Weekend Imbibing
POSTED AT 04:28 PM in Recipes

campbell

This past weekend, I got a bit too visceral with a paring knife, and exposed the flesh of a lemon that I was extracting a twist from.  Realising that I would be drinking the lemon over the weekend, I set about concocting a creative way of enjoying the fruit.  First, though, the beverage utilising the peel:

2 oz. Bombay Sapphire

1 oz. Noilly Prat Dry

3 oz. Pellegirno SanBitter

2 dashes, 'Halvies' Orange Bitters (1 dash, Regan's; 1 dash, Fee's)

twist, Lemon

 

served in a rocks glass over cracked ice

 

Essentially, we're looking at a wet martini turned into a highball.  Many people describe the SanBitter as a non-alcoholic Campari soda, but I found it to be less botanical/herbaceous and a little sweeter.  It comes in 10-packs of cute 3.3 oz bottles, though, which are perfect for highball purposes.  Overall, this wasn't as great as I felt that it could have been -- perhaps due to the vermouth being on its last legs -- but deftly served the dual purpose I had designed it for:  that of the Friday post-work wind-downer, and of the more voluminous aperitif.

 

Lemon Drink #1:

 

2 oz. Laird's Bonded Apple Brandy

0.75 oz. Licor 43

0.75 oz. Lemon juice

1 dash, Peychaud's

coupe glass, up

 

One could look at this drink in one of two analogised ways:  it's either a Sidecar that replaces both the spirit & liqueur while adding bitters, or it's a Pegu Club which replaces each ingredient with an analogue.  On the matter of taste, it's much more the former.  Similarly, it's also made in the 8:3:3 ratio that I prefer for non-syrup sours.  While not terribly exciting, it's close enough to a Sidecar to still be 'good,' the bitters didn't throw the balance off at all, I had just picked up the Licor 43 (think:  herbal/vanilla, shading toward the latter), and vanilla-apple is just so early-Autumnal.

 

Lemon Drink #2:

 

1.6 oz. El Tesoro Anejo

0.6 oz. Licor 43

0.33 oz. Aperol

0.6 oz. Lemon juice

2 dashes, Xocolatl Bitters

 

couple glass, up

 

I had to adjust my volumes to maintain the 8:3:3 ratio, in light of the lemon only retaining 0.6 oz. juice by this point.  This was the star of the weekend.  I'm not sure why I chose Aperol as a secondary modifier (probably playing off of the tested tequila-orange combo, but not wanting to add a second liqeuer, actually), but it subsumed very well beneath the citrus and chocolate-vanilla combo.  This drink featured an appreciable number of flavour layers, while maintaining a cohesive whole, which taken together is really the only thing I go for when crafting drinks.  The Anejo was necessary in maintaing a certain 'grounding' to the drink that a blanco could not have.  The only knock I would have on this cocktail (well, two actually) is that its flavour never evolved in-glass, so it's not a drink that you'd necessarily desire a second of in a single sitting, and it smelled overly of the vanilla note (odd given the somewhat liberal use of mole bitters).