Item: Whisk(e)y » Scotch blended whisky

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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Tuxedo Cocktail

I’ve learnt about Tuxedo cocktail from David Wondrich’s Esquire Drink Database. So I thought that it’s made exclusively with sherry. Once enjoying Tuxedo with genever and dry sherry, I started to search for more information about this cocktail. To my shame, it appears that Tuxedo was a well-known and popular cocktail in the first half of 20th century.
The oldest source I could find, Harry Johnson’s «New And Improved Bartendes’ Manual» described Tuxedo as a cocktail with French vermouth, not sherry.

Later sources, «The Savoy Cocktail Book» and «Approved Cocktails, authorized by UK bartenders guild» also mentioned Tuxedo with vermouth. Moreover, «The Savoy Cocktail Book» contains two Tuxedo versions.

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Borden Chase

I’m continuing with my Scotch whisky experiments. Now I’m about to learn Borden Chase, one more cocktail based on wonderful combination of Italian vermouth and Scotch whisky.

This cocktail should be called Rob Roy variation but if it were not for pastis. With pastis and orange bitters, this cocktail turns to something unique. Yes, there are Rob Roy Holiday Style and Bobby Burns with lightly anise-flavoured Drambuie and Benedictine, respectively. And there is almost identical Robert Burns Cocktail. But at first I’ve known it as Borden Chase at David Wondrich’s Esquire drinks database.

Both Drambuie and Benedictine work perfectly with whisky so I thought that pastis’ strong anise note could be nice addition to Scotch whisky flavour.

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Woodward

I have to admit that I count grapefruit juice as a perfect mixer. Despite it’s not as popular as lime juice, grapefruit juice brings richer flavour, fresher fragrance and unique bitter and tart aftertaste.

I prefer pink grapefruits because I think they give more constant taste than white ones.  Pink grapefruit juice combines perfectly with gin, vodka and tequila. But does it work with scotch?

Recently I’ve found simple cocktail recipe at CocktailDB in which blended scotch mixes with grapefruit juice and dry vermouth. It’s called Woodward, and I was going to learn how it works.

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Olga Cocktail

My wife is definitely not an imbiber, nevertheless she always supports me in my daily efforts of mixing, shaking, stirring, tasting, macerating, blending, buying and drinking, drinking, drinking. That’s why I’m always ready to do something when she asks me to «pour her something tasty». Usually a dram of Laphroiag 10 yo or fresh grapefruit juice with Campari are enough but sometimes she wants something special.

So one day she asked me to mix scotch with apple juice. You think that’s so simple. I thought too, and I was wrong.

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Penicillin

As I previously said, I love whisky very much. I prefer it to all other alcohols when I want something to drink straight.

Also I’m keen on modern cocktail recipes with whisky – blended as well as single malt. Sometimes they look very complex and require expensive or handmade ingredients but it just increases my desire to make them.

Lately I take my time to look for new recipes with whisky, and Penicillin by Sam Ross became the first one I was interested in.

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