it was done he set the finished drink in front of me. It was yeasty, toasty, and slightly sweet -- and it was wonderful and like nothing I'd ever tasted before.

Next up was the Red Hot Manhattan, which he made with Sazerac rye, Dolin vermouth, and Angostura bitters. This time the flames shot even higher, and the resulting toddy-like drink was very good -- still recognizably a Manhattan, with noticeable sweet-vermouth notes, but with the feel of warm whiskey.

After wowing me with the Red Hot Poker, Arnold then showed me another toy -- his rotary evaporator, or "roto-vap." Arnold uses it as a vacuum distiller, and infuses neutral spirits (el-cheapo vodka, filtered multiple times through charcoal) or other liquors with whatever he can think up. (Unlike the Red Hot Poker drinks, he can't sell the results at the French Culinary Institute's restaurants.) The low-temperature distilling infuses the flavors into the spirit with a great deal of presence; I sampled a caraway aquavit with a very forward rye-bread flavor, a peanut-infused Scotch that was fantastically fascinating, and even vodka and Scotch infused with hops. ("Hops-Scotch", of course.) The roto-vap removed the hops' extreme bitterness but left their characteristic flavor. I wish this stuff were more readily available...hmmm...perhaps I'll have to start trolling eBay for a roto-vap of my own.

Arnold is working on opening a bar with pastry-chef pal Johnny Iuzinni of Jean-Georges, but until then, you can taste the Red Hot Ale and Red Hot Manhattan at L'Ecole, the French Culinary Institute's restaurant.

Cape North Vodka Cruise: Take 2

Well, second time was the charm. After a tropical monsoon wiped out their first attempt at a promotional cruise, Cape North Vodka managed to shoehorn in a twilight jaunt around the bottom half of Manhattan for them and a couple dozen of their friends and fans. And me. It was chilly in New York Harbor, and most of the guests wound up in the TV room, but there was some sightseeing to be done for those who were into such things, and while drinking to stay warm is not really the same as drinking to enjoy the spirit, I didn't see anybody complaining too hard.

I've already discussed the vodka itself at reasonable length, but their follow-through and hospitality were greatly appreciated.

Cape North: A Refined Vodka That Actually Tastes Like Something

Because of alleged storm activity last night (people are sure sensitive about a little tropical storm action these days, eh? I wonder why), a scheduled cruise to promote Cape North vodka was moved to the less picturesque but more structurally sound confines of a west village club, where the revelry continued through the ensuing wetness, such as it was. Popa Chubby's Blues Band played, there was hot & cold running seafood, the crowd were fairly knowledgeable drinkers, it was cool.

The North American vodka market is a crowded one already, and with the domestic brands required by law to have no flavor, it falls to the imported brands to try variations on the theme. Usually that results in abominations like the Absolut fruit series or similar Hawaiian-Punchy setups that are most appropriate in drinks that ultimately glow in the dark (good for finding your way home after your friends have wandered off, if nothing else), but there are players in the market who are making an actual attempt to try something a little more upscale without getting wacky. That line is a lot finer with vodka than with pretty much any other spirit.

Enter Cape North. Their pitch involves mixing Swedish spring water and French grains, and the end result is sharp on the attack and decays into nothing, without leaving any residue in the mouth. There are tastes of vanilla, nut and lemon rind in it, but it's just a whiff. Once you mix it with anything (I tried it both neat & with tonic, as well as in a couple of many-ingrediented drinks that frankly weren't great), those notes go away.

It was perfectly fine on its own, and it didn't have to be freezing cold to be palatable, which puts it close to the front of the class as far as vodkas go. I'm not sure where the price point is, but if you have a feel for what constitutes top-shelf vodka, you might want to give this one a shot.

(If you can't find it soon, hang on. Anheuser-Busch is distributing it, so it should wind up in an establishment near you shortly.)