The Bloodhound Cocktail

One more article about summer cocktail with berries I failed to post at the right time because of two-month abnormally heavy heat in Moscow.

The Bloodhound Cocktail isn’t modern recipe. I saw it on Noilly Prat promo website and later found it in two books I have available.

The first book was Frank Meier’s «The Artistry Of Mixing Drinks» (1936). The second one was Mardee Haidin Regan’s «The Bartender’s Best Friend» (2003). And I found another third version at the CocktailDB. All these recipes differ from each other so it was interesting to me to find my own perfect variant.

The idea of The Bloodhound Cocktail is very simple: gin as a base spirit, sweet and dry vermouths as sweetener and mixer and fresh strawberry as an unique feature for this standard set. Modern source (Mardee Haidin Regan) talks about strawberry liqueur as a substitute for fresh berries.

It seems very interesting to mix together strawberry and vermouths. Strawberry has unique flavour where sweetness is there along with sourness and bitternes from its seeds with some fresh floral notes on the background. There are many opportunities to create something special combining it with herbal-flavoured vermouths as well as gins.

About proportions. Frank Meier’s recipe supposed 6/1/1. Mardee Haidin Regan called for 8/2/2/1 (the last digit is for liqueur). I doubted that these small amounts of vermouths can compete with massive quantity of strong and robust gin. For me, it looks like luxury Dry Martini version. So I was going to make CocktailDB variant with 2/1/1 proportion.

The Bloodhound Cocktail

40 ml gin (Bombay Sapphire),
20 ml dry vermouth (Noilly Prat Original Dry),
20 ml sweet vermouth (Cinzano Rosso),
2 huge strawberries.

Muddle berries in shaker, add ice and spirits, shake. Serve in cocktail glass.

It starts with awesome nose where gin, strawberry and dry vermouth put together in exceptional combination. The sip begins with vermouths and gin composition which later make way for piquant and bittersweet strawberry. The first aftertaste was from sweet vermouth but without usual heavy wine note. The next one was the wave of light dryness from Noilly Prat. And in the finish gin with strawberry hints came to the front.

Nice cocktail, and with these proportions it works for vermouths discovering its complex aroma.

Later I decided to try modern version with liqueur because I think that stirring is a better method to make drinks when using gin and vermouth.

Here I use slightly changed proportion – 3/2/2/1.

The Bloodhound Cocktail #2

45 ml gin (Bombay Sapphire),
22 ml dry vermouth (Noilly Prat Original Dry),
22 ml sweet vermouth (Cinzano Rosso),
15 ml strawberry liqueur (Marie Brizard Strawberry).

Stir with ice and serve in cocktail glass.

Oops… That’s definitely different thing.

Bitter nose of gin and dry vermouth comes before sweet winy sip without any strawberry hints. Backed by vermouths’ botanicals, gin flavour cleanses the palate with robust noble dryness and eventually disappears in the long and rich winy-and-herbal vermouths’ aftertastes with subtle bitter hints.

This version looks like very good one because of its perfect balance between spiciness, sweetness and dryness. But later I found that it slightly lacks of depth in taste and is definitely not as fresh as first version.

Here is the place where gin and dry vermouth reign whereas sweet vermouth and especially strawberry liqueur look like minor things.

The Bloodhound Cocktail’s modern version seems like another Perfect Martini variant, good mainstream drink without any original features.