How To Make Your Own Bitters

I want to be like Antoine Peychaud. After finally confronting the realization that I will never live up to the old “Be like Mike commercials”, I lived in a world without a role model and guidance for several years. This void in my life, filled by a perilous journey towards a purposeless end (Masters degree), eventually had to end. Read more

Pink Gin and My New British Friend

1,000’s of miles from his home, a man approached me the other day asking me to make him a Pink Gin. I don’t get requests for Pink Gins that often, but when I do, the guest usually has some common characteristics, namely bad teeth. But for what they may lack in dental hygiene, the English make up in cocktail appreciation.

Unlike modern American Kool-Aid cocktail connoisseurs, our friends across the pond love herbal and spiced dimensions in their drink. Man, Mom and Dad are you sure I was born here in the states and am the product of one American with a German background and another with some other non-British European White stuff in it? Wait a second, am I freaking adopted? If I find out about my biological status because of my love for Campari, I am going to be pissed off (and drink some more Campari). Either way, my tastes aren’t going to change anytime soon, and the English cocktail perspective remains as a persistent reminder on how to utilize different flavor elements in drinks. Pimm’s alone has such widespread use and distinct flavor that we could just stop here, but my bar guest wanted a Pink Gin.

I think my British friend expected me to say, “What’s that?” I got the impression that he only asked American bartenders for pink gins as a sort of reminiscing request. It wasn’t about the drink, but about feeling as though he was English and wasn’t going to abandon his strong devotion to good old gin and bitters. He wasn’t expecting to find someone else who loves the same drink I guess, because when I gave him a nod and made the drink in front of him, while continuing my conversation with another guest. I pushed the drink in front of him and noticed that he was just kind of staring at the drink. I was beginning to wonder if I had another cocktail expert on my hands who was going to correct me on how to make the drink correctly; bartenders, you know what I am talking about. The conversation usually goes something like this:

Cocktail Expert: Hey man, can I get one of those upside down, Tequila Zinger Zwangs, cherry style, on the rocks neat?

Me: …

Cocktail Expert: They are awesome; I had one at Shitty Drinks Pub on Tuesday!

Me: Can you tell me how to make a Tequila Zinger Zwang, cherry style upside down?

Cocktail Expert: What you don’t know how to make a T.Z.Z. Are you serious?

Cocktail Expert’s Jackass Friend: What kind of place is this?

Me: Well, if you tell me how to make it, I am sure I can come up with something close if that’s really what you are set on having.

Cocktail Expert: I don’t know! How should I know? You’re the bartender.

Me: Well, I tell you what. You guys give me a chance to make to one drink for each of you, and if it isn’t the best drink you’ve ever had, you can give it back, and I will make you my very best attempt at a T.Z.Z. on me.

Cocktail Expert: Awesome, you’re on.

(5 Drinks Later)

Former Cocktail Expert: Man, these drinks were awesome! What days do you work? We are coming back here tomorrow!

Actual Cocktail Expert Who Has Tolerated This Routine Too Many Times To Count (Me): Thanks guys; let me try some different stuff on you tomorrow and bring some friends. Have you ever had an Old Fashioned?

See how this works? I was ready for this guy to say something like this and tell me how to make a pink gin the “right” way. But, this prediction was way off base, see the British have some sort of detailed cocktail recipe consensus that says how to make certain drinks. Sure, there are variations like with any cocktail, but generally some fundamental rules are followed with each British cocktail. Knowing, this I should have known that this guy wasn’t going to be a pretentious asshole. Something else must have been going on. I asked Nicole to hold on a second and asked the guy if everything was ok. He said, “Man, I’ve been living in Houston for seven years and nobody has ever made me a pink gin without asking me how to make it! That’s awesome! How do you know how to make one of those?” Uhm, because I am a bartender, and you should know how to make one!

Pinks Gins have some variance however, as they are often preferred with tonic water and/or lime. But in its most fundamental state, a pink gin is not a G&T with bitters, instead, it is made as follows:

Pink Gin

2 oz Gin
2 Dashes Angostura Bitters

Pour the gin over a rocks glass filled with ice and dash bitters on top.

It is called a “Pink Gin” because, well, it looks pink and is made mostly of gin. See, one more reason to love the Brits, simple drink names. The T.Z.Z. would never be served in a British bar. As with many combinations of gin, bitters, and tonic, the Pink Gin was initially conceived by the British Royal Navy as a medicinal treatment for diseases like malaria, seasickness, and other stomach ailments, but we know that they were just making that crap up to drink more gin.

The Pink Gin is awesome because it is so simple and has the ability to bring out so many flavors from the gin and bitters, but can we make it more interesting I wondered. I walked outside and cut a sprig of rosemary of our plant who is still really angry at me for the Rosemarriage Drink of the Week from a couple of weeks ago. I muddled a small sprig of rosemary in a glass with the bitters and a quartered lime wedge, added ice, and the gin and shook and strained my new mixture into a cocktail glass, garnished with a lemon twist wrapped around a fresh rosemary spring. The drink rocked and had such a fresh herbal aroma and taste with all of the traditional Pink Gin qualities.

I passed the drink to my new British friend, and he really liked it. He said he was going to definitely bring some of his other British friends in to have some and take the idea home the next time he visited. If you don’t drink Pink Gins frequently, take this guy’s enthusiasm for this simple cocktail as motivation for trying something simpler which can be expanded on. Just don’t be that guy when you ask you bartender for one. The conversation will likely go something like this if you are:

Cocktail Expert (Due To Reading This Blog): Hey man, can I get one of those Pink Gins?

Less Cocktail Enthused Bartender: …

Cocktail Expert: Don’t tell me you don’t know how to make a Pink Gin. What kind of place is this?

Less Cocktail Enthused Bartender: One you can leave, take your breast cancer awareness gin ass and get the fuck out.

Cocktailess Expert (Due To Not Reading The Entirety Of This Post): Uh, oops…

Man, etiquette and good drinks, what more could you want? How about trying a Pink Gin without the rocks and with different types of bitters. The flavors can really be awesome like this. You’ve got to give it up for those Brits; they really know their drinks. God save the queen and all her cocktails!

9,204 Different REAL Martinis and Counting…

In The Joy of Mixology, Gary Regan makes the argument that the Manhattan is “the best cocktail on earth.” His rationale is partially based on “digesting all the variables” that influence a Manhattan’s taste. Gary probably knows more about this cocktail than anyone on the planet, and he argues that the best Manhattans consider the properties of their whiskey appropriately. For example, a spicier whiskey, such as a rye, needs more vermouth to correctly balance the drink. Milder whiskeys, such as a wheated bourbon, needs less vermouth. Therefore, to successfully create an ideal Manhattan, the bartender must have an extensive knowledge of whiskies, vermouth, and bitters. More importantly, to become a cocktail artisan, one must understand how the ingredients work together. Amid these circumstances, it is easy to understand why Gary claims the Manhattan to be the “best”.

Now, I would certainly never attempt to refute anything that Gary Regan has said. The man drools more bartending knowledge in his sleep than I posses. However, the term “best” is rather opinionated, allowing for me to add my own two cents. Additionally, Gary’s arguments for Manhattan supremacy have recently become applicable to the Martini. Now, I am not going to claim that the Martini is great because it was one of the first or is more iconic. Instead, let’s just consider the same concepts of complexity with the Martini.

THE MARTINI

3 oz Gin
1 oz Vermouth
2 Dashes Bitters (Orange Preferred)
Olive for Garnish

Combine all the ingredients in a tin and stir. Strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with the olive.

Simple enough? Maybe so - 10 years ago. Gin’s popularity was in the gutter and few brands were available to consumers. What a difference a decade has made! Gin has gained so much popularity that it is hard to keep up with all of the available brands. Consequently, the impact on the Martini is diversity. Just as the Manhattan is influenced by the abundant number of whiskies available, the Martini has become exponentially complex as new gins have developed. Bitters manufacturing has expanded as well, which equally influences both the Manhattan and the Martini. The combinations seem endless, but I came up with a ROUGH calculation of the possibilities for the Martini drinker.

The Rules: This task was a little more difficult than I expected. I generally keep track of most new products, especially gins, that are hitting the market, but, WOW, there are just so many more than I thought. I started listing them of the top of my head initially, got to about 30, and decided I needed some help. After surveying a few online merchants with huge selections, I settled on the list below, which I am sure is still incomplete. I excluded crap gins (such as Skol, McCormick, and any other company that produces a type of each major spirit and makes me want to vomit) and gins that are not traditionally used in Martinis (such as Holland’s gins). A lot of discussion has been made about whether some newer gins make good martinis and even count as gins. Some of my favorite articles covering this issue have been written by Gary Regan in the San Francisco Chronicle and Eric Asimov in the New York Times, but for the purpose of argumentation, let’s just count those gins that meet a minimum quality standard and could conceptually be used in a Martini. Vermouth has to be French Vermouth, and the bitters have to be either a basic (generally angostura flavored or similar) or orange, which was used originally. We will let Stirrings Blood Orange bitters in to be fair, but Collins chemical-orange-death-mixture is out. Other flavored bitters, while great in Martinis, are excluded just to draw the line somewhere. Alright, here’s the list of options:

TYPES OF FRENCH VERMOUTH

1. Boissiere
2. Cinzano
3. Dolin
4. Gallo
5. Kedem
6. Lejon
7. Martini & Rossi
8. Noilly Prat
9. Stock
10. Tribuno
11. Versasi
12. Vya

TYPES OF GIN

1. Aviation
2. Bafferts
3. Beefeater
4. Beefeater Wet
5. Blackwood’s
6. Blackwood’s 60
7. Bluecoat
8. Bombay
9. Bombay Sapphire
10. Boodles
11. Broker’s
12. Bulldog
13. Burnett’s
14. Cascade Mountain
15. Citadelle
16. Cork
17. Damrak
18. Desert Juniper
19. DH Krahn
20. Dogfish
21. G’Vine
22. Gabriel Boudier
23. Gilbey’s
24. Glenmore
25. Gordon’s
26. Gordon’s Distillers Cut
27. Hampton’s
28. Hendrick’s
29. Iceberg
30. Indigo
31. Juniper Green
32. Junipero
33. Kensington
34. Magellan
35. Mercury
36. Miller’s
37. Miller’s Westbourne Strength
38. No. 209
39. Northshore
40. Old Raj (46% ABV)
41. Old Raj (55% ABV)
42. Parliament
43. Plymouth
44. Plymouth Navy Strength
45. Quintessential
46. Rogue Spruce
47. Sarticious
48. Seagram’s
49. Seagram’s Lime Twisted
50. Seagram’s Reserve
51. South
52. Tanqueray
53. Tanqueray Rangpur
54. Tanqueray Ten
55. Tower of London
56. Van Gogh
57. Whitley Neill
58. Xoriguer
59. Zuidam

TYPES OF BITTERS

1. Angostura
2. Angostura (Orange)
3. A.V. Wees
4. A.V. Wees (Oranje)
5. Bitter Truth
6. Bitter Truth (Orange)
7. Fee Brother’s
8. Fee Brother’s (Orange)
9. Hermes
10. Hermes (Orange)
11. Peychaud’s
12. Regan’s (Orange)
13. Stirring’s (Blood Orange)

POSSIBLE MARTINIS: 9,204!

That’s right; with no repetition, there are 9,204 possible different combinations of 1 type of vermouth, 1 type of gin, and 1 type of bitters! And, as with the Manhattan, different degrees of vermouth work better with different strengths and flavors of gin. One could even make the argument that the variations in gin are more extreme than whiskies because of the diverse amount of herbs and other spices used. Further, not all gins work well with all vermouths. My favorites in each category are Vya Vermouth and Old Raj for example, but these two simply don’t work well together in my opinion. This is partially because Old Raj’s saffron elements seem to clash with some of Vya’s complexity; use Noilly Prat with Old Raj instead. This is just one example of the adjustments that need to be made for different ingredients.

Previously, when gin was more uniform in taste, the alterations were less essential. But as the gin market expands, bartenders need to be more aware of the relationship between their ingredients. So which is more difficult, the Manhattan or the Martini? Who knows? Gary’s original argument probably still applies because gin has yet to outnumber types of whiskies and probably never will. However, all other issues aside, the increasing diversity of gin makes the Martini a flexible contender. The question ultimately is unimportant; instead find out which of each you like the best. Here’s mine:

MY FAVORITE MARTINI (CURRENTLY)

2 ½ oz Northshore Gin
1 oz Vya Vermouth
3 Dashes Regan’s Orange Bitters
Lemon Twist for Garnish

MY FAVORITE MANHATTAN (CURRENTLY)

2 ¼ oz Sazerac 6 Rye
1 oz Vya Sweet Vermouth
2 Dashes Angostura Bitters
1 Maraschino Cherry for Garnish

Are they the best? Is one better than the other? Who knows, but they are my favorites right now. I have had a lot of Martinis, but nowhere near 9,204. I won’t try some by choice, and others I probably won’t have the opportunity to experience. If I just tried one of the possible combinations every day, it would take over 25 years to complete the list of combinations, and new gin brands are certainly going to continue to appear as well, making this objective impossible. Nevertheless, the quest for the unobtainable holy grail of the Martini is more about the journey than the drink.

Follow-Up Note: In a strange sort of coincidence that would almost only happen with the best of cocktails, a couple other blogs I am big fans of wrote on the Martini when I was working on this post or just before. I like each of these blogs and wanted to go ahead and recommend them as other readings related to this post and as great blogs! Check out Married with Dinner and Oh Gosh! if you liked this post.