Pomegranate & Ginger Mimosa Punch.

Pomegranate & Ginger Mimosa

50ml Kings Ginger liqueur
50ml Grenadine
Top with equal parts orange juice and Prosecco

Add a couple of scoops of ice, some orange slices and other fruit. Serve with flutes or wine glasses.

Jump on Board Old Mr Boston's Sidecar

The first drink that I want to share with you from “Old Mr Boston’s Official Bartender’s Guide” is a simple forgotten twist on a Sidecar. I just can’t understand how this spin-off of such a well-renowned cocktail has sadly grown out of favour, whilst its founding father relentlessly appears on thousands of cocktail menus around the world. The better known cocktail Between the Sheets, also known as a Maiden’s Prayer, is still popular today and is perhaps the closest cocktail to the Boston Sidecar. The only main difference is swapping out the lemon juice for lime juice and adding a dash of Demerara sugar syrup which complements the use of dark spirits, especially the rum. For any rum enthusiast this is a must try, a phrase, I admit, I use sparingly. However, this drink offers, for me, something different from your typical rum cocktail. It’s simple balance of rum, brandy and triple sec in equal measures is elegantly light, fresh and crisp. What more could you ask for?


Boston Sidecar:

20ml Slightly Aged Rum (10 Cane Rum)
20ml Brandy
20ml Triple Sec
12.5ml Lime
10ml Demerara Sugar Syrup

Shake well and serve in a chilled coupette with an orange twists.
If you are feeling adventurous we have been playing about with flaming zests of fruits over a glass to create an aroma, This would be perfect if can find a nice ripe to slightly over rip lime and flamed the zest of it over the drink and rimming the glass with it.

Christmas Jumpers!

For all those planning on heading down to The Corpse & Cocktail tonight, please take heed of this gentleman above. He is sporting a magnificent specimen of the kind of attire we would like to see a-plenty of tonight. We bartenders will certainly be abiding by our self-imposed dress code and we expect the patrons of our establishment to follow suit. Remember, you're only silly if you look different...

Here are a couple of the recipes we'll be warming you up with tonight:

Brandy Alexander
Okay, so we'll be serving this chilled, so not exactly warming you up with this one - anyway, your jumper should keep you warm enough.

50ml Martell VSOP

12.5ml White Creme de Cacao

12.5ml Brown Creme de Cacao

25ml half n' half (milk + cream)

Shake ingredients with ice and fine strain into a chilled coupette.  Sprinkle with freshly-grated nutmeg.

Washington Hot Toddy

So-called due to this recipe being found in the Washington Post.  Sorry the background story isn't more exciting.  Not sure exactly why Mike was reading the Washington Post.  I never asked.

40ml Goslings Black Seal Rum

15ml King's Ginger liqueur

60ml hot water

Build in a teacup or heat-proof glass (with handle...!).  Stir and garnish with a lemon peel.

Hopefully see a good few of you down tonight.  Merry Christmas from the Corpse & Cocktail.

Mulled Wine...The Swedish Way.

Surprisingly, the few shifts I have done at 99 recently have seen a higher-than-expected number of patrons asking for a warm festive drink.  As an experiment, a small batch of mulled wine was hand-crafted in the kitchen.  It proceeded to sell very well leading us to devise a warm festive menu for this Sunday’s Corpse & Cocktail.

All over the world, different cultures have some sort of variation of mulled wine.  The Germans have glühwein, the Croats kuhano vino  and the Swedish, Glögg.  It is Glögg that we will be serving on the menu this Sunday. Like many of these drinks, there is no set recipe and you really can experiment with a variety of fruits, spices and alcohol to obtain wonderful results. Use the following recipe as a guide rather than one to follow to the letter:

Glögg

(taken from “Swedish Recipes Old and New” by Lesley Jacobs Solmonson, 1955)

15 Blanched Almonds

0.5 Cup Raisins

4 Cups Red Wine (Australian Shiraz recommended)

4 Cardamom Pods

3 Whole Cloves

1.5 inch stick Cinnamon

0.25 Cup mix of Dried Apricots and Candied Orange Peel (see below)

0.75 Cup Brown Sugar (Demerara Sugar)

Peel of one-quarter Orange

1 Cup Martell VSOP

Add the almonds and raisins to the wine. Break open the cardamom pods.  Add cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, raisins, candied orange peels, and dried apricots to a cheesecloth bag, tie closed, and add to the wine.

In a separate bowl, cover orange peel with the sugar.

Let all of the above stand overnight.

The next day: Heat wine mixture slowly to simmering.  Do not allow to boil. Stir in sugar and orange peels until sugar is dissolved.  Remove from heat.  Stir in brandy.  Remove cheesecloth bag.

Ignite liquid, allowing it to burn for a 1 or 2 seconds, then extinguish (you do not want to burn off the alcohol completely) by covering the pot.

Remove orange peels if Glӧgg is going to sit for more than a few hours. Serve warm with a few raisins and almonds in the bottom of the glass.

Thanks to 12bottlebar.com for this.  God Jul (Merry Christmas).

The Next Best Thing to Time Traveling?

To continue the theme of the77th Anniversary of Repeal Day last Sunday I wanted to introduce a series of blogs that will be posted here over the next couple of months.
I was recently given, as a present from my Mum, a cocktail book that she had found in my Granddad’s basement in Philadelphia. It was a little tattered red book with a faded title. After closer inspection it turned out to be an official bartenders guide first published in 1935.
This book is a snippet of the history of cocktails offering an enormous range of drinks and it even has a section dedicated to being “the perfect host” suggesting classics like the Manhattan or an Old Fashioned, this is a very intriguing book. So, for obvious reasons, I showed it to a good friend of mine, James Mackay (who was behind the bar in 99 last Sunday), and we decided to do what every bartender would do - try a good few of the cocktails from the book made the way it was intended. With the recipes and measurements differing greatly to how a modern day bartender would serve them today, we felt it was our only option. Together we are going to visit bars across Aberdeen in search for the right ingredients in order to recreate these early recipes.
We will blog our experiences and share the best drinks that we come across so you can try them yourselves.

A Short History Lesson.

In 1919, after a temperance movement built up over decades by various Christian and women's movements, the 18th Amendment to the US Federal Constitution was passed.  The National Prohibition Act (also known as the Volstead Act or The Noble Experiment) began a year later in 1920.  

And so the USA began thirteen years as a "dry" nation...well almost, if it weren't for the glorious dawn of the age of speakeasies (or blind pigs).  These mob-run underground drinking saloons were purveyors of the finest bootleg liquor around.  "Milk" companies were set up to truck booze from state to state (who's going to question The White Stuff?) and wineries would barrel grape juice with a warning label stating "contents will ferment if stored in a warm place".

Mobsters such as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano made fortunes supplying speakeasies (Wiki makes a very good point when it states that mobsters were easily identifiable by their fashionable silk suits, expensive jewellery and...wait for it...their guns.  Really??!  Thanks Wikipedia.).

As many began to question the benefit (if any) of prohibition, repeal organisations gathered momentum.  On the 22nd March 1933, President Franklyn Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act allowing the sale of wine and 3.2% beer.  Although 1933 is widely quoted as the year of the repeal, Mississippi became the final state to repeal in 1966.  During the ratification of the repeal legislation, Congress devolved a certain amount of authority to each state allowing the likes of the hard-line Southern states to maintain some form of prohibition.

So, there you have it.  A very short history lesson on US Prohibition.  The following cocktail is an example of a prohibition-era drink.  Only in real desperate times would someone mix gin and whisky...

Barbary Coast

20ml Plymouth gin

20ml Cutty Sark blended whisky

20ml Creme de Cacao

20ml double cream

Method: Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Enjoy...!


Come to 99 Bar & Kitchen this Sunday and celebrate the 77th Anniversary of the Repeal of Prohibition.