cocktailnerd » Chartreuse

Last night's dogbite: Elan Vital

Gabriel — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:05:26 +0000

I have a problem with Imbibe!¹ and, in a larger sense, fussy-buns cocktails that require a body to prepare anywhere from 2 days to 4 weeks in advance to make a drink. You see, I’m not a planner. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the publication and think it’s gorgeous, brilliantly designed and edited, and I find you can rarely go wrong mixing up one of its drinks. But, therein lies the problem; I often can’t. This, from a guy with over 200 bottles of spirits and 30+ mixing supplements (bitters, syrups, infusions, etc.) at his disposal. I can’t imagine what a traditional reader faces what with the calls for tamarind syrup, algarrobina syrup, pinot grigio syrup, Ceylon black-tea infused silver tequila, pomegranate balsamic drizzle…I could go on and on, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that another blogger at TotC said it best when he said, “If I’m not able to reach for the bottles and mix it up, it gets a bit tiresome and fussy.”² In other words, I’m in this to make drinks, people. And, I have a feeling this is why I go in for the classic and vintage cocktails so heartily; they simply require, for the most part, you have a well-stocked bar, some juices, and the gumption.

In going through my Tales of the Cocktail recipe cards I find so many obscure liquors and spirits I can’t come near to acquiring³ here (Rain Organics Honey Mango Melon Vodka? I mean, C’MON!)⁴ or esoteric and arcane ingredients such as Bauman’s unsweetened Spice and Sassafras Apple Butter that I just begin to throw my hands up at the byzantine morass I see ahead of me that would make drinking a slog and turn to a nice classic Attention or Jack Rose cocktail and call it a night.⁵ Maybe I can be accused of not being serious or devoted enough, I don’t know.

But, this is why I get so delighted when I see a drink such as the Elan Vital, by Daniel Shoemaker, featured towards the back of the magazine’s July/August 2008 issue. “Alas,” I say, “a drink I can make this very instant, and it looks divine.”

Elan Vital

2 oz Full-bodied Dutch-style gin

3/4 oz Yellow Chartreuse

1/2 oz Dry vermouth ⁶

1/4 oz Creme de Violette

1/4 oz orgeat

Fill a mixing glass halfway with ice. Add ingredients and stir well to chill. Strain liquid into a saucer and garnish with freshly grated orange peel.

I heard many wonderful things about Daniel Shoemaker and the Teardrop Lounge while in New Orleans and this drink definitely gives them some measure of credibility if it’s any indication of the quality of drink they’re producing there. I love all of these ingredients on their own but the 3/4 oz of Yellow Chartreuse made me skeptical that this drink would work given all of the floral and botanical flavors that would be vying for prominence. However, they came together extremely well. Joana and I both likened this to a deeply-honeyed herbal tea. Just delicious and well worth its cost in hard-to-find ingredients. This is a drink that’s sweeter than expected but welcome in its complexity. “Vital impetus” indeed.

My only issue is that the dry vermouth gets lost in the shuffle and deserves to be featured more, at least if you’re using Martini & Rossi as I did. Now that I have a bottle of Vya Extra Dry I’m curious how it will change the make-up of this drink and how much a homemade or higher-quality orgeat syrup would deepen it and subdue the sweetness a bit. However, it’s not the slightest bit tacky or cloying, so don’t get me wrong; it’s just on the sweeter side of the scale for an “up” cocktail.

T. Marshall Fawley III of Scofflaw’s Den jiggered up a variation of this he called the “Elan Witch” that replaced the grated orange peel with a drop of orange flower water and added Strega in place of the Yellow Chartreuse. It sounds like it would dry it out a touch and, by his reckoning, kick up the vermouth’s influence on the final product.⁷

If you have these ingredients handy, give this a shot. If not, turn to Imbibe! where…ummmmmm, well, maybe not.⁸

Elan Vitale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Note: To be fair to Imbibe!, the ratio of straight-forward to “fussy” drinks is about 2:1 and it seems, more often than not, to keep its mission in mind with the drinks it chooses to feature. So, please Hammer, don’t hurt ‘em.⁹

Last night's dogbite: Elan Vital is a post from: cocktailnerd

Anita at MWD made a good point that Food & Wine may be a worse offender than Imbibe! about this. When a publication hunts out recipes and features bar/bartender’s “house ingredient” it becomes a barrier to entry to trying, and enjoying, it
I’m paraphrasing, but it was refreshing to hear the same “Dammit, I want to be able to make the drinks I discover.” sentiment
or wanting to acquire, how many damned specific types of vodka do you expect me to have or invest in, bastards?
GOB of “Arrested Development” reference here…
I understand the difference between having a bar where these ingredients can be made in large quantities and used to differentiate your cocktails and make them unique flavors not found elsewhere, that’s awesome stuff
calls for Vya, I had to use Martini & Rossi
this sentence edited to reflect Marshall’s comment and additional detail in the comments
I’m trying not to be completely unfair to Imbibe as it’s an extremely good publication. It just gets frustrating to me at times and it’s the most visible example of this phenomena of fussy and labor-intensive cocktails-maybe I’m lazy or in the wrong part of the country, it remains to be seen
also, I think Joana disagrees with me on this entire point which is usually a sign I’m deeply in the wrong

Last night's dogbite: The Bijou Cocktail

Gabriel — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:54:04 +0000

At the behest of Mark in my ‘Spotlight On: Chartreuse‘ entry, I pulled out my Savoy cocktail book and went to work mixing up the Bijou cocktail as it features two of my favorite ingredients; gin and chartreuse. There are only two basic recipes I’ve found for this (though you’ll find slight variations in garnish and amount of bitters – 1 dash or 2) in my search, the ‘Savoy Cocktail Book’ version which you can find here (with equal portions gin, chartreuse, and vermouth) and another you can find here (with a 3 parts gin to 1 part chartreuse and 1 part vermouth). Now, the first strikes me as being much more likely to retain its balance given the volume of sweet vermouth to offset the gin and Chartreuse. But, being the ever-faithful explorer of libations and other treats, I forged ahead trying both.

Bijou Cocktail ver. 1

3/4 oz gin (the Savoy recipe specifies Plymouth Gin, so I used it)

3/4 oz Chartreuse (green)

3/4 oz Gancia Italian Vermouth (used Noilly Prat sweet vermouth)

2 dashes orange bitters (used Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6)

Mix well with a spoon in a mixing glass (read: stir), strain into a cocktail glass, add a cherry or an olive (I chose cherry), squeeze a piece of lemon peel on top and serve.

The first thing I always do when trying a new cocktail is inhale it deeply (much to my wife’s amusement, mind you) since, as you know, so much of taste involves olfactory goodness. Well, in this case I get a big ol’ whiff of Chartreuse and nearly only Chartreuse; herbal and bright. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it makes me immediately suspicious of the drink’s balance. The taste of the drink is a very strong and bold front of Chartreuse with only gentle teasings of anything else behind it. The vermouth does bring a sweetness to it, which is welcome, but the gin is almost completely lost and the finish of the drink is almost exclusively of the Chartreuse. A disappointment.

However, as I get further into the drink and it returns closer to room temperature, a pleasant surprise. It actually starts blending and melding much better than after it’s initially poured. Suddenly the sweetness of the Plymouth and vermouth come more to the front and all of the herbals come together more harmoniously. From halfway through on down it’s a much better cocktail, just as allowing wine to breath gives it more complexity and depth. Pretty damned nice there at the end.

Bijou Cocktail ver. 2

1 1/2 oz gin

1/2 oz Chartreuse (green)

1/2 oz sweet vermouth

1 dash orange bitters

Stir in a mixing glass with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry.

Well, one thing’s for sure, the Chartreuse is definitely less prevalent but instead of having the sweetness of the vermouth tamp everything down and act as a catalyst between the gin and Chartreuse it gets lost and you’re left with a very dry and gin-prevalent drink. Again, not a bad thing, but I have a dozen or so other drinks I’ll go to if I want to feature gin so strongly. So, while this version has a more consistent character and stayed true throughout the drink I find it less complex and interesting than the first. Also, if I tried this version again I would up the orange bitters to two dashes and add the touch of lemon twist from the first. Both of those steps, absent in this version, seem to have contributed more than I expected and I felt their absence in this version.

So, for a drink to feature Chartreuse and how it can be used to wonderful effect I still recommend the ‘Last Word‘ cocktail, but the Savoy version of this drink (ver. 1) is a very nice pre-dinner cocktail as it has an herbal and slightly spicy nature that acts as a good and clean palate cleanser. Not quite the jewel the name implies, but not bad either.

Bijou Cocktail ver. 1 Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars (but let it breathe a bit)

Bijou Cocktail ver. 2 Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

There is a very nice entry on the Bijou at The Spirit World here as well.

03/25/09 Update:

Rachel Maddow featured the Bijou cocktail on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and rightly calls him out on needing a more manly drink than a Bud Light with Lime¹ :

Last night's dogbite: The Bijou Cocktail is a post from: cocktailnerd

I would also like to mention that a good stout vermouth like Carpano Antica and a heartier gin than Plymouth greatly improves this drink in ver. 1 – still avoid ver. 2

Spotlight On!: Chartreuse

Gabriel — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 16:25:54 +0000

Chartreuse fascinated me long before my foray into classic and vintage cocktails. At my favorite liquor store, the green elixir would stare down at me in a lonely fashion, awkwardly surrounded by grappas to the left of it, fruit brandies to the right of it, and it, stuck in the middle with me. But, at $42 a bottle, I couldn’t justify the expense lest it taste of raspberry and ketchup and I get stuck holding the bag (note to self, generally recipes that have survived for 400+ years don’t taste of ass…). Fortunately, my wife in her telepathic wonderfulness (ok, I may have dropped a few whine-intoned hints) wrapped a bottle for Christmas and made this cocktail nerd a very happy man.

That evening, upon opening the bottle, I was astounded at the smell; with very strong and complex herbal tones of, well, just about everything (130 ingredients indeed!), I had just never smelled anything like it. ‘I simply must drink this now‘, I thought. But, given the in-laws still hanging around, the kids still opening presents, and it being 10am I thought the better of it. So, anxiously awaiting the witching hour of 4:30pm (my personal mark for when it’s acceptable to begin ‘hitting it’) I researched it instead.

So, a short detour; originally intended as a medicine (just like Campari during prohibition!), Chartreuse is purported to have been presented to Carthusian monks in France around 1605 as an ‘elixir of long life’ and had somewhere on the order of 130 ingredients (mostly herbal) with a wine alcohol base. The recipe was slightly modified in the mid-18th century to create the widely known ‘Green Chartreuse’ and became very popular. Soon after, the monks were expelled from France for a short time, and then allowed back in. A hundred years or so went by during which the monks developed a sweeter and less-proofy version of Chartreuse which became known as ‘Yellow Chartreuse’. The French government, not learning from their earlier mistakes seized the monastery in 1903, the monks were expelled again, and this time they left for Spain and began creating the elixirs there. The French government attempted to produce the liqueurs from 1903 to 1927 and failed miserably, nearly bankrupting the production company. Local businessmen purchased all of the devalued shares and presented them as a gift to the expatriated monks in Spain, who quickly returned to the distellery to resume production only to have a mudslide destroy the distellery in 1935. The government rebuilt the distellery, allowed the monks to regain full citizenship, and it’s been produced to this day with only three monks knowing the full recipe and production process at any given time¹.

I stared at the bottle, a newfound respect upon me (and an understanding of the price tag for this stuff – it reads like an Updike story). So hell, it’s Christmas, it’s 4:00, let’s do this thing! Finding a recipe using Chartreuse proved harder than I imagined (this, before I began my deep research into true cocktails) and I found this recipe in ’The Bartender’s Black Book, Eighth Ed.‘.

Green Dragon

2 oz Vodka

1 oz Green Chartreuse

Shake and strain into a cocktail glass.

Hmmmm, nice because it definitely shows off the Chartreuse but that’s about all it does. Also, with Green Chartreuse clocking-in at 110-proof, any drink that after one of them makes you wonder about your faculties probably means you’re risking enjoying the rest of your evening. So, I drank these once a week or so until I got through a third of the bottle and then let it sit. It just felt like there could be something so much more to using Chartreuse than this… So, it sat… until I began researching truly classic cocktails and the vintage recipes that kept our forbears company.

Alamagoozlum

Now, I’m not going to provide the recipe for this drink here for two reasons:

It deserves its own post and review, being as unusual as it is – so I’ll not spoil it, and

I’ve not been able to find it anywhere on the Internet. As you probably know, it’s featured in Ted Haigh’s ‘Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails‘ but usually you’ll find these standard recipes reproduced somewhere. But not this one. So, in the spirit of honoring what may be Dr. Cocktail’s desire, even though the recipe may be public domain, I will reach out to him for permission before reprinting since even his book excerpts (except Amazon’s ‘Search Inside!’ feature), interviews, and other resources don’t list this recipe.

This recipe involves no less than eight ingredients, and astonishingly enough, the Chartreuse just rang through the thing. It’s a very interesting and worthwhile drink for anyone interested in lost cocktails to try but I was truly dismayed that even among such playmates the Green Chartreuse just battled its way through to the tongue. Far less complexity or depth than I was expecting, and given the time-consuming nature of mixing this drink, not something I’ll be trying again soon. It is novel in its design, but not a good cocktail to feature Chartreuse. Damn… hmmmmmmm… and the bottle sat again until the next contestant crossed my path.

The Last Word

1 oz Gin

1 oz Maraschino

1 oz Green Chartreuse

1 oz lime juice

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

I was very skeptical of this recipe because while I could see there was a good blend of sweet, tart, and herbal in the drink and while I’m a huge fan of Maraschino and Chartreuse I just didn’t trust that the Chartreuse wouldn’t overpower the thing. But, I fell upon the recipe watching one of Robert Hess’s (aka Drinkboy) online videos and Drinkboy is one of the good ones and I trust him implicitly.

This cocktail is simply amazing and beautifully shows off just how a well-made cocktail is a thing of beauty. After making myself and my wife one, which we both loved, she actually requested one the following day. That is about as high a recommendation as you’re ever going to get regarding a drink on the dry side of the spectrum. The Chartreuse lays behind the Maraschino (another strongly-flavored liqueur) and Gin in a way you wouldn’t expect and given that this has half the ingredients of the Alamagoozlum and it’s a hefty shot of Chartreuse in the mix it’s a more than pleasant surprise. If you’re interested in Chartreuse at all this is a great place to start, or if you have used it but haven’t had this recipe this shows it off beautifully. As the man said, ‘The only liquor so good they named a color after it’.

Prosit!

Green Dragon Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Alamagoozlum Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The Last Word Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Spotlight On!: Chartreuse is a post from: cocktailnerd

all historical information gathered from wikipedia.org and confirmed via text sources – any errors or omissions should be forwarded to the editors of wikipedia – that’s a little nerd joke btw