Tom Collins
2 oz. Gin
4 slices Lemon*
1 tsp. Pure Cane Sugar

Drop the slices of lemon in the bottom of a Boston tin, pour the sugar on top, and muddle with abandon. I mean, muddle the sweet jebus out of that shit. Thence, pour in your chilled** gin, and a few ounces of soda. Give it a bit of a stir to make sure the bulk of the sugar is dissolved, and pour unstrained into a Collins glass (you may need to assist the crap with the spoon.) Drop in a Collins spear (aka Chesterton) and top with soda (if required), and serve with a stir straw.

The issue here is vibrancy. Muddling the slices of lemon makes all the difference, as you get that amazing lemon oil out of the rind that you just wouldn’t get if you only used juice. It takes longer, but it’s so worth it.

*You’re going for .75 oz of lemon juice, so use your judgment. Maybe even muddle a few slices and see how much juice it yields.

**If you’re not chilling your gin for things like G&Ts and Collinses, then we don’t have much left to talk about. However, if had to use warm gin – like if you were stranded on a desert island or something – then it would be prudent to shake it over a small amount of ice, before adding the soda and pouring, unstrained, into the Collins glass, over said ice spear. Theoretically speaking, of course.

Drink 1 – Blood Orange Whiskey Sour

I tried this drink twice, the first time using bourbon, blood orange, simple syrup, cointreau, and egg white.  But in tweaking it a bit, I found I preferred this recipe:

• 2 oz bourbon
• .75 oz blood orange juice
• .5 oz simple syrup
• .25 oz lemon juice
• Egg white
• Shake with ice, double strain into chilled cocktail glass

My whiskey sours are not generally all that sour, but the first take was just way too sweet. The second blood orange take has a nice flowery balance, and while the lemon doesn’t make it sour, it dries it out nicely. Cointreau and bourbon just don’t work.  Never have, never will.

Drink 2 – The Bloody Scotsman

• 2 oz rye whiskey
• .5 oz Aperol
• .5 oz lemon juice
• .5 oz blood orange juice
• Islay scotch
• Rinse a chilled cocktail glass with the scotch, shake the remaining ingredients with ice, and double strain.

Oddly, the ingredients really cancelled each other out.  It didn’t taste like there was any whiskey in there at all, and the blood orange thinned the drink so much that there was no bitterness and just a hint of smoke from the scotch.  It was good and quite drinkable — poundable, really — but not anything electric.  I’d like to tinker with this some more and see what happens.

Drink 3 – The Bronx River Runs Red

Inspired by the original (and often kind of weak) Bronx Cocktail:

• 1.5 oz gin
• .5 oz Aperol
• .5 oz Lillet Blanc
• 1 oz blood orange juice
• .25 oz lemon juice
• Shake with ice, double strain into a chilled cocktail glass

This is a really light, really subtle, really aromatic take on a Bronx cocktail.  If you like a Bronx or any lighter drinks, you’d probably like this.  That’s not to say that it’s perfect by any stretch – Campari might be an improvement over Aperol here – but this is another pretty quaffable cocktail.

Then I had good vermouth.

At first, it was just sweet vermouth in the form of Carpano Antica Formula. That helped open up an entire world of classic cocktails. But my real education began with the entire line of Dolin vermouths, which aren’t as of yet available here in the Detroit area.

Dolin Dry is absolutely delicious on its own as an apertif. But it shines in a dry martini, that formerly dreaded drink that I’ve come to appreciate if not love. With light citrus flavors and hints of herbs de provence, it’s drier, more spicy, and more nuanced than any other dry vermouth I’ve ever tasted, and it illustrates why a classic dry martini isn’t made with a splash of vermouth and a bucket of gin as has become the fashion today.

If I had to settle for Martini & Rossi in my gin, I suppose that I’d only want a sprinkle of vermouth in my martini as well.

Fortunately, there’s Dolin.

So in my dry martinis, I’ve been working with 2 1/4 oz gin to 3/4 oz vermouth or even a half-and-half mix. Why not showcase the flavors of all the ingredients if they’re worth showcasing?

The Red Wings just won the fourth game of their first round playoff series as I was polishing off the last sip of my martini. I think I’ll have something else that features Dolin Dry to celebrate.

Obviously, the use of heat to change the properties of our food is a key principle of cooking, and I’d always wondered how it might be applied to my drinks beyond the token flaming orange peel at a trendy cocktail bar. As it turns out, bartending guru Jamie Boudreau had adequately demonstrated the concept already through a drink he created called the Rubicon.

The Rubicon

• 2oz dry gin
• .5 oz maraschino liqueur
• .5 oz lemon juice
• .25 oz green chartreuse
• a few sprigs of rosemary
• Pour the chartreuse into a rocks glass and curl a sprig of rosemary around the bottom of the glass. Then light the chartreuse on fire. Fixate on the awesomeness.
• Mix together the remaining booze in a shaker, shake with ice and a sprig of rosemary, and double strain into the glass, eliminating any stray bits of herbs and extinguishing the flame.
• Add crushed ice until the glass is full; add a final sprig of rosemary as a garnish

It’s astonishing the degree to which the flame changes the flavors. The herbal qualities of the chartreuse and the rosemary remain, but they’re made more robust and meatier by the fire. The drink feels more masculine, not just because it’s crafted from every caveman’s favorite exothermic reaction but because the sweeter elements are muted and rounded off nicely.

Crossing the Rubicon is, of course, a classic cultural idiom that refers to the notion of passing the point of no return. Here’s a summary of the phrase’s history in Boudreau’s own words:

The rosemary curled in the glass reminded me of Caesar’s laurels and therefore I’ve named this libation after the famous river Caesar crossed in 49 BC after uttering the now famous words: ‘Let us go where the omens of the Gods and the crimes of our enemies summon us! THE DIE IS NOW CAST!’ It is with this action that the Roman Empire began, and western civilization as we know it.

Perhaps an unintended secondary meaning of the phrase and of the drink in this case is the fire itself. Once you know what fire can do to your food, once you know it what it can do to your chartreause, how can you not want to play with it just a little more?

We started on some scallops with a cilantro gremolata and served over a lime beurre blanc, a recipe I found on Epicurious. With it, I mixed up and served a Captain Handsome, a cocktail created at Vessel, the bar in Seattle.

• 1.5 oz gin
• .5 oz lime juice
• .5 oz creme de violette
• .25 oz limoncello
• Shake w/ ice and strain the drink into a chilled cocktail glass rinsed with absinthe. Garnish with a cherry.

Its lime juice base made it ideal with the lime zest in the gremolata and the citrus in the reduction used to make the beurre blanc. Vessel has a fantastic device that carbonates any drink without dilluting it. And while our version lacks the delightful prickliness of Vessel’s original, it’s an excellent, elegant drink with a nicely cohesive floral and citrus flavor that’s accented really nicely by the absinthe rinse. Doesn’t get much better, and it’s an excellent drink to showcase the Creme de Violette I’ve come to love.

For the main course, I served another recipe I found online, albeit tweaked here and there: pork stuffed with a morel-based mixture and generously drizzled with a demi-glace and morel stock-based sauce.Part of me thought a fresh Joseph Swan pinot noir, which I’ve written about here previously, would do the trick of combatting the rich morel and veal flavors, but I wanted something more refined and nuanced. I had a gut feeling that a 20-year-old burgundy I’d been holding on to would do the trick. And indeed it did.

More specifically, the wine was a 1988 premier cru from Les Vaucrains (in Nuits St. Georges), produced Robert Chevillon. It was surprisingly vibrant with plenty of berry fruit and tannin left, but the real pleasant surprise was just how well this worked with the pork: Hints of leather, game, and even a Fernet-Branca-ish herbal quality evolved as we drank through the botttle.

The meal closed with a raspberry mousse. We elected not to pair it with any specific drinks, but afterward, I gave my new bottle of Plymouth Sloe Gin a try. I made Sloe Sambas for both of us, a fruity, pink, frothy concoction that I’ve approximated from a drink of the same name made at Nopa, a San Francisco gastropub.

• 2 oz dry gin
• .75 oz sweet vermouth
• .75 oz dry vermouth
• .75 oz orange juice

The first of the evening was courtesy of The Forest Grill in Birmingham, Michigan. Served to me on the rocks with an orange wedge, it was, in a word, weak. I don’t know if the juice was simply out of a fountain spray nozzle, if it was from watery oranges, and/or if he used too much OJ, but the ice didn’t really help matters as it melted. Anxious to save the fleeting flavor from its ostensibly inevitable watery grave, I consumed the rest in short order.

Arriving home a few hours later, I decided to make one myself, using the recipe above. But as I opened my fridge to fetch the vermouth, I realized I had both Stock and Carpano Antica on hand. Generally, Carpano Antica makes any drink better — but I thought it wouldn’t really be fair to compare a restaurant drink using well vermouth to something more precious than an autographed nude photo of Natalie Portman. So I constructed one drink using Stock and one with the Antica.

And to be honest, I’m not sure which I preferred. Initially, the sweet, somewhat flabbby orange juice seemed to clash with the herbs in the Antica, whereas the similar sweet, somewhat flabby Stock just melded nicely with the rest of the drink. But 20 minutes into the Carpano-laced drink, I noticed that I rather enjoyed the herbs and orange together. Perhaps the drift toward room temperature had an effect. Perhaps I just got used to it. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Regardless, the homemade Bronx proved to be what it always ought to be: a fairly sweet but never cloying orange cocktail that puts many others to shame. Do yourself a favor: Put away the vodka and peach schnapps. Forget that Fuzzy Navel or Screwdriver or Hairy Fuzzy Navel or whatever the kids call it these days. Make yourself a Bronx instead.