Bénédictine. In the same realm as Chartreuse, Bénédictine is another one of those age-old (300+ yrs) herbal liqueurs from Europe (France) made with a blend of secret herbs and spices (27) that only a few (3) people know at one time. It’s sold as a 40% ABV standalone liqueur, as…
rum, sugar, nutmeg
Roger Groult Calvados Pays d’Auge. Calvados is a spirit you may not be familiar with, but should be! Calvados is an apple brandy (spirit distilled from apples, sometimes pears) from France that’s regulated by an appellation (which defines where the apples must be grown and the process for creating the spirit). The…
scotch, Drambuie
Goslings Black Seal rum. This spirit from Bermuda is the official rum for the Dark N Stormy, a cocktail that’s become super popular with the rising craft cocktail movement. The rum gets its name because during WWII used champagne bottles were refilled with this rum and sealed with a black…
The book that started it all for me – The Bar Book by Jeffrey Morgenthaler. So I’ve been interested in cocktails/homebartending since college, but it really wasn’t until I got this book a few years ago that I really dove into the subject and started educating myself on it. There…
St. Elizabeth Allspice dram was brought to market in 2008 as a traditional pimento dram. (no, not the weird red strips inside olives) Pimento is also known as “allspice” and is commonly used in Jamaican and Caribbean cooking (jerk chicken!). Pimentos are very fragrant tiny dried berries that have flavors…
bourbon, apple brandy, Jamaican rum, Green Chartreuse, cinnamon, vanilla
Drambuie. A whiskey liqueur made from scotch, heather honey, and secret herbs/spices. The flavor of this is definitely scotch forward and very sweet with strong honey and herbal notes. It’s been around for a couple hundred years but really picked up popularity in the Prohibition period to pair with (aka mask)…
Making a drink taste delicious starts by making it *look* delicious – we taste first with our eyes, then our mouths. Serve the same cocktail in a Solo cup and a fancy coupe and I guarantee it won’t taste the same. (there have literally been scientific studies that support this)…
Luxardo maraschino liqueur. To start, this tastes nothing like those neon plastic-y cherries generally associated with “maraschino” (more on those later – the history there is also quite interesting). As one of the oldest European liqueurs (1821), Luxardo is a staple for a well-rounded collection both to recreate classic cocktails…
gin, Campari, sweet vermouth
Old Tom Gin. Ever hear of the Tom Collins cocktail? This classic gin drink got its name from the popular style of gin from 18th Century England – the “Old Tom” style. Today, the most common style you’ll find on the market is “London Dry,” which is considered the default/classic…
tequila, mezcal, agave, bitters
Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao orange liqueur. You may have heard of Cointreau, Grand Marnier, Triple Sec, Curaçao, and the like, but what’s the difference? The commonality between these is that they’re all considered orange liqueurs, a base spirit sweetened and flavored with oranges, and the distinction between them is actually…
Recipe 1 vanilla bean 2 cups of sugar 1 cup of water Bring the water to a boil and add the sugar until it’s fully dissolved (should be clear). Turn off the heat. Split the vanilla bean and scrape the beans into the syrup. Cut the bean into a couple…
Green Chartreuse. You may have heard of the color chartreuse (this was super popular in the fashion world a couple years back), but did you know the color actually got its name from this liqueur? Chartreuse has its roots back to 1737 (the color reference came in 1884) and is…
151 rum, passionfruit, orange, lime, bitters, absinthe
Orgeat, pronounced OR-ZHA (soft ‘zh’ sound), is not as fancy as it sounds. It’s a key ingredient in the classic Mai Tai, but really is pretty much just almond milk in syrup form. Now, before you go racing off trying to dump sugar into your carton of almond milk, be…
rum, sugar, bitters
Frangelico was actually one of the very first liqueurs I ever owned. When I first got interested in cocktails my senior year of college, I threw a couple cocktail parties for my friends, loading up my ‘bar’ with a few very calculated purchases (getting cocktail ingredients was a HUGE investment for…
I picked up this Plantation Stiggin’s Fancy Pineapple Rum recently and it’s seriously one of the best bottles ever. In a market where Bacardi/Malibu offer rums in every flavor under the moon (“wolf berry,” “horned coconut,” “arctic grape”), the category of flavored rums has become intimately linked to these sugary…
rum, lime, sugar
Cachaça. The first time I heard of cachaça was from a Brazilian at a bar, and of course in the context of what else but the caipirinha. The second time I heard of cachaça was from another Brazilian, this time in college on campus, again in the context of a caipirinha.…