Ramos Gin Fizz

When considering recipes for any drink, the question to ask is, "What are the issues?" The issues with a Ramos Gin Fizz are many, starting with what to call it.

The Ramos Gin Fizz was originally called a New Orleans Fizz; it pops up early on as such. The drink also became known as a Ramos Gin Fizz later on, in deference to its inventor. There's no question that Henry Ramos worked at Meyer's restaurant in New Orleans, and there's no question, unlike with many other eponymous drinks, who the real inventor of this one was.
Jerry Thomas's 1887 guide, which mentions six gin fizzes, is of little help. There is in it a gin fiz recipe, but ironically, the 1887 edition of the guide precedes the invention of the New Orleans Fizz by a year, and three years after the death of Thomas.

Among noted present-day mixologists, you can't find Ramos Gin Fizz in Ted Haigh's Cocktail database; Ted is the ultra-traditionalist, and the drink goes by the earlier name there. But note Chuck Taggart has no problem labelling the drink the Ramos Gin Fizz. And their recipes are different too---slightly, but in critical ways.

Ted wants you to double up on the lemon juice; Chuck wants the lemon and lime to be present in equal measure. Ted calls a half-ounce of cream optional; Chuck calls out two ounces of it. Chuck wants you to shake the drink for over a minute; Ted doesn't specify.

There's also an option often found in bars to use powdered egg instead of egg white. But what makes a fizz a fizz is not an egg white; what makes for a fizz is sugar and lemon juice.

Overall, de gustibus non disputandum est. I like the Ramos without cream, and I wouldn't think of mixing it without egg white, and I too would double up on the lemon juice. In short, I'd follow Ted's New Orleans Fizz recipe to the letter, without the cream. But Chuck's recipe is certainly just as valid as Ted's, and tilted toward a mid-century modern moment, when cream found more favor in drinks than it does today.

Honestini

Explaining a lot is this NYT travel article on New York (read: Manhattan) bars that "put the right prefix on the -tini."

Picture your basic barely thirtysomething Madison Avenue account rep for some beverage giant. They go out to a bar after work and ...

"Here, they take your cellphone number and call you when they’re ready."

No, they don't have that kind of a place much in Madison or Baton Rouge. But they make all kinds of silly demands on customers in NYC, and the account rep thinks, "Wow, in this cocktail crazy land, I can say anything and it will work..."

No, you can't. But they do anyway, over and over and over. And there are hundreds of obliging media and bloggers ready to defend the cuketini for a free bottle, or ready to denounce it to demonstrate their integrity.

The truth is that there has never been a better time for new drinks than now; but there has also never been a worse time for new drinks than now. Our only suggestion is not to insist on either Old Skool or flavortini approach, but to try, try, try, and give honest evaluations. Unlike those folk in New York City, you do have to sleep at night, ultimately.

For Old School bars in NYC that put you through hell anyway, click the link and scroll to the bottom.

Alaska Cocktail

This is a long and highly errant way to go to get to Alaska, but you may nonetheless feel good about the path.

When we want to experiment with spirits, the word cocktail makes us delighted. Origin of this fancy word is not clear, but there are a number of legends associated with it. the most common story is that of a widow of an American revolutionary officer in the war of American independence BETSY FLANAGAN who stole neighbour's chicken and decorated the glasses in the bar with cockstail feathers and thus it is called "coquetel". The very first book on cocktails was written by Jerry Thomsan in 1860, who invented Martinez or dry martini and tom and jerry.

I'm not sure that you can garble English much more efficiently. But at the end comes the payoff, the Alaska Cocktail, which may have a better pedigree than you might imagine:

Alaska Cocktail

45 ml. Gin

22 ml. yellow chartreuse

several dashes orange bitter

Method- Mix all ingredients with cracked ice in a shaker or blender. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Again, English is suspect. For clues as to how much fluid 45 and 22 ml. might be, refer to the far sturdier cocktail db for their Alaska Cocktail. (It's 1 1/2 oz and 3/4 oz.) The Alaska Cocktail is actually a very good summer drink.

Thanks to Chander for the reminder.

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.

The French 75

It looks like lemonade, so you can sip it in front of your husband without much notice. It consists of simple things including gin, which is a part of all households all the time, and champagne, which should be but is not. There may be some of the latter pumped and rubbercorked in just the right quantities in your fridge right now. Or there might even be a gloriously unopened bottle you received as part of the Nationwide Re-gifting Program.

As usual, the CocktailDB has the best recipe:

French 75

1 oz fresh lemon juice (3 cl, 1/4 gills)
2 tsp sugar, stir (1 cl, 1/16 gills)
2 oz gin (6 cl, 1/2 gills)
Fill with ice, Champagne
Add lemon wedge, cherry, orange slice
Serve with straws
Serve in a tall glass (14.0 oz)

What was the name of that cocktail again, and why does it sound so sexy?

A French 75 (the Soixante Quinze) was a big artillery piece from WWI. One of the earliest print references to the drink is from 1927:

“Here’s How”, Judge Jnr, 1927

This drink is really what won the War for the Allies:

* 2 jiggers Gordon water;
* 1 part lemon juice;
* a spoonful of powdered sugar;
* cracked ice.
* Fill up the rest of a tall glass with champagne!
* (If you use club soda instead of champagne, you have a Tom Collins.)

And you probably have lots of club soda left from New Years Eve too. But try it with champagne first. It will keep the embers glowing.