A few suggestions for seasonally spooky drinks for this weekend:
Pumpkin Spice Old Fashioned
A flexible syrup to be used in place of simple syrup in your Autumn drinks. Try it in drinks based on dark spirits such as the Old Fashioned, Sazerac or Sidecar:
Add 165g brown sugar and 200g granulated sugar to 350ml of water and stir over a medium heat to dissolve.
Add 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves and 85g pumpkin puree and whisk well.
Simmer for eight minutes, stirring occasionally.
Strain through a muslin cloth, add 1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract once cool and keep refrigerated for up to three weeks.
Corpse Reviver #2
Appropriately named, but delicious all year round:
Shake 25ml gin, 25ml Lillet Blanc, 25ml Cointreau and 25ml fresh lemon juice with cubed ice for twenty seconds.
Strain into a chilled absinthe-rinsed coupe.
This time of year we like to top this with a thick green absinthe foam, whipped up strong enough to suspend a few spooky jelly sweets.
Nosferatini (Tony Conigliaro, Drink Factory)
Just the right side of disturbing, this is the drink Dracula would make himself after a long night out feeding:
Make a ‘blood solution’ by crushing an iron tablet and adding three teaspoons of red food colouring and one teaspoon of caster sugar. Stir well.
Add 50ml London dry gin and 15ml dry vermouth and stir with ice.
Strain into a chilled martini glass and add two drops of the blood solution.
“I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?” —”Hills Like White Elephants,” Men Without Women, 1927
Just two days after National Daiquiri Day we celebrate the birthday of Ernest Hemingway. Surely that can’t be a coincidence? Today, Hemingway’s legacy owes almost as much to his reputation as a heavy drinker as it does to his short, sharp writing style which has been credited with reinventing American literature, although the two were always heavily intertwined. When I first read The Sun Also Rises I tabbed every page where a character took a drink and ran out of Post It notes before I was halfway through.
“In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes has a Jack Rose while waiting in vain for Brett. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry has a couple of “cool and clean” Martinis; they made him “feel civilized.” and in For Whom the Bell Tolls, it is the ritual of dripped absinthe that gives Robert Jordan temporary solace from the rigours of war: “One cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month.… of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.”” – Philip Greene, To Have and Have Another
As for the heavy drinking reputation, most of it comes from the man himself and his proud tales of record-breaking sessions at La Florida Bar, Havana. During the decades he lived and holidayed in Cuba, Hemingway spent the majority of his time holding court at the bar affectionately known as La Floridita after a chance visit had convinced him that the house daiquiri was “the ultimate achievement of the daiquiri-maker’s art”. Nevertheless, he requested a couple of tweaks (double the rum and skip the sugar) and the Papa Doble was born. Although his recipe has been tweaked again more recently to create the more palatable Hemingway Daiquiri or even the modern Doble to which it is also common to add a little sugar (not everyone has a palate like Papa…) today, in his honour, we go back to the original. The hardcore. The not for the faint-hearted. The ‘I’ll have six of these of an average afternoon’: The Papa Doble.
Add 110ml white rum, 70ml fresh lime juice, 120ml fresh grapefruit juice and six dashes of Maraschino to a blender of shaved ice.
Frappe until it looks “like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots”.
Serve in a large wine goblet.
Most people would shy away from a drink that contains 110ml of rum. Most people would fall off their stools after an evening session of six of these. And who but the man himself could handle the record-beating sixteen he once put away in one session?
Maybe it’s the crushed ice that does it. The original recipe calls for the drink to be blended “until it foams” and the author himself claimed the finished product “had no taste of alcohol and felt, as you drank them, the way downhill glacier skiing feels running through powder snow.”
It’s Election Day in the UK and while voters shuffle to the polls to put a cross in a box and thus become entitled to complain about the Government for the next five years, The Times asked Luca Corradini, bartender at The American Bar at The Savoy to create a drink for each of the main UK parties.
As several Election Night traditions revolve around waiting up for the results and toasting the demise of some of the best-loathed members of the political establishment we provide reviews of each below and, with a nod to the democratic spirit of the day, give you the chance to vote for your favourite.
A General Election of booze – what’s not to like?
Conservatives
As the largest party in the Government that has run Britain for the last five years, the Tory drink is called Current No 10. A floral gin-based drink with a hint of spice from the Kummel. Many will find this one difficult to palate.
Stir 50ml gin, 15ml creme de violette, 10ml kummel, 10ml Cocchi Americano and a dash of rose water with cubed ice for sixty seconds.
Strain into a chilled coupe glass.
Garnish with dried lavender.
Labour
The main challenger (at the ballot box at least) and determined to show their leader has what it takes to be taken seriously on the world stage. The Labour drink is called the Anything But Mili-bland and is a bitter sweet combination of characters, so it’s a relief to see this one end up moderated somewhat with soda water.
Shake 50ml vodka, 10ml Campari, 30ml fresh lemon juice and 15ml grenadine with cubed ice for twenty seconds.
Strain into a chilled highball glass and top with soda water.
Garnish with a lemon twist and a raspberry.
Liberal Democrats
Once the darlings of the disaffected, but now battered and bruised by a punishing five year stint as junior coalition members. Hoping their pleas to be allowed to moderate the extremes of the major parties will encourage the electorate to let them have another go in charge, albeit under close supervision. The drink, the Señorita tries to appeal to a broad range of tastes, but ends up putting a lot of people off as a result. Some of its decisions may take a long time to be forgiven.
Shake 50ml tequila, 15ml elderflower, 10ml fino sherry, 30ml pineapple juice and 15ml (2:1) pineapple syrup with cubed ice for twenty seconds.
Strain into a cobbler glass with ice.
Garnish with a slice of cucumber and mixed berries.
UKIP
Angling to replace the Liberal Democrats as the protest vote for those disaffected with the ‘old way of doing things’ UKIP advocate a return to a more insular protectionist time when Britain still had an Empire. The Love It Or Hate It shows a nod to this with a combination of dark rum, spice, egg white and pale ale which will make a handful of adherents go crazy, but leave most people mildly disgusted and hoping it will go away.
Shake 50ml dark rum, 15ml Grand Marnier, 10ml pimento dram, 20ml fresh lemon juice, 15ml sugar syrup and 10ml egg white with cubed ice for twenty seconds.
Strain into a chilled pint glass and top with pale ale.
Garnish with a small broken meringue.
Green Party
Hoping to build on the breakthrough the made in 2010 winning their first MP the Green party is striving to move away from its single-issue image with some daring economic policies. The drink appears to be the most attractive of the lot, and as a result is unlikely to garner much attention and will be largely overlooked on a menu of brash extremes.
Blend 50ml vodka, 10ml green Chartreuse, 20ml fresh lemon juice, 15ml sugar syrup, four basil leaves, three dashes of absinthe and an egg white and then shake with cubed ice for twenty seconds.
Strain into a chilled coupe glass.
Garnish with a basil leaf.
SNP
The Scottish Nationalists have been the rising stars of British politics since coming so close to achieving their main aim of secession in the 2014 referendum. Having dropped their promise to abstain on non-Scottish matters in Westminster they look set to wield real influence in the next Parliament. This drink, Sturgeon’s Sharper, serves as a reminder of what the UK would lose if Scotland went its own way. Built on reassuringly familiar foundations, the addition of cacao seems a rash decision, and an unnecessary amount of sugar, which may have far-reaching consequences.
Stir 50ml Mortlach 13yo whisky, 20ml Grand Marnier, 15ml creme de cacao and 10ml Cocchi Americano with cubed ice for sixty seconds.
Strain into a chilled coupe glass.
Garnish with an orange zest.
Plaid Cymru
The Welsh national party is not going to cause as much of a stir on the Westminster stage as the SNP, but a strong showing could eat into the Labour vote and make another Conservative-led coalition more likely. The Red Dragon is a welcoming and quite one. While cynics may say it is just here to make up the numbers, if they were to look a little more closely they may well be surprised by how much they like what they see.
Blend 60ml Penderyn Welsh whisky, 30ml fresh lemon juice, 15ml calvados, 10ml raspberry eau de vie, half an egg white and a small piece of red apple and then shake with cubed ice for twenty seconds.
Strain into a chilled coupe.
Garnish with a dehydrated apple slice.
Now, for the enfranchisement – vote for your favourite below:
Today is World Book Day (in the UK at least), so in honour of one of our favourite books, here is a quick recipe for Fantastic Mr Fox.
Like Foxy, this drink is based in high-proof cider (or in our case applejack) and has a rich smoky and Christmas pudding flavour. It is based on the Rapscallion, created at Ruby Bar, Copenhagen in 2007.
Stir 45ml applejack, 15ml Islay whisky, 15ml Pedro Ximenez sherry and 20ml chilled water with ice for sixty seconds.
Fox & Beagle 