Cocktail Recipe Series #1: Batched Mojitos

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This post is going to have a slightly different format than I intend for this series to generally. This particular recipe has eluded me for so long that I honestly wouldn’t want to bore you with every variant I came up with. There were just too many, and all to replicate a simple cocktail. Oftentimes something that’s really hard to make one of is really easy to batch, like a Ramos Gin Fizz. This one, however, is the reverse.

My white whale of batched drinks is, undoubtedly, the mojito. It took me several dozen attempts over the course of two years to get one I feel confident serving. It’s still not 100% where I want it to be, but it’s close. Damn close. A-couple-tweaks-and-I’m-there close.

One of the reasons I set out to do batching in the first place is carbonation. It’s something classic cocktails often deal with, but rarely well. There’s almost nothing better than the first sip of a freshly made mojito on a hot summer day. But there’s not much worse (in cocktail terms, at least) than the limp, listless, watered down dregs left at the bottom after the carbonation is gone. Especially if the bartender used sugar instead of simple. It’s like drinking a grossly tangy simple syrup down there.

So my first goal was to make a mojito that would taste good all the way down, mainly by carbonating it enough that even at the bottom, it’d still effervesce.

Also bartenders often bitch about customers ordering mojitos because they’re time-consuming. I hate this. If you work at a craft cocktail bar, your job is to make cocktails. Not the ones that are easy to make. People can make themselves a perfectly fine gin and tonic at home. It’s your job to give them a delicious drink they couldn’t make at home. Most people don’t have a muddler or know how to use it. They don’t stock mint and soda regularly. (Yes dear reader, I know you do, and it’s why we’re besties.) When I worked at a bar, I never once complained when someone ordered a laborious drink. I did complain when someone asked for a chocolate martini, though only to the other bartenders, but that’s because it offended me as a bartender, a drinker, and a human being, not because it was a pain in the dick to make.

When designing a bar menu, you have to be careful about balance. Too many laborious drinks on the menu at once and you’re going to have long lines and unhappy patrons. And unhappy bartenders because they’re losing out on tips as customers sit, upset, with no drink in hand.

So my second order of business was to put together a mojito that took markedly less labor (no muddling or shaking) that I could serve by the keg at beer speed. Combine that with tasting good all the way through and I think you’ve got a winner.

I also wanted to make a few variants because it’s a cocktail that pairs well with basically all seasonal fruit. In my recent travels to rum-producing parts of the world, I’ve had it with various tropical fruits, and here in the great white north I’ve had it with strawberries, blackberries, etc. They’ve all been delicious.

The batched mojito turned out to be a taller order than I anticipated. The first problem came with the mint. How to get fresh mint into a batched cocktail?

Attempt number 1 was with mint simple syrup. I’ve made syrups with other herbs with great effect. Thyme, rosemary, etc. (Rosemary Tom Collins that way is delicious.) Mint, unfortunately, takes on an unpleasant cooked flavor.

The obvious solution is mint extract. There are several types though. There are peppermint extracts, and spearmint extracts. There are alcohol-based ones, oil based, and pure mint oils that I believe are steam extracted or cold-pressed. Seriously, there are probably a dozen different products that are basically mint in a bottle.

The alcohol ones work right out of the bottle, but they don’t give you the flavor of fresh mint. It’s more of a mint candy flavor. It’s hard to describe the difference, but try them side by side and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not quite right. The taste wasn’t up to par.

The oil-based ones are similar, plus they have the undesired effect of adding oil to your glass. They’re usually extracted in something like sunflower oil that doesn’t stay in suspension even briefly. I could fix that (more on that in a second) but the taste wasn’t much better than the alcohol-based extracts.

The closest thing I could find is 100% pure spearmint oil. Do yourself a favor, wait until you don’t mind tasting nothing but mint for an hour before putting a drop of that stuff on your tongue. That stuff is the real deal. Imagine compressing all of the flavor from an entire sprig of mint into one drop. Then make it oil so it sticks to your tongue like minty-fresh napalm. On the plus side, squeeze one drop of that on your tongue and simple syrup tastes just like a mojito!

My first tests with that, which is what I settled on, involved using a few drops of the oil because I’d been previously using extracts and didn’t realize the difference in potency. Three drops in a whole drink was a mint bomb. Two drops still tasted like chewing on mint leaves.

I think this is similar to how bitters get significantly more potent when allowed to sit, and I think it’s for the same reason. Bitters are also made of flavoring oils, suspended in alcohol. I believe that both when placed into a cocktail full of water come out of suspension and after a day, float to the top where they’re volatilized and you smell them much more.

Anyway if your mojito is sitting around for a day or more, one drop, it turns out, is about the right amount. It’s not quite as minty as some mojitos you order, but it’s really damn close. If you’re batching in volume, I think something like 6 drops per 5 drinks is more like the perfect amount. I still have to play with this to dial it in.

Because mint oil is, well, oil, when it’s in a mojito, which is basically aqueous, it tends to separate. Leave it in a clear bottle for a couple days and you’ll see a thin film form at the top.

Fixing that is easy. Just do what soda makers do: use gum Arabic. The nice thing about gum Arabic is that if you use too much, nothing happens. If I’m doing these one at a time, I just toss a pinch in with the liquid ingredients and shake the crap out of it. If I’m doing a batch, I use a weight equal to that of the oil and take a little more care to hydrate and disperse.

Next up, lime juice. Dave Arnold’s lime acid was where I started. This is pretty good, but not fresh lime. Clarified lime juice is a little better, but still not fresh lime juice. It’s also a pain to make and goes bad quickly. I’ve mentioned it a couple times before, but I developed my fake lime juice (name still to be determined) which is the best solution of all. It tastes closer to fresh lime than clarified lime juice, I think. But really you can use any alternative. I’ll hopefully be selling mine soon.

Then there was the ratio. Here’s where I finally dialed it in:

Matt’s Batched Mojito

2 oz. white rum (Don Q Cristal and Flor de Cana Extra Dry are my favorites)

1 oz. simple syrup

.75 oz. clarified lime juice or other substitute

1 drop (roughly 0.5 grams) 100% pure mint oil

0.5 gram gum Arabic

Mix everything but the gum Arabic together. When doing a big batch, I like to use a 7 gallon food-safe bucket (tall sides prevent splashing) and a stainless steel paint mixer that has only been used for beverages attached to a cordless drill. For small batches, just use a blender or a hand mixer.

With your mixing device running, sprinkle in the gum Arabic. I like to sprinkle it out of a fine mesh shaker. Gum Arabic hydrates under shear, so you want it to get blended in nicely. Just dump it in willy-nilly and you’ll get a big, snotty-looking clump.

Chill and carbonate to 30 psi at 32 degrees. Serve on the rocks. Smack a fresh mint sprig between your hands, basically clapping with it, and use that for garnish.

Fruit Variant

To make any fruit variant, do the following.

Clarify juice using method of choice. For strawberry juice, I like agar freeze thaw.
Test sugar levels with refractometer, add sugar to 50 brix.
Substitute for simple syrup.

Another option: just buy good stuff that’s already there. I’m not opposed to using packaged products if they’re high quality. Torani’s Signature line is about 65 brix, so use 2/3 ounce of that in place of the simple syrup. They’re all natural, though they add a little bit of acid too so you want to drop your lime juice just a touch. Their white peach is very good in mojito form.

Also, you could instead do a justino with the rum. That’d probably be a great way for long term preservation.

New Series of Posts

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In an effort to both up my cocktail game, and increase my output on this blog, I’ve decided to take on a small challenge. It’s going to be difficult for me since it’s busy season at The Happy Camper, but now that I’m a bar owner, drinking is basically market research right?

The challenge: create one new production-ready cocktail every week. This is a cocktail I could serve in a bar or my camper. (The constraints of my camper are such that some cocktails don’t really work for high volume events, though some could work for low-volume.)

Sometimes I’m lucky and get one that’s ready to go on the first attempt, or as I usually exclaim when it happens, “First time prime baby!” Some cocktails go through literally dozens of iterations before they’re where I want them to be. For the latter, I’ll try to give at least some of the iterations and my notes on them here.

Where possible I’m going to get taste testers. I don’t have a lot of people turning down offers like that! But I’m going to have to maybe get some sort of formalized schedule.

Anyway, wish me luck. It’ll be an ongoing series here, so if you like it, feel free to subscribe.

Update

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Long time, no post. It’s not because I don’t love you though. Thought I’d drop a little update.

Lately the Happy Camper Bar Car is taking up a lot of my time. We are doing the cocktails for the Cleveland Flea, Sunday Market, and a couple one-off street festivals. As near as I can tell we sold at least 1,000 Mules last weekend at the Flea, and expect to do even more at a couple other events. We’ve also got a few weddings booked, and a couple events without the camper. It’s going to be a busy summer!

I’ve also got the Cocktail Calculator on its own site. After it went down (because Google shut down the service it was running on, Divshot) it was gone for a bit. I got a surprising number of Reddit messages asking where it went, so I brought it back. I’m preparing to pay a programmer to make it a lot better too with some new features. I intend to keep it free as well.

I’m working on a book on batching cocktails. It’s great because I’m writing it as I go along. I’ve already got a bit of experience doing high-volume events, and let me tell you, the price of any normal book is 1% of what it’ll save you in equipment costs, time, and anguish. Had I had the book I was writing and paid $1,000 for it, I’d have still had a good ROI. (And of course, it’ll be normal book prices.) I’ll be including a few of my best recipes.

I’m debating shopping around for a publisher. That’d give me a budget to do stunning photography, something I can’t do myself. While the book doesn’t require it, per se, it’d be helpful in some spots. Pictures of the parts of a corny keg are worth more than their thousands of words.

Lastly but not leastly, I’m also working on a store to sell some of the stuff I make for my own batched cocktails. My lemon and lime replacements, for instance. I can sell them relatively affordably and highly concentrated. I’ll probably size them for 5 gallon keg batches, though of course with a measuring cup you could use them for other batch sizes. If I succeed, the recipe for a whiskey sour will be something like add 1 bottle of fake lemon, x pounds of sugar, y gallons of water, z bottles of whiskey, shake and carbonate.

I’ve got a few other products I use on a regular basis to make good things by the gallon. Some are for batched cocktails specifically, some are just for whatever. All of them are going to go on sale. I’ll have more details soon.

So You Want To Get Into Kegging Cocktails

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Let’s say you’re a bar or a really enthusiastic home drinker and want to serve cocktails on draft. You’re wondering what it takes, money-wise, to get into the whole kegging thing. If there’s one thing I’ve gotten a lot of experience with over the last few years it’s kegging cocktails, so I thought I’d share some tips.

I’m going to recommend you don’t go the cheap route. I had initially included cheap components in my barebones carbonating cocktails post. I regret it. Every time I’ve tried to save money by buying something less than I really wanted, I ended up replacing it later, sometimes because it broke, sometimes because it sucked and I needed something better. I’ve talked to several people who’ve said the same. So here’s what I think you should get.

Necessities

Tank: $50.

Find your local gas supply store and pick up a used tank from them. They’re cheaper that way. I think I got a 10 lb. tank for $50 last time, whereas a new one is $90. If you buy from the supply store, they’ll often let you just swap tanks later for convenience, so you’ll not have to worry about getting them recertified (which you’d otherwise have to do every 5 years for about $30). You also won’t have to drop it off then come back a day or two later to pick it up, you just walk in and swap it like exchanging propane at the gas station.

They’ll be a lot cheaper to fill than at the local homebrew store (LHBS) too. Usually the LHBS is buying from the gas supplier and reselling at 2-3x the cost. (They’re also using a different method to fill the tank that is faster but fills it less, so you end up paying for CO2 you aren’t even getting!) Google for dry ice in your area, the local dry ice seller probably does tank swaps. I hear welding shops do too but have never been to one.

I’d get at least a 10 lb. tank. They’re only slightly more than a 5 lb. tank, and of course hold twice as much. For home use these last me quite awhile, however for my commercial stuff I blow through 10 lbs. for a good-sized event so I use a bigger tank.

Regulator w/cage: $85

Primary Double Gauge - CO2 Get a good dual gauge regulator. It’s like $10 or $20 more than a cheap one. If you get the cheap one, you’re going to replace it later. I promise. I got the crappy Kegco I recommended in my first post for $45 on Amazon and it was the first thing that bit the dust. (Should have known from its 3.5 star reviews.) A crappy one is also going to require a wrench to adjust, whereas a good one can be adjusted by hand.

I love the Micromatic 642, pictured here. (I’ve only used a few, but it’s the best so far.) I’ve also got a couple of the dual regulators for when I need to set two different pressures. For bar service you’re probably going to want at least two different pressures available.

Get a gauge cage (or two if you go with the dual regulator). You’re going to have your tank tip over sooner or later, I promise. This will save it from busting a gauge and pay for itself quickly. I’ve had to replace gauges, they are very fragile.

You can do a double regulator on a ten pound CO2 tank, but it’s precariously balanced when full and a serious tipping hazard. Make sure to strap the tank in place. With a 5 lb. it won’t even stand up by itself. A 20 lb. is no problem even for a dual regulator, but still can be tipped so get the cage.

Perlick Adjustable Tap/Shank ($80)

These puppies aren’t cheap but boy are they worth it. Without them you have to use line length calculators and match the length of the line to the PSI of what you want to serve. If you’re just doing beer it’s not as bad. A lot of home brewers say they just serve everything at 12 PSI. I don’t do this, even with my beer, because some beer tastes better with more carbonation than others. If you want to be able to change your pressure you either need a flow control faucet or to be constantly swapping out the line.

If you’re doing cocktails you’re doing high PSI, and they can vary a bit more widely. (1) You need to either get an adjustable faucet or be constantly changing lines. If you want to serve different drinks at different pressures, and you probably will, you’ll want these.

Gas Line

As far as I can tell, gas line is just gas line. I usually buy whatever’s cheapest and I’ve never had any problems with any of it. Just do some rough math as to how far you want to run the line, then add a few feet in for good measure and you’re done.

Beer Line

Beer line lengths are a little trickier. Use a line length calculator to figure out proper pressure. Set your Specific Gravity to 1. Set your PSI to the lowest you’d carbonate anything at, which is probably around 30. If you followed my recommendation and got flow control faucets, then make the line a bit shorter than it says.

If the number that pops out is shorter than your run, you have to use line with a higher Internal Diameter (ID). The homebrew standard is 3/16” line.

You can see on the right, using some assumptions I made, I need 26 feet of line between each keg and the tap. Or, I could just get good flow control faucets and run very little. In my camper I’m serving at 40 psi on 12 feet of line and thanks to flow control I have no foaming.

Niceties

Manifolds.

I’m not counting the price on here, because they’re only necessary if you’re distributing gas. A manifold basically lets you distribute gas (at the same pressure) from one regulator to multiple kegs. This is quite useful if you are serving more than one thing at a given pressure, as it’s far cheaper than having a separate regulator for each. A homebrewer with a keezer might want a 2-way. A bar might go way more. If, like me, you’re doing several carbonated cocktails on draft, you can probably run them all off of one regulator with a big enough manifold. (I still have 3 of this 3-way manifold in the camper though because beer comes out at lower PSI and shaken drinks at higher, often with nitrogen. I can configure my 6 taps in very many different ways as a result.) I use 6-way manifolds when carbonating because I have to do a lot of kegs at once sometimes.

I recommend getting one with check valves. I made the mistake of not having them originally, and learned the hard way that that is a great way to get liquid to back up through the gas line. Then you have to clean everything out and dry it to avoid mildew, and you also might get product from one keg going through the gas tube and into another while shaking.(2)

Also, for safety, I highly recommend getting ones with pressure relief valves. Especially if you’re doing something with some particulate matter in it, like an unfiltered beer. I don’t think there’s really much chance of one exploding, and you’ve got relief valves on your kegs and regulators, but better safe than sorry.

Stainless Ball Lock Disconnects

If you’re kegging cocktails, you’re probably using homebrew Corny kegs. The standard homebrew disconnects are made from plastic. These break. Like all the time. The last thing you want is to be changing over a keg mid-service and have your disconnect break on you.

I love my stainless disconnects. They don’t break. I stepped on a plastic one once and it broke and lodged a chunk of plastic in my shoe sole. I accidentally ran a stainless one over with my Airstream and after I dug it out of the ground it still worked.

Another advantage, if you use the Liquid Bread Carbonater, it was redesigned to not allow the ball lock disconnect to stay on, which makes it a huge pain in the dick to use. (The old red ones were not like that, the new blue ones won’t allow it. If you don’t already own the liquid bread, I highly prefer the newer stainless ones as a result, but if you’re like me you’ve probably got a few of the old ones kicking around.) A stainless disconnect will clamp on to any of them.

Also, some of the stainless ones come with an MFL connector rather than a hose barb. That’s useful if you need to use line with a larger ID than 1/4”. (Which would be rare.)

If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to drop it in the comment section. In my next post I’ll give you a great couple recipes.

Notes

1. In Liquid Intelligence, Dave Arnold recommends the pre-mix soda valves by C.M. Becker. I called them when I was building the camper and had them make me four of them. I can’t say enough good things about that company’s customer service. The owner himself got on the phone with me and made me what I needed. That kind of thing doesn’t happen much these days.

Unfortunately the quality of service is much better than the quality of the valves themselves. The shanks were a pain in the ass to install in my beer tower. They’re just a tiny amount larger than a normal beer shank, so getting them in without stripping the threads with a wrench was a bitch. The nut/hose barb at the end leaked like crazy and I had to use PTFE tape and plumber’s putty, something I’ve not experienced on the several beer shanks I’ve used. Even then it was a pain to get to seal properly.

And worse the product is unreliable. It’s made of a chintsy plastic, rather than stainless. Even if you don’t worry about plastic touching your high alcohol, high acid cocktails, they just look bad. But I’d deal with that if they worked ok.

Unfortunately they do not. They have a flow adjustment valve on the side, but it’s odd. It rotates all the way around (the Perlick only rotates maybe 180 degrees) so it’s hard to tell where you’re at, and it doesn’t seem to do much regardless. I constantly experience dripping. I can have three faucets hooked up to three kegs that have the same pressure and get a trickle out of one, a torrent out of another, and the middle one be just right.

The one that’s just right will be incredible though. You can pour a highly carbonated ginger beer out at 32 PSI and see no foam at all. When they work they do a better job of keeping the bubbles in than a Perlick, but they just aren’t reliable enough for service.

2. For instance I was once force-carbing a couple sodas. I had shut off the gas at the regulator, but left all the ports on the manifold open and vented all of the kegs. When I shook one keg, the higher pressure in it forced the soda through the gas line, through the manifold, and into another keg. Thankfully they were the same soda so the product wasn’t damaged, but it’s a bitch to disassemble your setup, disassemble the manifold, then force cleaner through the whole thing.

Also for my launch party I had left the gas on in the camper as we drove to the event. Big mistake! The shaking caused by bumps in the road flooded all of my gas lines with a mix of six different cocktails/mixers/beers. Gross! I didn’t realize what had happened until days later, and the manifold and gas lines were so gross I just threw them out.

Modern Sour Mix

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When I say sour mix, what do you think of? Probably this stuff:

If you’re a fan of real, “craft” cocktails, the very thought of it probably makes you throw up in your mouth a little. You probably remember way too many trashy margaritas from the ‘90s or whiskey sours made from it at a wedding.

Not only does it taste disgusting, it’s made of god-knows-what. Here’s the ingredients list for this brand: Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Lemon Juice from Concentrate, Citric Acid, Sodium Benzoate, Sodium Citrate, Sodium Metabisulfite, Sorbitan Monostearate, Ester Gum, Natural Flavors, Brominated Vegetable Oil, FD&C Yellow 5.

That’s pretty typical of these things, they’re a cocktail of chemicals with maybe a little oxidized lemon juice mixed in for good measure.

There are, however, reasons for their ubiquity in low-rent bars. These things wouldn’t have been in every bar for three decades if there wasn’t something useful about them right? So let’s break it down into a pro’s and cons list.

Pros:

Cheaper than fresh citrus.
Faster (no squeezing) and lower labor, and therefore even more cheaper.
Shelf-stable so no waste, and therefore even more cheaperer.
Shelf-stability lets you use it in batched drinks (think the frozen margaritas of the 90’s) so even lower labor and even more cheaperest! (See a pattern here, other than my bad grammar?)
There’s also quality control; whereas fresh citrus can taste very different from batch to batch, this stuff always tastes the same.

Cons:

tastes like your dog drank a bottle of Lemon Pledge and then vomited into your drink.
Is made of chemicals probably somewhere between smoking and asbestos on the carcinogen scale.

Now I’m not really expressing anything controversial here when I say that I believe the first con alone is a deal breaker. (The second one also would be for me personally, but your mileage may vary on the artificial flavors/preservatives.) When craft cocktails came back into circulation nigh on a decade ago, the industry mantra became “fresh-squeezed juices” and for good reason. The alternative was garbage. It actually became a religion to the point where if you mention doing anything sour without fresh citrus, craft cocktail aficionados everywhere will tell you that you’re an asshole unworthy of even your own mother’s love.

But, if there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s a no-sacred-cows philosophy. I think we as bartenders and drink makers should do things because they’re the best way to serve our customers, not because they’re “the way it’s always been done”.

Let’s say someone invented shelf-stable lemon juice. Perhaps that someone built a machine that presses and packages lemons in a vacuum, and uses some mechanical process to make the juice such that it won’t degrade. There are no artificial flavors or preservatives. Just shelf-stable lemon juice that tastes indistinguishable from the stuff you’d squeeze. And because it’s processed by machine rather than by hand, and shipped without all the added weight of the peel, and quality control ensures consistency, and it can be pressed when lemons are in season and thus cheapest, its cost is below that of fresh citrus. Wouldn’t you use that?

I have not developed such a device, but I have developed a lemon juice replacement. I made a lime one too. Both are all natural and do not contain any sweetener. They’re made from mostly citrus byproducts. Oh and probably the biggest benefit: they don’t have any solids in them, so they’re already clarified and excellent for carbonated drinks. Have you ever tasted clarified fruit juice? It’s nowhere near as good as the real thing. Mine is actually closer. Here’s a picture of the Chartruth, from Booker and Dax (which I’ve had at that bar, by the way) using my fake lime.

In cocktail use my fake juices routinely tie or even beat real citrus juice in blind taste tests. Seriously, I’ve done several. For those to whom “fresh-squeezed juice” isn’t dogma (i.e. 98% of Americans) they find it equally good. Remember, there are parts of real citrus that taste bad, and you get those when juicing too.

You probably don’t believe me. I don’t blame you. I went into this experiment thinking it might be impossible. I went down to Tales of the Cocktail and there were guys there doing a primitive version of what I’m doing, with a method I had thought of before but not tested, and decided they were onto something but still weren’t quite there. They inspired me to keep moving it forward, and keep testing, but even still I did so thinking “this will probably never work”.

And then I found myself reading old soda manuals from 100 years ago. And some new ones too. I found myself reading papers on citrus juice and preservation. There’s been a decent amount of study done on the topic. Gotta love science! And finally, after dozens of iterations, and tasting more Tom Collinses and Margaritas than I thought possible, I’ve come up with something I’m proud of.

Mine is not nearly as economical as the old school sour mix. Nothing’s cheaper than corn syrup and chemicals. It is much cheaper than actual lemon juice though, but cost was the least of my motivations. I don’t often find myself worrying about my citrus budget.

I developed it to make awesome batched drinks that can last long enough to make them economical. I wanted to be able to make a keg full of whiskey sour for service at a multi-day event or bar. I wanted to make a force-carbonated Tom Collins or Margarita on draft. I succeeded. I served a carbonated serrano margarita with the lime version of it at my launch party and it was the first cocktail to go.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with it yet. There’s a very good chance I’ll make a product containing it. There’s a very good chance I’ll just share the recipe here. There’s some chance I’ll just sell it directly as a pre-packaged “sour mix” though I’d like to come up with a different term given the connotation that has.

If you have any suggestions, other than “you’re an asshole for trying to replace citrus and I hope you die in a fire!”, please comment them here.

Zooming In On Ingredients

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Yesterday I was at the Diageo World Class seminar in Cleveland. A question popped up that really illuminated to me why the modern cocktail movement is basically playing in a different league than the old-school, classic cocktailers.

The question was something to the effect of “How many ingredients should be in a great cocktail.” The available answers were 3-4, 5-6, or as many as it takes. There was a handy-dandy live poll to see what people said and probably over 100 people in attendance.

From a classic perspective, the first two answers (which about 80% of people chose) would seem on the surface to make sense. A Manhattan is a fantastic cocktail, and its whiskey, bitters, and vermouth. Three ingredients right? A lot of people like to argue that if a cocktail has 7+ ingredients it’s a jumbled mess, and I think we’ve all had a bartender whose eagerness exceeds his skill level serve us a kitchen sink cocktail that was horrendous once or twice.

But let’s unpack that Manhattan for a second. First off, you have aromatic bitters. Let’s go with good old Angostura. What’s in Angostura? We don’t know exactly, but we know it’s a maceration of several different herbs in alcohol. This recipe from Serious Eats which attempts to replicate it contains 11 flavors (herbs, peels, raisin, sugar) in addition to whatever is in the alcohol. Ango is basically a blend of several different tinctures.

Then we have our sweet vermouth. Sweet vermouth is a lot like bitters. Several different herbs are added to wine, along with caramel for coloring and sweetness. Here’s a recipe from Serious Eats for those inclined to make their own. I count 12 separate ingredients, though perhaps we should ignore water as its already the predominate ingredient in every cocktail. And there are a couple overlapping with the bitters.

But you get my point. Before we’ve even added the rye, we’re probably close to 20 ingredients. And each ingredient itself is probably made of multiple different volatile organic compounds, not to mention all of the flavors in the rye that get through distilling or come from the wood after, but we’ll stay zoomed out a little bit for clarity here.

I’ve recently gotten into making tinctures a little bit. It’s a science I’d like to get down more. Unfortunately, in most states it’s hard to get really high proof neutral alcohol. Everclear has some bad flavors associated with it that make it unsuitable for really anything I think. I got a couple bottles of Technical Reserve, which is basically exactly what I am looking for but expensive and unavailable in most states, from New York to tide me over for a bit and I’ve been playing around with them. I’ll be delving more into it when I get a stable source of low cost, neutral, high proof spirits, which I think will be very soon.

Cider

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I’ve recently gotten into fermenting cider. I’ve always loved cider, and always loved fermenting things. But for some reason I’ve always looked at hard cider as sort of a gimmicky drink for girls who don’t like beer. And then I tried a few good ones that changed my mind. We’ve got a great local cider maker (cidery?) called Griffin Ciderworks that does a few exceptional ones.

So I fermented about 12 gallons of the stuff, bought from a local orchard, in my homemade fermenter (i.e. a trashcan with an airlock). It didn’t end up airtight, even after copious amounts of shrink wrap, but the cider was pasteurized in advance (no preservatives) and I’d been careful about sanitation and pitched it with a solid amount of yeast so it all went well. It started at almost 16 brix and after a week it was at about 9% alcohol. I racked it from one container to the next and then used Pectinex Ultra-SPL to clarify it. From everything I’ve read about normal pectinase enzymes it’s supposed to take days or even a week or two to clarify, but with Pectinex all the solids had settled out in a day. I was able to rack it off with ease.

The favor of unaltered cider is interesting. There’s none of the sugar left, as the yeast consumes it all, so it’s tart. It’s not your normal apple flavor though, which is probably why they so often add malic acid to them.

While it’s drinkable straight, it’s not what I’d call delicious. It needs something. It needs a little sugar and maybe a little brightness.

As a result I’m playing around with different recipes. I’m toying with various acids (malic, lactic, etc.) and sugars. I’m toying with force carbonating. I also want to make a cocktail for my family party this weekend, probably a cranberry gin justino with fresh cranberry, cider, and brown sugar.

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So far after extensive testing I’ve come to the following conclusions.

Some sort of sugar is useful. All of it was fermented out and the result, while palatable, needs a little bit of a bass note. Options I’ve tried so far are cane sugar, brown sugar, honey, and concentrated apple cider (the frozen stuff you get at the store) which I think is my preference so far.
Some sort of acid is also quite delicious. I am guessing given the relatively high starting sugar content of the cider I purchased it had little acidity. This might not be true using different apples. So far I like malic, but once I get the level dialed in (and 1g/200ml is too high but better than none at all) I’ll play around with different options more.

Cocktail Projects

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I’ve been up to very much cocktail related recently. A few highlights.

1. Aged Eggnog. Last year I made Ruhlman’s Aged Eggnog and it was amazing. Everyone got knock-down drunk because it doesn’t taste boozy but it’s freaking 25% alcohol.

So this year of course I had to go over the top. I made 12 fucking gallons of it. Not kidding. That’s 60 liquor bottles worth. No joke. Some of it is for sale to various people I know, but most of it’s just for me.

For most of it I split the whiskey between Old Grand-dad and Old Overholt. I love me some rye, and I feel like the spice goes well with the cream. Old Grand-dad is a rye heavy bourbon, so it comes out pretty tasty.

For a couple gallons of it a friend and I decided to go high class. We got the milk and eggs from local farms, Elijah Craig 12 and Rittenhouse for the whiskey, Plantation Grand Reserva for the rum, and a decent cognac whose name eludes me now. (In my defense, I have been drinking.) I mostly wanted to see what the difference was, other than price, in the final product .

2. Batching app. I had made a batching app for my launch party. You can find it at: http://production.cocktailcalc.divshot.io/

Right now it’s a simple web app. It’ll calculate dilution for you if needed, using the formulas in Liquid Intelligence, and make it easy to scale up. I used that for all of the cocktails at the party and it saved me a shit ton of time.

I have lots of upgrades, and I think divshot will be gone soon so I’ll have to move it to another server. But feel free to use while it’s around.

3. Apple Hard Cider/Brandy. My friend and I decided to make a shit ton of hard cider, so I built a 32 gallon primary fermentor. Basically it’s a food-grade plastic trash can with an airlock built in and shrink-wrapped to be air-tight.

I want to turn it into brandy when it’s done, and thankfully I know a guy who is actually licensed to do so. He has a micro-distillery and some awesome equipment. The goal is to do that, then barrel age it. I’ll probably toss a few gallons of it into a keg and carbonate to make some hard cider, and then get a beer gun and load up bottles because why the hell not?

I’ll probably buy some various barrel staves and barrels for aging the brandy. I have a theory that barrel staves can work just as well as actual bottles, for far less money, you just have to take the stave out and then let the liquor continue to age. I think that people try using them for speed and it never comes out quite right, because other things happen during aging than just extracting wood flavor. I’ll give my theory a test.

4. Something I can’t talk about yet. Let’s just say, it’s a project that requires government licensing and as such I’ll be lucky if I can talk about it in 6 months to a year. But happy.

Happy Camper Launch Party

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Two weeks ago I did the launch party for the Happy Camper Bar Car. My new business, the Happy Camper is basically a food truck for booze built into a 1972 Airstream.

Backstory

Two years ago, growing dissatisfied with my day job, I was considering starting a food truck with my brother. My real dream was to open a bar, but it seemed so mysterious and expensive at the time. I’d never worked at one. They needed all sorts of fancy equipment. My brother has been a chef for a long time so I wasn’t worried about the cost or knowledge involved in doing a food truck, but a bar? No way.

We never ended up doing it though because my brother was going to drop out of school to work on it, and I didn’t want that. I ended up taking a weeknight job at a bar, for just long enough that I felt comfortable owning one. Not that it’s rocket surgery, but just working at one for let’s say 25 to 50 shifts will save you a lot of headache. You’ll make a lot fewer mistakes than you would if you went cowboy and did it yourself, and someone will pay you for the education. It’s a no-brainer and I’m glad I did it.

I felt ready to start a bar. So I started looking at real estate. I found a spot I loved. It was owned by the county and they wanted the building do prop up the convention center next door. The door to my bar would be directly across from the door of the convention center, which meant a hundred thousand people a year would stumble out of a miserable work event looking for a drink and mine would be the only one in sight.

It was stripped down to brick and concrete. It had these beautiful cathedral ceilings because the building is built on a hill and it was at the bottom, with a gorgeous window above the high door. The perfect speakeasy. All it needed was a bar and some Edison bulbs hanging from a pipe.

The one small wrinkle was that they wanted to sell the building to make a hotel. They’ve been trying to make a deal for that for years and failing, but they didn’t want to do a lease longer than a year just in case. Which made it hard for me to justify putting much money into it, even though I think that hotel is about as likely to occur as a zombie outbreak.

But mysteriously, they were also getting a renovation budget from the county to turn it into usable space. They seemed like they might be amenable to letting me using said budget to build my bar instead of putting in generic carpet and white drop panel ceilings like the old UPS store next to it.

I was feeling optimistic. And that’s when they found asbestos. The cost for them to remove it would have been more than I paid in rent for six years, so understandably they decided to just wait for the zombie apocalypse. So the one spot I wanted was gone.

I could have looked for another. My city’s downtown has plenty of vacancy. But that’s when I saw a couple people online doing food trucks for booze.

Sure, I’d joked about that several times. But the inability to get a liquor license seemed like a deal breaker. Except, of course, if you do private events. Then you don’t even need one. What a great loophole.

It goes really well with what I love doing. I really like batching cocktails. There are so many advantages to them over made to order ones. You have more control over dilution and chilling when you can divorce the two. You can ensure a level of consistency far beyond even the best bartenders. You can make things bubbly. You can serve people the highest quality cocktails at beer speed. And most importantly, you can do it without ever washing dishes. The weight of the water it would require to be stirring and shaking on the Airstream wouldn’t fit on the axle.

So when I found the loophole that made it possible, I was talking to my good friend Heather and she wanted to jump into it with me. We went for it. We went from talking about it to owning a stripped-bare Airstream in under a month, and having a party three months later. Do that with a bar!

The Launch Party

Fast forward to four months later. The trials and tribulations involved in getting the Airstream ready would make a blog post, or maybe a book but we were past it and it was time for the launch party. The girl doing the interior woodwork was coming down to the wire. The party was on Sunday and I got a bar top installed Saturday afternoon. Ever built out a tap system in a couple hours? It ain’t easy! I knew I’d have to run to the homebrew store for something, and they were only open until 5, so I got started ASAP.

Thankfully I’d done everything I could beforehand. I’d cut all of the beverage tubing and drilled holes in the side of the fridge to run it through. I’d made sure I could fit six kegs and two gas tanks (one CO2, one nitro) in the left-hand side of the fridge. I’d installed the shanks and valves, including four custom post-mix soda valves on beer-tower sized soda shanks made for me by CM Becker. All we had to do was screw the towers into place, run the lines, and connect the liquid disconnects.

It went off without too much trouble. I turned out to be one tap handle shy because we never had time to make our custom ones (next time) but that was all I really needed from the homebrew store. I built the system and ran each drink through its line.

On the far left was beer on draft. I’d simply gone to a growler fill and filled my 3 gallon Corny Keg and recarbonated. The next drink was one I made up featuring Rittenhouse Rye, lemon, apple cider, Aperol, and mulled simple syrup.

We had my homemade ginger beer on draft for mule variants, including my brown butter dark and stormy. We had Jack Rudy tonic force-carbonated in another keg.

The last two were cocktails. One is Chartreuse and root beer. It was an idea I’d gotten from Chris at A Bar Above (I think) and have been playing with for a long time. For this version, which is by far the best, by the way, I used:

1.5 oz. Chartreuse

1 oz. Monin Rootbeer Syrup

5 oz. Water

1 dash orange bitters

I scaled that up to a few gallons using my handy dandy cocktail calculator then force carbonated at 32 PSI at about 28F. Do yourself a favor and let this one rest a day. I made some to test and tried it day of, and it tasted like it needed more orange bitters and Chartreuse. Then I tossed the rest back in my fridge and forgot about it until Heather came over a couple days later. I tasted it again then and it was magically the greatest drink of all time.

The last tap was my carbonated serrano margarita. Maybe I’ll explain the recipe for that one some time in the future. It’s a blog post in and of itself.

Here’s the full menu:

Lessons:

#1. Detach gas lines from kegs before driving down the road. Turns out liquid can back up into the gas lines, and from there up into your distributors and regulator from the sloshing. I spent the first half-hour trying to unjam the kegs as a result. One of them got halfway empty and never flowed again.

#2. Keep your tap lines accessible. Ours are hidden behind the bar and wrapped in insulation. It’s a bitch to get to them and if something jams, I’m screwed. (I don’t think I need glycol, the stuff never sits around enough to get cold, but if it starts foaming due to temp I might build an air-cooled system. I don’t anticipate having to do so though, insulation should be good enough.)

#3. Move the CO2 tanks outside of the refrigerator. I had not accounted for the fact that I’d have extra kegs that needed to stay cold, so room in there was at a premium. I’m going to drill holes in the right for two lines, and set up quick disconnects in the fridge so I can easily swap out distributors. That’ll make the whole thing much more organized and easy to troubleshoot if something goes wrong.

#4. Test the Airstream with a non-contact tester before every event. This didn’t happen at the party but later at my house, thankfully. My house is really old and my garage has a GFCI in it into which I plug the camper. You’d think that’d make it safe, and it probably would if whatever idiot wired it decades ago hadn’t had current coming out of the grounding wire. An Airstream isn’t grounded because it sits on big rubber tires. And the shell is highly conductive. So it zapped me. You just never know what you’re going to be plugging into, and if an electrical source is wired wrong a customer could get seriously injured!

#5. People really love home-made ginger beer. It was like half the drinks that walked out. I’ll account for that at future events. I was a little worried that my menu was a little too hardcore for casual cocktail fans. Not so. I think I sold one drink with tonic in it the whole time. I’ll probably repurpose the remaining case of Jack Rudy for a special drink, like an Elderflower G&T on draft, and use one more cocktail and one fewer mixer generally.

#6. I should have spent more time calculating the PSI needed before I ordered the parts. The lines were 12’ long, plus there’s a 2 foot rise, and that’s too much resistance for 3/16” ID line. I had to pump it out at about 35-40 PSI. Good thing I never had to use my personal remanufactured ball lock keg, it vents around there. (Note to self, fix that.) Our new ones don’t even seem to vent at 55, which is the highest I’ve taken them, but still. I couldn’t figure out why the beer wasn’t flowing well when the event started, turns out I was just way off on that.

The shaken drink on draft relies on a lot of pressure forcing it through the stout faucet. At home on my personal equipment, 30 PSI gets a great drink. That’s about 22 PSI more than I’d serve a carbonated drink at. I couldn’t even get the Fireside up near that, so it ended up with a texture I wasn’t 100% happy with. Still tasted good but wasn’t perfect. So I’m switching to 1/4” ID line. That’ll let me drop the pressure way down to about 8.

Anyway, I would say overall the party was a success. The drinks were really good. When the taps jammed I spent a half hour fixing them, but we got through it. I then spent two hours wanting to go behind a shed and cry! But I muscled through that too. And then it was over.

I’m pretty optimistic about our venture. We’ve now cleared most of the major hurdles that were worrying me. I’ve got another venture I’m working on to go right alongside it too. And I’m going to greatly improve the batching app. And I’m even working on a book about batching drinks too. So stay tuned.

Cocktail Competition

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Saturday I entered my first cocktail competition. It was for the USBG Bartender’s Battle at Crop Bistro. It was part of Cleveland Cocktail Week.

I found out about it in early August when I joined the USBG. The rules required you to use a product from one of seven Ohio distilleries. It was supposed to be a brunch cocktail and couldn’t be a Bloody Mary, which would be too obvious anyway. It’s fall, and my favorite thing about Ohio this time of year is the stone fruit. Our peaches, plums and apples are second to none, and for some reason a lot of Ohioans don’t even know they grow here! I was told I’d have to make 120 samples for attendees (2 ounces each) plus four full eight ounce drinks for the judges, so 272 ounces in total.

I also knew I wanted to go bubbly. When I think brunch cocktails my first thought is a mimosa. My second thought is a Bellini. There’s just something so refreshing about bubbly drinks in the afternoon that I had to try it.

I also knew I wanted to batch the drink. I mean, I pretty much always want to batch the drink. Now that I have the technology to do shaken drinks in a keg and figured out how to replace fresh citrus (more on those later) batching is just better almost 100% of the time. And I thought my competitors might be hassled trying to shake and strain what amounted to 34 drinks in a short period of time if we got an early rush.

So I worked out a recipe using clarified plum juice, Dave Arnold’s coriander soda (modified to use Asian chilis), plum vinegar, and OYO White Rye. It was probably the best cocktail I’d ever come up with. Coriander soda (recipe in Liquid Intelligence) has a taste not too dissimilar to ginger beer. It was sort of an Asian/Midwestern fusion and it was fucking fantastic, and I’ll probably serve a version of it at my launch party.

The rules said you’d get the liquor the morning of the event. I wasn’t sure which way to go with that for a carbonated drink. Option #1 was to try to get the liquor a day or more early. I could batch out and carbonate the rest of the drink at my leisure, get the liquor, add it, and then re-carbonate.

Option #2 was to do some dry ice magic at the event venue. I could batch everything but the liquor in a keg, and take some dry ice up with me. When I showed up to the event, I could toss the liquor into a bowl, use dry ice to chill it rapidly (which would also lightly carbonate) then finish force carbonating in the keg. Of course I’d have to bring the keg, the tank and regulator, etc.

Option #3 was to just serve it the way people normally serve Moscow Mules. I’d batch up the soda, then still chill and lightly carbonate the liquor with dry ice to as cold as I could. Add the liquor to the serving glass and top with soda.

At the last moment I saw you could submit a second recipe. So I decided to go with another fall staple, peaches. I made up a recipe off the top of my head and balanced it with my cocktail calculus spreadsheet. It was basically a Moscow Mule, but fall style. I was using Tom Foolery’s bourbon with a modified ginger beer, force carbonated. I hadn’t even tried it and just hoped they’d pick the coriander plum drink.

I submitted the cocktails on 8/31. I was supposed to hear back from them on 9/6. I really needed the two weeks between the announcement and the event because either way I was clarifying a lot of stone fruit. (Turns out a bushel gets you about 5 liters.) I had to buy an entire bushel, remove the stones, juice, treat with pectin, set with agar, then allow to thaw. Not to mention the end of peach season was rapidly approaching, so if that drink got picked I wasn’t totally sure there’d be any left at the orchard.

It came and went with nothing. I gave it a few days to account for bartender time, and when I didn’t hear anything just assumed I hadn’t been chosen. Finally on the 11th I got the notice that I’d been accepted, though the bad news was it was the peach cocktail that had only ever existed in spreadsheet form!

So I scrambled the next day to the orchard and bought what turned out to be the last bushel of peaches they had. Had I gotten the notice one day later, I might have had to use grocery store peaches (gross). But I was immediately in a scramble to get a gallon of clarified peach juice.

For the submission I had taken my standard ginger beer recipe (stolen from Jeffrey Morgenthaler) and modified it to use brown sugar simple instead of plain, clarified peach juice instead of water, and plum vinegar instead of lemon. I had to adjust all of the levels to account for the fact that clarified peach juice has some acid (about .6%, according to my titration test) and a lot of sugar. When I put it in the refractometer, the peach juice turned out to be 21.6% sugar! No wonder those things are so damn tasty.

In fact, clarified peach juice oddly is half of the final acidity and about 100% of the sugar you get from the lemon and simple in the normal recipe. So you could really just add half of the lemon and your ginger and be good to go. But I ended up adjusting the acidity a little up with the plum vinegar and a little citric acid so I could use some simple because I wanted to get that brown sugar taste in. I felt like it would go really well with the other flavors.

Anyway, thanks to my handy dandy refractometer, acid titration test kit, and a spreadsheet that uses Dave Arnold’s Cocktail Calculus section in Liquid Intelligence, plus lots of taste testing, I was able to get the drink exactly where I wanted it. It ended up being pretty much what I had submitted, with the one modification that I didn’t like using just plum vinegar. There was just too much acetic acid flavor.

So the process was as follows:

Saturday: Run to the orchard and buy the last of the peaches.

Sunday: Have my friends help me cut juice them. Pre-treat with Pectinex Ultra-SPL. (See the clarification section of Liquid Intelligence if you want the details). Set some of it with agar to test out freeze-thaw.

Monday: Thaw the batch set with agar. It works beautifully. Carbonates with very low foam. Promptly gel and freeze the rest of the juice in a giant hotel pan.

Tuesday: Thaw the rest of the peaches. Buy the ginger. Make a few liters brown sugar simple syrup. And a liter of 6% citric acid solution.

Wednesday: Enjoy one day of relaxing/housecleaning/actually getting shit done for my day job.

Thursday: Juice ginger. Why haven’t I bought a masticating juicer yet? Centrifugal gets the job done but it’s low yield and sucks to do. Prep everything. Sanitize and clean kegs and a bunch of 5 gallon buckets. Buy lots of canned peaches, cut them up, and put them in a keg to carbonate for garnish.

Friday: Put the whole thing together in a 5 gallon bucket. Find out only afterward that I bought the wrong vinegar and it’s extremely salty. It said it was ume vinegar but was actually umeboshi vinegar. Ume is a Japanese plum. Umeboshi is a salted, preserved ume. Batch is ruined. Fuuuuuuck.

I’ve used most of the clarified peach juice, and there won’t be enough left to get the flavor I want, so now I have to go buy more liquor, rapid-infuse it with lots of thawed frozen peaches (the orchard is done selling those now) in an ISI whip, 400ml at a time, and spend the next 12 hours doing that. Oh, have to go buy and juice 7 more lbs of ginger, make more brown sugar simple and citric acid solution, etc.

Also am hosting an event in the evening that I can’t skip, so I take a 3 hour detour in the middle of the mess. My house looks like a terrorist attacked a peach cannery.

Come back and try kegging the drink with the hope of serving with a pigtail. Nope, way too foamy. Thought that might happen. I’ll just pour the drinks. Switch to 2L bottles and the carbonater. I have four of them but can only find three, and I need to do 6 bottles.

Saturday: Head up to the event. Door isn’t open for like a half hour past when it was supposed to be. The good news is, all I have to do at the venue is put the peaches on a stick and smile. I would have even prepped the garnish but I thought the peaches might fall off the toothpicks when I tried to get them out of the keg. Steal some basic supplies from the restaurant’s kitchen and get ‘er done. Throw a few peaches in the ISI with a hit of CO2 so they’re extra fizzy for the judges.

The setup turns out to be we each get a table. I pull my cooler up between mine and the neighbor’s. I grab a bunch of ice from the ice maker, start filling up sample cups, pouring, and topping. I quickly realize the brunch isn’t as crowded as I thought (no 120 people) so they’re going to sit there and get diluted and go flat. I stop pouring, chalk them up as display models, and just pour individual samples whenever someone comes by. Carbonated drinks cannot be left to sit on ice for long.

I find out that the first round is judged by the attendees. I was kind of banking on that. Had it been the four judges, I’d have had to work an amaro in or something.

They gave us some larger cups for if people want more than a sample. I start noticing people coming back to my line over and over. I look around and that doesn’t seem to be happening to anyone else. Some people request extra carbonated peaches because, well, they’re delightful. Everyone’s telling me how great my drink is, except one of the four judges who doesn’t like that I used canned peaches. That’s fucking crazy. (I even heard about it later from another judge.) Canned peaches are the most delicious thing in the universe, and fresh peaches often don’t have enough sweetness to balance out the acidic taste of carbonation. They’re not as bad as a strawberry (which just tastes rancid) but they’re not as good fizzy as canned.

The girl running the show is going around asking with a notepad and I see lots of people pointing to me. My drink, it turns out, is an overwhelming favorite. Me and a girl from one of the better bars in Cleveland go on to round 2, the Iron Chef-style competition.

For round two the judges give us $20 and 20 minutes to go shopping at West Side Market. I had brought my ISI whip in case I had gotten to round two, figuring I’d either do a rapid infusion with it, or a carbonated drink, or just a really cool foam garnish. I look at the supplies available before I head to the market. I have to use a wheat whiskey I’d never tasted, but it’s wheat whiskey and the local distillery that made it makes good products, so I feel confident. I see some very fall-ish looking items for use. Cinnamon and various other spices, some apple cider, etc. I decide to try to find some medjool dates to rapid infuse the whiskey with. One girl mentions they have a tea shop over there, and I think of some oolong.

The market is soooo crowded but 20 minutes is way more than enough time. I run to the produce section. Nobody there has dates so I pick up some figs as a fallback. That also sounds good right? I grab an apple for garnish too. Then I run to the main part of the market and find the tea store. Their tea is $30 an ounce, and they can’t go lower than 1/2 on their scale. I don’t have $15 to spare so I explain the competition and ask if they can help a brother out. They can and I get a little tea for $1.

I find a spice shop that also has dried fruit and score, they have medjool dates! I get $5 worth. Between the the dates, figs, apple, and tea I’ve got $8 left, and I’m feeling like more tea. I run back to the girl and ask her if I can get a little more for $8. She hooks me up. I get out of the market with a few minutes to spare but neither my opponent nor the judge are anywhere to be found. Was I supposed to meet back at the restaurant? Shit. I cross the road, then see them back at the market. Oh well.

So then we get back and I’ve got 15 minutes to make the cocktail. I get a saucepan from the kitchen and use it to smash some cinnamon. I chop the dates and toss them with the cinnamon and oolong into the ISI, fill it full of whiskey, and start the rapid infusion. I prep the glasses and the apple wedge garnish, dig up the cider for acid, prep my stirring tin, grab some simple to get that at the ready. I’m good to go.

Toward the end of the time I start wondering if my drink is going to have enough sourness. There’s a little acid in the cider, thanks to the cranberry, but not much. I see a lemon but nothing with which to squeeze it and no open containers to squeeze it into. I’m seriously debating hand squeezing it into some sample cups, one ounce at a time, but I notice my opponent has no acid either and I’m already pressed for time. I’m not sure one ounce of lemon (and good luck wringing more than that out of a small lemon with your hands) is going to help much.

When the timer gets to 4 minutes, I end the rapid infusion. I only got about 8 minutes in but that’s picked up some flavor, especially from the oolong. I pour all the whiskey into the tin (we had to make some samples for the judges as well) and taste. It’s good. I add a little cider. Still not enough acid. I add a bunch more. Better. Still wish I had juiced the lemon, but hey, it’s something.

I serve it on the rocks with an apple wedge and a cinnamon stick. I think it’s good, and with some acid could have been really good. One of the judges tells me the same thing a day later. I taste the opponent’s. I like it though I have no idea what’s in it. It’s a bit too hot and needs acid, but mine does too so I don’t feel as confident as I’d like to.

The judging comes. We hold hands while they read the verdict. They do their best Iron Chef judge impressions, and say it was a coin toss. Turns out I won. A little lemon juice and I might have expected that but my cocktail was imperfect too. I can see why it might have been a hard decision.

Later that night I go to the bar where my competitor works. Coincidentally, not to rub it in, though of course I plan to ask her how Cleveland’s second best bartender is doing. She isn’t there but I still get a couple shots of Fernet on the house. I like these USBG people.