Malört Cocktails or What to Drink at the End of the World

I am one of those crazy people that loves Malör. But for years I have never really known what to do with it other than enjoy it neat after a meal. However, in the last couple of years a number of intrepid YouTube mixologists (cock-tubers?) have taken on the noble challenge of making or creating cocktails that work with one of the world’s most aggressively bitter liqueurs.

So, whether you love Malört and want new ways to enjoy it, or you bought a bottle as a prank and can’t bring yourself to dump it out, here are a few Malört cocktails you can enjoy now—or save for the apocalypse when most of the other booze is already gone. All jokes aside, if you like grapefruit in your cocktails or jucy IPAs then this cocktials will be right up your alley.

Malört Spritz

• 2 oz Jeppson's Malört

• 1/4 oz fresh grapefruit or lime juice

• Top with grapefruit seltzer

Fill a Collins glass or a large wine glass with ice and add Malört, lime juice, and top with grapefruit soda water.

The fresh juice really helps to tame the the bitterness of the Malört and give the drink more dimension.

---

The Forced Retirement

• 3/4 oz. Jeppson's Malört

• 1 oz Gin (preferably a classic juniper forward style gin)

• 1/2 oz Campari

• 3/4 oz passion fruit syrup

• 3/4 oz fresh lime juice

• 3/4 oz grapefruit juice

• Pineapple fronds & cocktail umbrella for garnish

Combine ingredients in a Collins glass, add crushed ice and swizzel until the outside of the glass is frosted. Garnish with pineapple fronds and a cocktail umbrella, add straw and serve. Drink designed by Anders Erickson

---

Hard Sell

• 1 oz Gin (preferably a classic juniper forward style gin)

• 1 oz Elderflower liqueur

• 3/4 oz Jeppson’s Malört

• 3/4 ounce lemon juice

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice and shake until chilled. Strain into a coupe. Express a grapefruit peel over the surface of the drink and discard.

Created by Brad Bolt

---

The Bukowski

• 1 1/2 oz Jeppson’s Malört

• 1/2 oz Drambuie

• 3/4 oz Fresh lemon juice

• 1/2 oz Fresh orange juice

• 1/2 oz honey syrup (1:1 honey and water)

• 5 large Basil leaves

Combine all ingredients to shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Drink designed by Charles Joly

How to Use Texas Whiskey and Bourbon in Cocktails

Texas Whiskey is known for its bold character due to its intense aging environment. Some might struggle with how to use these spirits in cocktails so here is a little history that can help guide us.

For those who only know Texas through the movies, it is easy to imagine the state pre-prohibition to be a huge expanse of brushy grazing land dotted with cattle, and a few cowboys who fiercely value their independence. While there have been and are areas where this is true, Texas also had large cosmopolitan cities well respected for their contribution to cocktail culture. In the 19th Century, several travelers recoded their experiences and observations while traveling through Texas and remarked on the array of grog shops, taverns, saloons, and ornate hotel lounges available for drinking. With that in mind, here are two drinks, one simple and one more sophisticated, that could work with Texas whiskey both then and now.

Texas Grog

One of the advantages of the intense Texas climate is that you can get a more mature tasting whiskey with less aging time than a similar whiskey from Kentucky, Tennessee, or Indiana. For most young whiskey it is best mixed with colas or sodas to mask its youth but young Texas whiskeys can work both as sippers or in cocktails. Inspired by the 19th Century Texas grog shops, I came up with a light and refreshing drink that pairs great with Texas bourbon.

• 2oz bourbon (Treaty Oak’s Ghost Hill Texas Bourbon, or Blackland Bourbon work well)

• 2oz water

• ½oz fresh orange juice (fresh not bottled OJ is key)

• ½oz simple syrup

• 2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Shake all the ingredients with ice and strain into a double Old-Fashioned glass with fresh ice.

The Improved (Texas) Whiskey Cocktail

In the 1830s Huston, was no backwater town, so while Texans are known for being hard working and free spirited, they are certainly not barbarians. One could have walked into a fancy hotel bar and found an array of spirits such as cognac, gin, rums from Jamaica and Cuba, and whiskeys from Tennessee, Kentucky, Maryland, Ireland, and Scotland. In addition, wines such as claret, port, madeira, hock, burgundy, sherry, and champagne were available from several merchants in the city. Given this wide variety of regional and imported beverages an Improved Whiskey Cocktail would have been great option for a m1ore sophisticated drink.

• 1 sugar cube (1tsp white sugar or ¼oz simple syrup)

• 1 bar spoon (¼oz) maraschino liqueur

• 1 dash Angostura Bitters

• 1 dash Peychaud’s Bitters

• 1 dash absinthe

• 2oz bourbon (Balcones’s Texas Pot Still Bourbon or Garison Brothers Texas Small Batch Bourbon will work well)

• 2in lemon peel for garnish

In an Old-Fashioned glass, add the sugar, maraschino, bitters, absinthe, and muddle them for about 30 seconds (if using simple syrup skip the muddling). Add the bourbon and a large ice cube and stir again until chilled. Twist or pinch the lemon peel over the glass to express the oils, then drop it into the drink.

Review: The Soul of Brasil

View fullsize

Anastasia Miller and Jared Brown, The Soul of Brasil, (United Kingdom: Jared Brown, 2008), 188 pages, $17.95. ISBN: 9780976093770

Since 1992, Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown have been writing, speaking and teaching about the history of cocktails and spirits. Together they have written more than a dozen books on Champagne, vermouth, cocktails, and spirits as well as articles for Imbibe, Wine Spectator, and the Financial Times. In 2009, Brown became the head distiller at Sipsmith in London and he has helped to develop spirits in Sweden, Norway, Vietnam and the US.

In 2008, Miller and Brown wrote The Soul of Brasil, which is a short history of distillation, of Brazil, and the important cultural role cachaça plays in that country. While the book seems to have been sponsored by the cachaça distillery Sagatiba, it is very well written, and serves as a good introduction to the world's ninth largest spirits category. The book is broken down into two parts; part one traces the history of beverage alcohol since 7000 BC, European conquest of the New World, the creation of cachaça, its decline in popularity and its resurgence. In part two, Miller and Brown describe what makes cachaça unique, how it is made, its categories and flavors, as well as popular food and drink combinations.

Despite the fact that Brazil only exports about 1% of the 1.5 billion liters of cachaça sold each year, the story of cachaça is interesting for other small distillers. Though approximately one-third of the cachaça market is controlled by one brand, more than 30,000 cachaça distillers exist in Brazil. These local micro-distillers are able to remain relevant by fully embracing the local music, dance, food, and drinks of their region. By becoming enmeshed in the community, their community has a reason to buy their spirit over the national brands.

First appeared in Distiller (Winter 2017/18): 175

One Simple Way to Keep Your Vermouth Fresh

View fullsize

Vermouth is an aromatized  and fortified wine which can be drunk neat, on the rocks with a twist or in a cocktail. Aromatize refers to the fact that herbs and botanicals are added to the wine to enhance its flavor, aroma and color; fortified refers to the fact that neutral spirit, usually from grape brandy is added to increase the alcohol content which makes the vermouth more stable and last longer. However, since vermouth is based on wine, an open bottle has a shorter lifespan than say an open bottle of whiskey.

In the last few years I have grown to appreciate quite a few cocktails that call for vermouth and so I have bought a bottle from time to time. However, since I usually drink spirits neat, I've run into the problem that my open bottle of vermouth goes off before I've used it up. Because I hate to be wasteful, I've mostly given up on buying vermouth.

In the lead up to 2016 Negroni Week I wanted to buy some vermouth to make my negronis and I didn't want it to bad after the week was over and I was done making cocktails for a while. That's when it hit me. I came up with the idea to buy four 250ml swing-top bottles from The Container Store, decant the vermouth into the smaller bottles and put them into the refrigerator. I used the first 250mls during the week making cocktails and the remaining bottles sat in the back of my refrigerator. Now, four months into this experiment I am happy to say that when I opened another small bottle, the vermouth was still fresh. Both the cold refrigerator and having little to no headspace in the smaller bottled worked together to extend the life of the vermouth that otherwise would have gone bad in that amount of time. 

I figured that every time I pour vermouth from a regular bottle some amount of oxygen gets mixed into the liquid that remains. Each time you do that, the more the vermouth sloshes around and the more oxygen gets into it. Now, if I drank vermouth or made cocktails more often this would be a problem. However, this simple and inexpensive trick of decanting full size vermouth bottles (which are less expensive per ounce) into smaller bottles has made it possible for me keep vermouth on hand at all times, waiting for me when a cocktail mood strikes. If you are like me and it has killed you to pour out bad vermouth because you were too slow to finish the bottle, give this little trick a shot.