Sources on the internet were of pretty mixed feelings about the idea of infusing bourbon, ranging from IT’S BLASPHEMY to IT’S BRILLIANT. I like brilliant blasphemy, so I got out my infusing jug and crammed a bunch of apples into some Maker’s Mark.

Ingredients:
1 750 ml bottle of bourbon — I didn’t want to go with anything too fancy or distinctive here, so I just went with middle of the road Maker’s, and that worked out well.
3-4 apples, cut into small chunks — I used a mix of honeycrisp and gala apples, since those were the best available

Put the whole mess in your handy infusion jar or jug and leave it there for 5-7 days. I did mine for just five days and the apple flavor was very mild, just a nice hint on the top of the palate; next time I might leave it a little longer and see how it comes out. The end result is still perfectly bourbony, but with just a little extra sweetness and dimension of flavor. Mmm, deliciously blasphemous.

And did I make cocktails with this? I sure did! Check back soon for those recipes.

Anyway, I made some vanilla-ginger sugar syrup a while back to use in the Endless Possibilities cocktail, and found the flavor combination to be full of promise. So, after I made the important purchase of vanilla beans in bulk (because holy crap in a tiny glass bottle, those things are expensive if you buy them at the grocery store. I bought mine through BulkFoods.com and saved a lot of money) it was time to infuse again.

Ingredients:
1 750ml bottle of light rum
2 vanilla beans, split down the middle and fanned out
1/2 cup of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped into medium sized pieces

Put all of these into a large jar or bottle (I used my beer growlers yet again) and leave in a cool place for 3-5 days. When it’s done, you’ll want to filter the solids out with a cheesecloth, or—since I have never in my life owned cheesecloth—a coffee filter or two.

The rum takes on a lovely dark amber color. The taste is very vanilla up front, with a bite on the back end like a good ginger beer. Cocktails using this mix are still in the testing phase and will appear here soon, but until then, this would make a nice rum and coke!

Last night I got the opportunity to not be a fool at all, thanks to David Burke at Bloomingdale’s, Inocente Tequila, and my dear friend Nicole of The NY City Dish. Nicole, through her crazy food-blogger connections (or more likely from dining at a David Burke restaurant before and filling out a comment card), got us on the list for the event: a four-course menu consisting of seven small plates, two desserts, and four cocktails, all for $42 (plus tax and tip). Obscene! Just an obscene deal, and the meal itself was ridiculous in a very good way, but this blog isn’t here to talk about food. Let me tell you about the booze that was the backbone of the event.

Inocente Tequila’s shtick is that that it’s triple-distilled, whereas most tequilas are double distilled, making for a particularly clean and smooth taste. There’s also something about a “micro-oxygenation process” and a lot of other cleverly chosen words to indicate that this is supposed to be a fancy tequila for fancy people. In any case, the event served up five variations to show off the booze:

1. Classic Margarita – Inocente tequila, lime juice, agave nectar. This one they just handed to us when we walked in the door, and continued to hand them to us until the dinner started. This was a lot smoother than I’m used to margaritas tasting, but to be perfectly honest, I am not usually drinking the classiest of margaritas. Okay, to be extra honest, if I’m drinking a margarita it’s usually frozen and came out of a pitcher. I am classy. But this was smooth and sweet, and reminded me in flavor of a caipirinha, one of my favorite drinks.

2. Double Down – Inocente tequila, cucumber puree, serrano pepper, lime juice, agave nectar. I am all about savory cocktails, especially those that involve cucumber, so I loved this one. It was fresh up front, had smooth body, and had quite a kick on the back end from the peppers. This went incredibly perfectly with the first course of ceviche and gazpacho.

3. Inocente Puro - Okay, that’s just the fancy name they gave it on the menu, but this was just a shot of the tequila straight, complete with a little glass of coffee beans and vanilla pods to cleanse the sniffing palate before sipping. Now, I don’t have much experience with blanco tequilas as sipping tequilas; my mom was into tequilas for sipping, but she mostly had añejo and reposado tequilas. This was very smooth and a little sugary on the tongue, and honestly reminded me of cachaça.

4. Pure Innocence – Inocente tequila, fresh basil, lemon juice, agave nectar, soda water. This was my absolute favorite, summery and refreshing. I’m really into basil as a cocktail ingredient right now, so having a fresh sprig right there to sniff with every sip was such a pleasure. I could have had about six of these without blinking.

5. Life’s a Peach – Inocente tequila, white peach puree, lemon juice, prosecco. This, though, was a disappointment as the last cocktail of the night. I didn’t get any taste of peach at all, just a strange bitterness and an unpleasantly heavily alcohol taste. The only good part of this cocktail was the little crispy balls of chocolate they floated in it, which I tried to be as subtle as possible (and mostly failed) at shaking all of them out of the bottom of the glass and into my mouth.

Was Inocente tequila good? Yes. It was smooth and combined well with a variety of cocktail types. Would I buy it on my own? I’m not sure, but that’s just a matter of my personal tastes. I don’t make many tequila cocktails when left to my own devices, and when it comes to liquor I’m going to be sipping, I prefer the bouquets of gin or the classic taste of brown liquors. Also, no one told me how much a bottle of this stuff costs, but I’m guessing it’s a lot. Still, it was a fantastic experience, and one I hope to repeat again next month at the similar event for Leblon Cachaça.

Honeydew Infused Rum

A while ago, I had a delicious dessert that involved pieces of frozen watermelon. It was so good that I kept thinking about it later, and thought, “Say, I should infuse watermelon into some sort of liquor.” I followed this with the thought “Watermelon? How pedestrian. Let’s go with honeydew!” And finally, I had the thought “Now, how do you go about infusing things?”

After some minor research on the internet, I found that it was easier than I’d ever thought. Booze + flavored item + time = infusion! I decided to go with rum, because I pretty much call bullshit on vodka. Plus I had a pretty brilliant cocktail idea forming that will be gone into in a later post.

The ingredients are pretty simple:
1 750ml bottle of light rum
1/2 a honeydew melon, cut into small chunks.

I put the whole mess into the only thing I had lying around that could hold that amount of liquids and solids: a growler from the Whole Foods Beer Room. It was dark glass, had a resealable lid, and could hold half a gallon of stuff, so it was perfect. I didn’t refrigerate it, but left it in my dark and mostly air-conditioned living room for eight days. Other fruits may take less time, but my dear friend the internet suggested at least a week for melon.

The end result was a lovely pale green liquid. The taste was smooth and cool, the flavor of the honeydew evening out any harshness of the rum. The best part was the aftertaste, this flood of cool honeydew flavor on my tongue and in my nose.

This is only the first of my infusion experiments; I’ve got grand plans for the future in the world of things to soak in a bottle of booze.

Since I was a ridiculous goth teenager, I have had wild fantasies about drinking absinthe. It’s very likely that these fantasies starred Gary Oldman, or possibly Trent Reznor. There was even a point in my life where I tried to make my own absinthe, sending a friend to pick up the right herbs, and stealing my mom’s vodka to seal the whole mess up in a mason jar. I was never brave enough to drink it, but the bonus of that experiences was that when my mom later drank that vodka (after I had filled it back up with water to cover up what I had stolen), she kept commenting on how smoooooth it was. Hilarity!

I’ve considered importing absinthe from other countries, at risk of it getting snatched by customs or being a terrible product, but now getting the green stuff is as simple as going down to my beloved corner liquor store, thanks to Lucid finding legal loopholes to bring absinthe back to the US for the first time in, what, 90 years?

First things first, no, absinthe doesn’t make you hallucinate. Or if it does, it has nothing to do with the wormwood or the amount of thujone. Any crazed effects are due to the fact that this stuff is a solid 62% alcohol, which is a serious kick in the drawers. I drank it in the classic fashion involving sugar and water, although since I lacked a traditional slotted absinthe spoon (they just don’t have them in the Martha Stewart Living collection at K-Mart, for some reason), I used a wire mesh tea ball that I inexplicably have. I poured around an ounce of absinthe into a wine glass, then put a sugar cube in the tea ball and dribbled icy cold SmartWater (because we all know that Oscar Wilde loved his SmartWater! I strive for accuracy) over it. I had been sort of doubtful that cold water would dissolve the sugar, but it most certainly did! And the absinthe in the glass became a beautiful milky green-white, and gave off a strong herbal absinthe smell.

I was bracing myself for a rough, bitter experience, and got nothing of the sort! Lucid consumed in this manner was sweet and lovely. Anise was the strongest flavor, naturally, and there were some other herbs that I couldn’t quite place, but they stirred some sort of nostalgia in me, probably for when I was a gothy teenager and always messing around with herbs. The sugar made it nicely sweet, and it was a little tongue-numbing, with just a twist of bitterness in the finish. I tried a little (very little; I just dipped my finger in the glass) of it straight, and I could still taste sweetness in it without the sugar-water dilution, but good god, it was far too strong to drink straight.

I also consumed Lucid in the form of Ernest Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon” cocktail: “Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly.” I used a possibly too-sweet Moscato d’Asti, and only made it slowly through two, but it made a very nice combination. Bubbly absinthe! Delicious.

And finally, the effects. No, I did not hallucinate, but man, it was a drunkenness like no other. The brand name is very apt, since drinking a very small amount (the price point isn’t so painful when you consider how much of an incredible bang for the buck you’re getting) put me into this very clear, bright state of lucid drunkeness. I was hammered both nights I drank the absinthe, but I didn’t feel really hampered or clumsy or slow. I felt like a genius. I wanted to write novels! I had coherent conversations, and felt utterly fantastic. If possible, I would like to feel like I have two glasses of absinthe in me at all times. Is “Absinthe Fiend” still a valid profession? …no? Oh, rats.

Next up will be experimenting with more cocktails. I just have to see how this would mesh with some Hendrick’s Gin.

BUY IT AGAIN: As often as my budget allows. I will be making my budget allow for a lot of it.

I was not always a gin fan. I’m sure a large number of the works of writing about personal experiences with gin begin, “I was not always a gin fan.” Gin is an intimidating sort of alcohol; it’s got all kinds of confusing flavors, and bad gin tastes like something you’d use to sterilize a burn. I avoided gin and made fearful facial expressions at the substance until Thanksgiving of 2005, when I went to see Martha (of 2 Tasty Ladies) and Stephen in San Fransisco. Martha, you see, is a gin-soaked fiend. She loves gin, and has written about the topic quite in quite a lovely manner here and here. She was my Janie Ginnyseed, laying sprinkles of Bombay Sapphire in my heart to grow to a full-fledged love of this most rich, nuanced, complicated, interesting of heavy liquors.

I came home from that trip and started drinking gin and tonics and dirty martinis (and the topic of what should be in a damn martini is the subject for a post to come). Martha had sung the praises of Hendrick’s to me, and I sought it out, but sadly my previous liquor store of choice had what we experts refer to as a totally shit section when it came to gin. But Astor, blessed Astor, has all the fancy gins you could dream of.

To be poetic for a moment, Hendrick’s tastes like music. It is simply beautiful. It has the sharp, crisp scent of juniper, like any gin should, but on the tongue it opens up into this wonderful explosion of cucumbers and roses. This is a gin that is perfectly palatable, and perhaps even preferable (oy, alliteration) when consumed just on the rocks. Or as some might call it, a dry martini, but again, that’s a subject for anothe post. A gin and tonic mixed with Hendrick’s is a different experience from a G&T with any other gin. To start with, they recommend you put slices of cucumber in your drink instead of the usual lime, and I heartily agree with this recommendation. I don’t know if there’s anything more delicious than slices of cucumber that have been soaking in delicious gin and tonic.

Alone, Hendrick’s is a whirlwind on the tongue that makes you close your eyes and say, “Oh.” In a cocktail, it brings a certain unique character and interesting floral hints you wouldn’t find with another gin. I keep meaning to make myself try a different brand, but it’s just so hard.

The only bad thing I have to say about Hendrick’s? It’s bottled in dark glass apothecary-style bottles, and thus it is impossible to tell when you are almost out.

BUY IT AGAIN: Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.