It was while my station wagon sat stuck behind a dump truck as I inched across New York's Westchester County, trying to find a bottle of Italian chestnut honey distillate, that I realized I was probably not cut out for this mixology thing.
I had the passion, to be sure, even if my after-work bartending adventures only sporadically get beyond the pour-bourbon-on-top-of-ice stage. And the mission had seemed simple enough. The idea was to attempt to make a few recipes from the most buzzed-about cocktail guide in the country, "The PDT Cocktail Book" (Sterling Epicure, 368 pages, $24.95) by Jim Meehan. It's a mesmerizing volume. Start flipping through it and you can't help but be transported, sort of like Jack Nicholson in "The Shining," to some faraway Jazz Age bacchanal where the bartenders muddle blueberries with half an ounce of Creme Yvette, pour in some cognac and Champagne, and top off this ambrosial sip with an edible orchid. (At PDT, in the East Village in New York City, they really do that. See Page 147: the Imperial Blueberry Fizz. Sigh.)
What would happen if I tried to conjure up a few of these speak-easy dreams in my own home, in the gridlocked, Yellowtail-friendly suburbs?
I'm certainly not the first guy to try. Recipes for labyrinthine libations have been showing up all over the place lately, and not just in insider's guides like Imbibe magazine. Look around and you'll find a proliferation of intricately brand-specific recipes on food blogs, in new books like "Northstar Cocktails" and in publications like The Wall Street Journal, GQ and Food and Wine.
The implication is that you, the home bartender, have bottles of Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur, Hayman's Old Tom gin and Fee Brothers bitters. And if you don't, you've got the budgetary leeway and a nearby liquor store that's ready to fill your order.
Cocktail culture
Which you might. Such is the spread of craft-cocktail mania in the United States that the Holeman & Finch Public House, an Atlanta hot spot, opened the H&F Bottle Shop this year to meet Georgia's exploding demand for small-batch arcana.
"Cocktail culture has taken root in people's homes, and your average consumers are so much more educated than they were even two years ago," said Greg Best, a bartender and one of the owners. "I mean, I have people coming in and asking me what Torino-based vermouth I carry. We get runs on allspice dram. People are coming in and not even thinking twice about dropping 100 bucks on a bottle of yellow chartreuse." All the PDT recipes I wanted to try called for specific and obscure spirits -- a few of which I'd never heard of.
My search began with a splash of hope. The first shop I wandered into, Rochambeau Wines and Liquors in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., carried a surprising bounty of the ingredients that I needed. It had Cherry Heering, Clear Creek Kirschwasser and Gran Duque d'Alba Brandy de Jerez, all of which I had to find in order to create a cherry-tinged elixir called the Mount Vernon.
"That's what we're known for," Jeffrey Wooddy, the general manager at Rochambeau, said proudly. "A customer will say, 'I haven't been able to find it. Can you help me?' And we'll have five of them on the shelf."
Indeed, the store also carried two of the five elements of a drink called the Kina Miele (Dolin Dry Vermouth and Clear Creek Pear Brandy) and one of the things I needed for the Nigori Milk Punch (Hine V.S.O.P. Cognac).
That's when things got complicated.
Rare ingredients
That Nigori Milk Punch also called for Kamoizumi Nigori sake, three dashes of Feldman's Barrel Aged Bitters and something called Navan Vanilla Liqueur. Rochambeau didn't have these. In fact, it was unlikely that any store would have the Navan.
"No more," Rochambeau's owner, Dieter Kannapin, said after hanging up the phone by the cash register. "Navan is no more?" Wooddy said.
"Off the market," Kannapin said. "They don't make it anymore."
Which meant the Nigori Milk Punch was already toast.
At this point, Wooddy was kind enough to perform a computer search for Nonino Gioiello, another element of the Kina Miele. The good news?
Zachys, a short drive away in Scarsdale, N.Y., had some. The bad news?
"Oh my God," Wooddy said. It turned out that this Italian chestnut-honey distillate, presumably made by angels who extract gossamer threads from ancient beehives when the moon is blue, sold for about $100 a bottle.
As I stood there, mildly stunned, Wooddy sagely observed that the resources available to a home bartender are not the same as those available to a celebrated Manhattan cocktail wizard.
"It's a different mind-set when you're playing with house money," he said.
A fine point. My bill for the six bottles from Rochambeau was $244.75.
I followed that by paying $132.60 at Zachys for the chestnut honey potion, along with an assortment of Bitter Truth bitters. Then I drove across the county and scored a $29.99 bottle of Lustau Pedro Ximenez sherry at Varmax in Port Chester. After getting lost in downtown Port Chester, I made landfall again at Tarry Wine, a shop opened by Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich; there I paid $22.55 for a bottle of an aperitif called Cocchi Americano.
Finally I schlepped back to Stop & Shop in Dobbs Ferry for $12.79 worth of ice, precise measuring spoons and (forgive me, elite mixologists of the East Village) a container of Florida's Natural grapefruit juice. By this point, I didn't have any time to squeeze my own.
As the sun set on the Hudson River and I headed home, my tab was nearly $450, and I'd managed to round up the complete ingredients for only one of the cocktails that I'd daydreamed of concocting.
I recounted the adventure to Meehan the next day. He gently suggested that I had aimed a bit high.
"The Nigori Milk Punch, the Mount Vernon, the Kina Miele -- those are, like, the super-advanced level drinks," he said. "They're the fetish cocktails for the people who already have a humongous collection of booze, and are bored, and are like, 'I do have 100 bucks to blow on an obscure bottle of honey distillate.' "
PDT has a budget that a speak-easy-minded suburbanite doesn't.
"I have an $18,000 liquor inventory on a daily basis at PDT, and it's because there's a lot of ingredients," he said. "I've gone to great lengths to find great products that are off the beaten track and to share them with my customers."
Via Denmark
For more perspective, I called Gary Regan, the author and cocktail expert. He was about to try a cocktail recipe that a bartender in Copenhagen had sent his way. It involved a shot of sea buckhorn juice.
"I just took a sip of it," Regan said. "It is weird, man. It is very weird." Bartending is showmanship, Regan said. The vogue for freaky drams and droplets is a bit like a band's urge to break out the didgeridoo.
"Let's face it, being a bartender is a look-at-me job," he said.
Mix specialists like Craig Schoettler in Chicago, Johnny Michaels in Minneapolis, John Coltharp in Los Angeles and Thad Vogler and Jackie Patterson in San Francisco know that the careful use of rare, artisanal ingredients helps a bartender stand out from the appletini-slinging herd. And they have a reason for being obsessively precise about their measurements and flavors.
"These ingredients do actually make a difference," Regan said. "If we're talking about the Dolin vermouth, you've got to use Dolin vermouth, because nothing else tastes like that."
I now had the Dolin, but I'd never found the final ingredient in the Kina Miele, Bitter Truth lemon bitters. So after I had hauled several bags and boxes of odd bottles into the house, I set out to make the one cocktail for which I had all of the elements: the Mount Vernon, which Meehan had created in sly tribute to George Washington.
I cannot tell a lie. The Mount Vernon was spectacular. Cost and labor and traffic snarls aside, it was the most delicious cocktail I'd ever made at home.
And that was a good thing, because by now I needed a drink.
No comments:
Post a Comment