Item: Rum » Rum (aged)

The Reverb Crash

Funny that the first Tiki drink I write about is not of those famous drinks such as Mai Tai or Zombie. There is more fun because my Tiki season has started when summer comes to the end. Anyway, I’m drinking Tiki cocktails from time to time during last three years but get only just ready for writing about it.

My choice was a bit spontaneous. I was in mood for something exotic when buying two big pink grapefruits in a local store. Juiced, they’ve provided me with a 0.5L bottle of fresh grapefruit juice, and that was a reason for making grapefruit inspired Tiki drink.

So I’ve switched over to The Reverb Crash, a relatively new Tiki cocktail in which grapefruit juice works with passion fruit syrup and rum.

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Alizé Daiquiri

Do you love classic Daiquiri? If you ask me, I’ll answer that I didn’t understand it until I’ve got used to mix there aged Cuban rums only. Cocktails with lime and white rum make me sick, to be honest. Too acid and plain for my taste. A few years later Moscow stores offered too little rum and there were mainly cheap white rums: Cuban pair Varadero and Havana Club and Puerto Rican Bacardi, of course. Later the situation has improved a lot but since those times I dislike «ron blanco».

So now I’m used to take medium-bodied aged Cuban rums when I need to mix Daiquiri. Maybe that’s wrong but the cocktail benefits from strong and distinct rum flavour. Also I’m choosing aged rums when I want to make some fruit twists on classic Daiquiri. And this time I’ve used it in my passion fruit inspired cocktail.

Here I’ve used Alizé Gold Passion, a modern liqueur based on Cognac and passion fruit. With Cuban rum, it creates wonderful tropical aroma – fruity, spicy and exotic.

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Old Fashioned. The story continues

For me, Old Fashioned cocktail is a pure inspiration. I love it made in traditional way with bourbon and also I love to tweak a bit the cocktail’s classic recipe.

My first post is dedicated to normal Old Fashioned. Current one is about all Old Fashioned variations I love so much.

In my work I applied two basic methods: a) to change a spirit and b) to replace (partially) syrup with a liqueur. Additionally I was trying to combine various bitters and extracts.

Another method  is to mix two or more brown spirits. In my opinion that’s a tricky way and today I feel I’m not ready to go in for these experiments. Now I just adopt another bloggers’ practices, and my latest effort was theSpeakista’s cocktail called Final Five. That’s not Old Fashioned but I dare suppose it a cocktail in Old Fashioned style. In any case, I’ve made two cocktail in similar manner and wrote about it below.

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D’Artagnan’s Wish

As I wrote earlier, I love to spend my time lurking on cocktail blogs and sipping a nice drink. One day I was reading Kaiser Penguin blog, one of my favourite blogs, thanks and respect to Rick , the author (Sorry if I’m wrong…).

There is a nice recipe called “D’Artagnan’s Wish”.

I’ve red it carefully and said – “Wow! I have all ingredients for it, and it looks very-very-very interesting. I should make it immediately!” Then I went and made it.

After first sip my reaction was “Oh dear Lord! Man, bookmark this page quickly! No, no, don’t bookmark, just save it as PDF!!!”

It was a great experience, a moment of pleasure. And I later I felt that I have to write about it.

The essence of this cocktail is a combination of very different flavours of Demerara rum and heavy peated and smoked Islay single malt whisky. They look like different but their combination set me thinking about their similarity.

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