Tasting tasty drinks – Recipes, instruction and more.

Tonight we try another flavored vodka, I do seem to be on a vodka kick lately but I honestly believe it’s just because suddenly flavored vodkas are all the rage.

Burnett’s Pink Lemonade Vodka.
35% alcohol – 70 proof

LOOK
Well let’s just say it’s really pink. Heck even the bottle has a pink cap. I feel like this should be the official vodka of the Disney Princesses; but I digress.

The vodka has the standard light body of a normal vodka. It is clear but with a smooth pink color throughout.

SMELL
The scent of the drink is definitely citrus – but it smells like cheap chemical citrus. There’s definitely a vodka smell as well – again it smells like a cheap one. I might regret this. The smell as I swirl it in the glass is definitely chemical in nature. I’ve had some other lemon vodkas lately and this is not in their category in the smell category.

TASTE
Wow! Powerful alcohol taste. It immediately sets the tongue on fire and lights up your lips.
As you register the alcohol the citrus comes rushing in. It’s a good strong lemon flavor but the undertone is very chemical, much like I expected but also not as bad as I feared.
There’s a nice body to the drink, slightly thicker than plain vodka.

AFTERTASTE
As the flavor lingers on the tongue it turns much more sour as time passes. The lemonade aftertaste doesnt last long, but the alcohol flavor definitely does stick around.
Retronasally you get a lot more of the lemon scent at the back of the mouth.

The verdict:
Not the best vodka I’ve ever had. I cannot see myself drinking this straight. However, that being said, I would consider using it as a rail brand for mixed drinks. I would not be using it however for very high quality drinks for a discerning drinker who would analyze and try to appreciate the flavors of the ingredients.

Would mix well with:

• Cranberry juice
• Lemonade
• Ginger Ale
• Lemon lime soda
• Tea
• Pineapple juice
• Sloe Gin
• Whiskey
• Grenadine
• Sour Apple Pucker

There’s probably a lot more things that will mix, but these are a good start to try this out.

Have a drink:

• 1 part Burnett’s Pink Lemonade Vodka
• 2 dashes Regans Orange bitters
• 2 parts Lemon Lime soda

And the verdict on this is – simple but tasty. The bitters and soda mellow out the vodka enough to make this a pleasant and refreshing drink.

So give it a try, maybe don’t buy a big bottle for an experiment but try a 50ml or request it at a bar, it might be a fun option to try. Taste deeply, drink well.

Cheers!

Ed ‘Whitey’ Walker is an knowledgeable cocktail resource with experience creating drinks for events and individuals.
A Taste For Drink teaches users to utilize a trained sense of taste to create and enjoy unique drinks

Twitter,Facebook, – service @ atastefordrink.com – ©2012 Ed Walker-A Taste For Drink, All Rights Reserved. All opinions, reviews and spirits’ coverage are the personal opinion and decision of Ed Walker

Time to talk mixers again. Today let’s examine the venerable sour mix.

Sour mix is used in many cocktails. It is made from approximately equal parts lemon and/or lime juice and simple syrup and shaken vigorously with ice. This produces a pearly-white liquid with a pronounced flavor.

Pre-mixed versions are available, and are in use in many bars. These typically consist of a powder which must be rehydrated by adding water prior to use. There are also premix versions that are already liquid. One of my favorites that I used to use listed an ingredient called bar foam which I gather enhances the amount of foaminess you gain when shaking a drink. I’ve utilized this when making some foamy drinks in my Pond Scum series of drink recipes (you’ll get one of these in a minute).

Sour mix tends to be a yellowish color and semi-opaque. sipping it straight leads you into the realm of conflicting flavors. First you pucker from the sour of the citrus juice and immediately your mouth is hit by the sweet of the simple syrup.

When used, you’re mostly aiming for a sour tasting flavor. Although the sweet is there to balance, the overall theme of drinks with sour mix added is, well, sour.

Among the most common drinks using sour mix are vodka sour and whiskey sour.

There are two schools regarding sour mix: make your own, or use pre-mixed.

Personally I have no affinity for either school of thought. In my mind, it comes down to your time available and the venue. If you have time and patience to make simple syrup and either squeeze lemons or obtain fresh lemon juice – have a field day and mix your own. You’ll end up with a quality sour mix that matches the flavor YOU want rather than something from a vendor who’s idea of the perfect balance of sweet and sour may not match your own.

If, however, you’re working under a time crunch or are going to use so much mix that you can’t possibly keep up – or any of a thousand other myriad reasons – use the pre-mix. Just be picky in the brand, they are not all identical. Taste test several brands and find your favorite. I’m NOT going to give my favorite as I don’t want to seem to be endorsing a specific product and MY taste is not the same as yours.

Utilize your tasting skills and determine what works best for you.

I’ve also come up with a ‘cheaters’ sour mix when in a real pinch.
Have you encountered those lemonade drink mixes on the shelves of the super market? I thought you might. Well, when I’ve been mixing at outdoor events I’ve run out of my normal sour mix on more than one occasion. I have learned to stock a jar of this mix in my supplies. I simply add the powdered mix at double or possibly triple strength – depending on my need for sour – directly to the alcohol and viola, sour mix on the cheap. Not the highest quality substitute but it makes the flavor right when in a punch or drink with a lot of ingredients. I would not recommend this for a simple cocktail such as whiskey sour.

Sour works well with the following flavors:

• Sweet fruit flavors
• Sweet berry flavors
• Vanilla
• Other citrus – lime, grapefruit etc
• Tart fruits such as cranberry
• Piquant notes such as from cayenne or toasco
• Honey
• Licorice/anise flavor such as ouzo
• Cola

A large dose of a sour mix can lighten a bitter tasting cocktail; it can also lower the sweetness in an overly sweet one.

Alcohols that go well with sour mix:

• vodka
• gin
• rum
• tequila
• whiskey
• kahlua
• amaretto
• triple sec
• Almost any liqueur that has a flavor that it mixes well with as noted above.

There’s actualy few things that sour mix won’t go well with – well maybe dairy.

Now for a recipe.

Today I introduce Pond Scum #39.  There’s a funny story behind Pond Scum. A long time ago a friend and I were pouring drinks for ourselves and my friend jokingly said that it would be funny if I started a drink series at 100 and counted down with ever variation until I reached number 1 which, of course, would have to be perfect. This of course sounded like a challenge so I created Pond Scum. There was a point where the drinks came fast and furious with dozens of versions passing in a matter of days but eventually the novelty wore off and my liver cried for respite so the numbers slowed. Pond Scum #42 was perfection – it looked like brackish water with mud in the bottom, foam on top and flecks of…something, floating inside. It tasted like the nectar of the gods. I worried that #1 had arrived too soon – but the gods of drink were kind and after drinking way too many of this recipe we awoke in the morning and had no clue what it had contained. A search of the bar showed almost every bottle we owned was empty. Alas Pond Scum #42 disappeared into the mists of time, hopefully to be resurrected after 41 more versions had passed.

Pond Scum #39:
In a glass place several ice cubes:

• Pour 1 part Kahlua to create a layer of mud and coat the ice ‘rocks’.

In a shaker with ice, combine:

• 1 part vodka
• 1/2 part blue curacao
• 3 parts sour mix.

Shake vigorously and then strain gently over the back of a spoon and down the side of the glass so as to disturb the ‘mud’ as little as possible.
The drink is somewhat sour and the Kahlua gives a coffee surprise as you reach the bottom totally transforming the aftertaste of what went before.

Ed ‘Whitey’ Walker is an knowledgeable cocktail resource with experience creating drinks for events and individuals.
A Taste For Drink teaches users to utilize a trained sense of taste to create and enjoy unique drinks

Twitter,Facebook, – service @ atastefordrink.com – ©2012 Ed Walker-A Taste For Drink, All Rights Reserved. All opinions, reviews and spirits’ coverage are the personal opinion and decision of Ed Walker.

Brandy is a bit different than the clear liquors or whiskeys we utilize for making cocktails. For one thing, it’s made from wine.

Brandy has some interesting historical tales surrounding it, especially in the Cognac region of France where some of the best is made. I find it humorous that several histories mention how distilling of the wine was done to enable it to be saved and stored more efficiently.  It makes a kind of sense, you evaporate out the water from your product and then add it back later. Who could have known that the concentrated outcome of distillation would prove to be so much better than the unrefined product?

Brandy can be made from any fruit juice, not just the wine of grapes. There are some really nice apple, blackberry, cherry, the list goes on. The American colonists were quite gung ho in fermenting every fruit juice under the sun at one point with apple and peach being some of the most popular.

The beauty of brandy is that is clearly retains the characteristics of its ingredients and like wine itself can be very complex and connoisseurs will debate their merits for hours.

Most grape wine brandies are blends with the bottlers mixing different flavors and ages to obtain a unique, superior product.

Tonight, I’m trying an E&J VS brandy.  VS? Is this a fight? Is it E&J versus Brandy? Nope, there’s a code used by brandy distillers to describe and rank their products. It is not regulated by law but is pretty consistently adopted by the industry

V.S. : very superior and V.S.P./Three Star: very superior pale
These types spend a minimum of two years aging in a cask, although the industry average is four to five years.

V.S.O.P.: very superior old pale
This rating indicates a minimum of four years of cask aging for the youngest Cognac in the blend, with the industry average being between 10 and 15 years

X.O./Luxury: extra old
This rating indicates a minimum of six years aging for the youngest cognac in the blend, with the average age running 20 years or older. This is the rating that tends to have large dollar signs on the bottle.

Grape wine based brandies are aged in wooden casks – normally oak; other forms of brandy may never feel the caress of wood.

My E&J is a nice pale brown color with a very light body. It has the characteristic alcohol bite in the scent and flavor. You can really smell the wood aroma when it’s warm.  It has a nice woody flavor with the wine taste mixed into a pleasant

There are 2 schools of drinking brandy: warm and cold.

Warm thins the alcohol and increases the amount of vapors released. There’s a definite bite when tasting.

Cold makes the drink more viscous giving it a better mouth feel and lowers the amount of vapors so there’s less bite but it’s still there. Face it, brandy is not a girlie drink.  It’s something that you picture men sitting around in darkened parlors with animal heads on the walls while cigar smoke clouds their view of each other.

You’ll find as many ways to drink brandy as you find brandy drinkers. Some prefer it straight, or neat; others on the rocks, cut with water or as part of a cocktail.

Combines well with the following liquors:
rum
grand marnier
champagne
maraschino liqueur
absinthe
bitters
wine
triple sec
creme de menthe
and many more.

Mixers such as these work well with brandy:
cola
coffee
milk or cream
lemon juice
lime juice but not as much as lemon in my opinion
grenadine

Combines well with the following flavors
nutty flavors
chocolatey flavors
sugary flavors – you’ll see a lot of drinks with brown sugar on the ingredients list or simple syrup – honey is a wonderful sugar to mix with it.
ingredients that lend a smokey or woody taste such as bourbons or whiskey blend well with brandy.
sours work well but I prefer them as an accent so as to not completely hide the brandy
almost any berry fruit juice.

This is not a definitive list but a good launching point for your experimentation.

So try some different brandies and see how they compare.

Ed ‘Whitey’ Walker is an knowledgable cocktail resource with experience creating drinks for events and individuals.
A Taste For Drink teaches users to utilize a trained sense of taste to create and enjoy unique drinks

Twitter,Facebook, – service @ atastefordrink.com – ©2012 Ed Walker-A Taste For Drink, All Rights Reserved. All opinions, reviews and spirits’ coverage are the personal opinion and decision of Ed Walker.

Howdy readers. There was a problem in the setup of the blog that caused us to bring it down and rebuild it from scratch. Due to this some of the links and tracebacks of older posts may have been killed as the folder structure on our site has changed.

All our content is still here. Sorry for any inconvenience I’ve caused but the fix should make the site work better going forward.

Hello fellow tasters, I’ve been intrigued by a series of articles floating about recently that seem to show that there will soon be a sixth taste added to our arsenal – well not exactly added, but identified as being an actual taste.

We already know about the 5 known tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami; well stand back, there appears to be room for another receptor in the taste buds – fat.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have conducted studies that identify a human receptor that can taste fat and suggest that some people may be more sensitive to the presence of fat in foods. The study is available online in the Journal of Lipid Research if you’d like some light reading to put you to sleep at night.

Read the Research here.

A widely-reported study supporting the idea of “fatty” as the sixth taste was published in March of 2010, by Russel Keast of Deakin University in Australia. And yet another came to light just this week. Both the studies predicate fatty’s status as the sixth taste on the ability of some people to correctly identify ‘fattiness’ in the absence of the telltale signs of fatty foods. The theory goes that, people can pick out fatty acids in without the queues of texture and smell giving away the presence of the fat content. This must mean that the tongue can respond to “fattiness” in a similar way, to salt or sugar.

For the new study, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis asked 21 individuals to taste different solutions with the same texture.  The subjects wore nose clips and were examining the liquid under red light to remove all normal queues. One of those solutions contained a small amount of fatty oil. The researchers asked the subjects to identify which of the solutions tasted different. This allowed them to remove the subjectivity of asking what was fatty and also track just how low a concentration of fatty acids could be detected by the tongue.

What they found was that some people were very adept at picking out the fatty solution and others were not. And many of those most able to identify “fattiness” shared high levels of the protein CD36, which suggests a genetic, biological basis for the taste sensation, rather than just a learned affinity.

So how can this help drinkers such as we? Well there are some mixtures that directly utilize fatty acids. Butter laced drinks such as Hot Buttered Rum, and Butter Beer immediately come to mind.

Butter and Oil are the two most common things that spring to mind as ‘fatty’.

Edible plant fats include peanut, soya bean, sunflower, sesame, coconut and olive oils, and cocoa butter so consider extracts of these and alcohols flavored with these natural ingredients.

Experiment with some drinks. Maybe for oil you wouldn’t want to use something like vegetable cooking oil but look into oils extracted from plants such as those above. I can see oils and other fatty liquids being used to create thicker, more cloying liquids that will coat the mouth and hold more subtle flavors on the tongue for a longer period.

Here’s a couple recipes with fatty ingredients to try out to see how your taste buds react to their sixth taste center.

Hot Buttered Rum
In an Irish Coffee mug

• 1 small slice soft butter
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• optional spices to taste: ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, allspice
• vanilla extract
• 2 oz dark rum
• hot water to fill the glass

Muddle everything except the rum and water in the glass until it is well combined. Add the rum and then the water.

Butter Beer (it’s not just for Wizards anymore)
A version of Buttered Beere from ‘The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin’ published in London in 1588:

• 1500 ml (3 bottles) of good quality ale
• 1/4 tsp ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 200g (7 ounces – almost a cup) natural brown sugar
• 5 egg yolks (yolks only are needed)
• 100g (3.5 ounces – about 3/4 stick) unsalted butter (diced)

Another old recipe for Buttered Beer, published by Robert May in 1664 A.D.:

• 1 bottle of good quality ale (500ml – about 16 ounces)
• 1 stick of liquorish root
• 1/4 tsp anise seeds
• 1 egg yolk (just the yolk beaten)
• 20g (4 teaspoons) unsalted butter
• 30g (6 teaspoons) natural brown sugar

Now if you dont like beer or want to share it with your kids who love Harry Potter, you can take just the butter and brown sugar from Mr. May’s recipe, toss in the 1/2 tsp of nutmeg from the first recipe and cream (muddle) them with 1/4 a cup of heavy cream. Then add a bottle of cream soda – if you’re feeling really decadent, top it with whipped cream.

Remember the technique when examining these drinks: look, smell, taste, aftertaste, notate, compare

Taste thoroughly, drink deeply and enjoy. Cheers!

Twitter,Facebook, – service @ atastefordrink.com – ©2012 Ed Walker-A Taste For Drink, All Rights Reserved. All opinions, reviews and spirits’ coverage are the personal opinion and decision of Ed Walker.