The Guinness Shandy and the Half and Half

To satisfy the insatiable Margaret et al., here’s not a bad way to start off. Recipes courtesy TheBar.com.

Mostly a Shandy is an ale with ginger ale or lemon-lime soda. But there’s no special reason to restrict it to ale.

Guinness Shandy
• .75 pint Guinness
• .25 pint lemon-lime soda

If you want to stick to your basic Shandy, and feel bound to Eire tomorrow or even tonight, mix half and half Harp and ginger ale.

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A black and tan also goes by the name Half and Half, when the components are all Irish.

Half & Half

• .5 pint Harp
• .5 pint Guinness
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Add Harp to pint glass
Add Guinness by pouring it over the back of a spoon

We find that you can now make great ones at home, thanks to the widget. We’d add: a big spoon, maybe a wooden spoon, one that best fits to the contours of your glass.

More stuff Americans hate

Following proudly in the footsteps of my mentor and roll model Punxsutawney Phil, Your Doctor once again is making his presence known.

Initially let me say, drinking is getting constantly more exciting and if you’ve been considering taking it on as a hobby, the market is primed. There is an exquisite new Elderflower liqueur named St. Germain from the classy, cocktail-historic folks at Jacquin et Cie. From the freethinking mind of friend and co-conspirator Ted Breaux, there is a– no kidding – tobacco liqueur; Perique, flavored with the so-named leaf variety peculiar to Louisiana. Fee Brothers, the scrappy bitters magnates of Rochester, New York, have placed a tiny selection of their Old Fashion Aromatic Bitters on the market, in a special bottling of the cinnamony stuff substantially aged in charred oak Bourbon casks. I’ll review these products soon enough, but they all deserve mention here and now because they are excellent, all of them, simply excellent.

Now, though, at Joe Mailander’s request, I want to talk about genever: Dutch gin. Hey, it wasn’t a hard sell. I was always a proud iconoclast. When other kids were reading Superman, I was dreaming about Captain Marvel…the similar hero DC sued out of existence in the 1950s. When all of the cocktail elite were tooling around in Rolls Royces, I wanted a Bentley. And when I read about a kind of gin that Americans generally hated for just being what it was…well!

I won’t belabor you with but so much history of genever but what follows are the basics necessary to grasp this really interesting spirit. It was the first gin. It was made in pot stills, a type of distillation largely reserved for brown spirits in the current day, and proudly touted by Cognacs and Armagnacs to flash a little bibulous bling.

Pot stills are what one pictures when one pictures one’s own mental image of a still. Even if the image in your head is of a moonshiner, it is still a pot still you are picturing.

For just a sec, let’s quickly go over the TYPES of gin that there are (or were.) Genever, Old Tom, Plymouth, London Dry, and the new Hendricks model – which would include Aviation Gin. So here is the 30-second history: 1st gin: genever. Low temperature, inefficient distillation that emphasized both the juniper and the maltiness. (Think of a kind of a wine character. Think of a Martini with quite a bit of vermouth.) Add a certain vague smokiness. Think 3 parts gin, 1 part blended Scotch, 1 part vermouth. This is a horrible way to characterize the original genever but, like Latin, we must start somewhere because nobody we know speaks it anymore. So far we are residing in the late 17th century heading into the 1700s. Cut to 1832 and a clever guy named Coffey developed the eponymously named Coffey Still AKA the continuous column rectifying still. You’d lynch me if I made the slightest attempt to explain this still to you, but suffice to say, all the vodka you heathens love (gin too) is made today in such stills. It’s very efficient and it produces extremely clean spirits.

Too clean.

As of the 1830s, the drinking public was used to the slightly sweet, malty-charactered genever (the name of which was a bowdlerization of the French word for juniper) but as of the Coffey still, they could instantly have what we now know as London Dry Gin…and that was just all too strange for them. So then, as now, what do you, Mr. Liquor Producer, do to dumb down the new spirit? Of course. You sweeten it. Thus was born Old Tom Gin. Eventually the public trended into the flavor and feel of dry London gin. The Plymouth differentiation was a difference in technique that originally created a powerful, differently flavored gin. It is now certainly a London Dry. It is still excellent. The newest gin type is what I call the Hendricks model. London Dry gin is supposed to emphasize the juniper as gin lovers and haters all expect it to do, but though they have skated on this point so far, Hendricks does NOT emphasize juniper. Nor does the excellent Aviation Gin made by my buddy Ryan Magarian. Hendricks has a rose petal frontal approach, which itself is astounding since thanks to 20th century “advances” all early hand lotions were scented with rose and most alcohols flavored with rose taste, in a Pavlovian sense, soapy or like lotion. Hendricks (and Aviation – which is superbly flavored with lavender) really create a new and inspired gin category. Oh, before vodka made its late American entry in the early 20th century, the gin guys did do flavored gins. Orange gin. Lemon gin, Mint gin. Sound familiar? They weren’t all that good – much like many of their vodka counterparts, so I am ignoring them.

But in the early days of the cocktail, early to mid 1800s, genever is all there was.

Modern genever is divided into two types: jonge (young) and oulde (I’m sure you can figure it out). Most are in the jonge category. These, these days, are clean, crisp, and quite junipery. They are both dry and weirdly richer than London Dry and they can be as abrupt in a cocktail as Rhum Agricole in a Mai Tai. The oulde is quite mild and a little caramelly – both in flavor and color. It is very pleasant simply sipped neat or on ice. If you’ve ever tried Linie Aquavit, it has a similar character, minus the caraway. If you’ve ever had marc, that sort of flavor, but not as sweet, not as thick. Both varieties are lovely, really. You may have seen them (especially the jonge) in the past: a tall smokestack-like terra cotta bottle. That would be the Bols product, and they’ve been doing it since the beginning, which is to say, hundreds of years.

What of the original genever? Is it still the same as in those pre-column still days? Well, yes and no. If you want to taste gin as gin was originally, the product (and it is Bols) is now called Corenwyn. I asked quite specifically this question of Piet Schreuders, the longtime master distiller for Bols-Netherlands. I proposed this theory of genever and he utterly agreed. So…up for something different? Genever. As far as Corenwyn (which, Bols allows, is made generically in the Netherlands as “korenwyn”) is concerned, if any of you ever entertained asking Dr.Cocktail what his favorite spirit is, that is the answer; the original gin: Corenwyn.

Some Stout-Hearted Drinks

For more information on stout, check out this blog carnival on the subject!

Herein, we’re going to go over a few cocktails you can make with stout.

But first up: we don’t ordinarily think of the ordinary Black and Tan, of course, as a cocktail. We think of it as a beer. We think of it as two beers, in fact. But by most definitions, a Black and Tan is indeed a cocktail.

If some of of think we can’t call a Black and Tan a cocktail, most of us are not used to pouring one at home. But whether or not we agree that the Black and Tan is a cocktail, thanks to Guinness rocket widget technology, we can safely pour one at home. To pour a really good one at home, use a pub spoon. Certainly, the Guinness cans and now bottles give good foam. If your goal is to replicate the pub taste of a Black and Tan at home, a drink involving the rocket widget is your very best bet.

But it’s not your only bet. Most think of a Black and Tan as Guinness and Bass. But a Black and Tan can be any stout and any ale. And happily, the experimentation is as good as the discovery of what kind of mashup works best for you.

Turning to the Doctor’s CocktailDB, as we always do, because it’s the best…

Here is a drink called a Black Velvet: fill a big glass halfway with stout, and top it off with champagne. It’s also called a Champagne Velvet. If you do this just once, you’ll wonder why it never occured to you before to do so. Now when you crave stout and your husband craves champagne, you can stay happily wed. It doesn’t hurt to use a champagne flute for this drink also, but you’re going to get so much foam—these two drinks make for an overflow reading of about 9.1 on the seismograph, the highest ever be recorded—you’d better be careful in those cramped confines.

Also, you can combine stout and champagne into a coffee cup. Result? A Velvet Cup. Sometimes you can get away with this one at the computer, and your spouse will think it’s just a cup of coffee. Um, with a peculiar crema.

Oooo, did you ever think of this good use of good stout? A Dog’s Nose is a glass of stout preceded by a jigger of gin. Dust the foam with nutmeg if your stout benefits from a touch of holiday cheer.

Now, a Stout Sangaree is a true cocktail. You serve it in a double rocks glass—a glass that’s shorter than your pint, the kind of glass you’d serve a big tropical tiki drink in. Build 2 oz. of soda and dissolve half a teaspoon of sugar in the soda. Fill the glass with stout and ice, and sprinkle nutmeg, again to taste. When might you favor such a drink? Well, try the Carribean, where Sangarees have been enjoyed since at least 1774.

It’s a pleasure to be part of the first beer blog carnival! Even if you don’t like mixing your stout with anything, we hope you’ll take a chance on one of the cocktails you can concoct with stout.