Imbibliotech

New Gin: Colonel Fox’s London Dry Gin

I went to a tasting event with the London Cocktail Society last night. The two things being tasted were the Babička wormwood vodka (which I already own) and a new gin called Colonel Fox.

Most happily, as well as tasting it there, it was also on offer to be bought (the bar we were at, Bedford and Strand, also doubles as an off license). I was a big fan of this gin so bought a bottle as soon as they would let me. At £20, it’s a bargain.

What’s it like?

When you smell it it’s quite harsh, with not much coming through other than the alcohol (that might be because I have hayfever). However that completely doesn’t carry through to the sip. 

It’s smooth, almost creamy. Very sweet. Other than that, it tastes like a simple but good gin - there’s no complicated mix of botanicals on top of that screaming “Hi! I’m different! I have MANGO PEEL AND PLANTAIN* in me. I’m not like all those other gins”. You can definitely taste the liquorice, but mostly it tastes like gin. 

This is particularly interesting to me because the gin it reminds me most of is the Nolet’s Silver Dry Gin, which I don’t actually like at all due to a complex set of floral flavours on top of the base gin. This has none of those, and is the better for it.

I’ve yet to try this any way other than neat, but at the very least I think this may easily be amongst my favourite sipping gins. 

* Disclaimer: I am not in fact aware of any gins containing either mango peel or plantain. 

Tonight’s drink: Corpse Reviver #2

One of the classics, and one of my favourites, but I realised I’ve never actually made it myself. Tonight I decided to fix that.

Here’s the recipe I used (all very standard, mostly documenting specific choices of spirits):

• 25ml of No. 3 Gin
• 25ml of Lillet Blanc
• 25ml of Gabrielle Boudier Triple Sec
• 25ml of Lemon juice
• A barspoon of Jade Edouard absinthe

I made two, one for myself and Jamie. I offered Femke one, which she declined, but as soon as she had a sip of mine she decided she wanted one after all, so I taught her to make them too.

Neither of us got ours quite right. Mine was a little heavy on the Absinthe, hers a little heavy on the lemon, but both were nevertheless rather tasty.

The Edouard absinthe is really too nice to be using for this, but my only other choice of absinthe is a horrifying generic green thing that contains more food colouring than wormwood. I need to acquire a decent mid-range absinthe if I’m going to be making more of these. 

A Negronesque with the Tea Vodka

Remember the tea vodka from a while back? 

Yeah, it’s mostly been sitting neglected waiting for me to try to figure out what to do with it. 

I’ve made a bit of an attempt at it tonight with a Negroni variant. It contains the following:

• 25ml Tea Vodka
• 25ml Death’s Door gin
• 25ml Lillet Blanc
• A barspoon of Gabriel Boudier triple sec
• A couple dashes of Angostura bitters

Served over ice, ungarnished.

This could use some more work, but there’s definitely the core of a good drink in it. It’s quite complex, but bordering on the complicated or indeed merely confused.

It starts off sweet, with the lillet/gin combination coming through, and then has a bitter tannic finish on the swallow, but much less so than the tea vodka on its own.

I think it could actually stand to have a little more of the tea vodka, which surprises me. After I’d drunk about half I added a splash more tea vodka, and the result was much better balanced. An entire additional 25ml would be far too much.

It also might work better as a longer drink, maybe cut with some amount of soda water. I’ve not tried that.

As it stands, I probably wouldn’t recommend this drink. It’s not bad, but there are a lot of drinks that are better. It’s a fairly promising start though, and I’ll have to experiment with it some more.

Drink of the evening

I asked Elliot at Shaker & Company to make me something with Master of Malt’s Proprietary Barley Spirit Drink. It’s a bizarre substance - somewhere between scotch and a thick sherry. I like it, but it’s too harsh to drink neat so I was looking for ways to use it. This is what he came up with. I don’t know the proportions, but the following were the ingredients:

• Proprietary barley spirit
• Aperol
• Chartreuse
• Some sort of home made bitters

Served in an old fashioned glass, with a large twist of lemon and a sphere of ice.

As you can see, it was however mostly spirits. I believe Elliot’s description was 

This is a really tasty drink, and you will enjoy it, but it will knock you for six.

He was correct. It was quite lethal but really rather tasty. Somewhere between a Negroni and an old fashioned. A definite success. 

Rhum Agricole

Yesterday’s tasting at Callooh Callay was Rhum Agricole, which is an unusual style of rum popular in France and produced in the French Caribbean.

The event was interesting, and Callooh Callay was lovely as always, but alas I came away from it with the conclusion that rhum agricole is not a nice spirit.

Fundamentally the thing that killed any chance of my liking it happened in the opening couple of sentences when the man doing the presentation told us that it was legally required to include the volatiles from distillation, which includes all the nasty stuff that most gives you a hangover. So it’s a spirit which is legally required to give you a hangover. Great. I do in fact have a stinking headache this morning, but it’s hard to believe that’s really caused by the rum - I drank very sparingly of it during the sampling. It’s more likely to be a result of having slept badly or something plus psychosomatic effects. Still, there’s my little bit of anecdata. 

How did it taste? Well, not great. Some of the really good ones were somewhat pleasant - like a decent rum with overtones of Armagnac. But even those had a weird musky chemical finish that I didn’t like at all. I might have been persuaded to buy a bottle of it and give it a more thorough investigation were it not for three things. 

1. The aforementioned hangover effect
2. The complete lack of good cocktails with it. Even CC only had some uninspired variations on the Ti’Punch.
3. The price tag. The ones I actually liked were about £120. I can buy 3 bottles of spirits I actually like for that. 

So all in all a useful learning experience, but most of what I learned was that this is a spirit for me to avoid in future. 

Vodka tasting

I’m not a vodka drinker. My classic opinion on it has been that it’s a fairly boring drink whose primary purpose is get drunk. I mentioned this to the gin monkey on twitter and she pointed out that this was something a lot of good people were working to change and suggested some brands I should try. 

I generally try to challenge beliefs that I don’t like something until I’m really certain about it. So, armed with some expert advice, I went out and bought some vodka. Believe it or not, there was previously no vodka in my spirit collection, so these four are the first (I do have some things which claim to be vodka, but really they’re no more vodka than gin is - I’ve got the Babička for starters, as well as some infused vodkas I’ve made in the past). 

The four vodkas I bought were

1. Kaszebe Vestal Vodka
2. Chase potato vodka
3. Adnams Longshore Premium Vodka
4. Sipsmith vodka

The first two were potato vodkas recommended by the monkey, the second two are Barley vodkas made by people who do two gins I really like (I thought they were actually made with the same base spirit, but now I’m not sure).

I opened these up at the office, and a few of us tried them. Here are the conclusions

Vestal Vodka

Everyone who tried this had an identical expression on their face afterwards. It can roughly be summarised as “Oh. That’s interesting”. I think I like it, but I’m not sure. It’s a bit weird - there’s definitely an earthy potato character to it. The man at the store described it as a little bit like a peaty whiskey. I can see where the description comes from, though I’m not entirely sure I agree.

I think the jury is still out on this one for me. I don’t really know if I like it or not, but I’ll happily drink more to find out.

Chase Vodka

The second potato vodka. You can definitely taste the similarity with the Vestal vodka, but it had a lot less depth of flavour. This actually worked in its favour to an extent - there’s much less of an uncertainty around whether I like this one or not. All in all, quite pleasant.

Adnams

This was my favourite of the lot (and in general it seemed a toss up between this and the chase). It was quite rich and creamy. Not terribly complex, but pleasant and interesting enough to hold up on its own. It has a slightly odd, maybe slightly musky, finish but only a hint of that and it wasn’t unpleasant.

It’s also worth noting that this one was stronger than the other 3 - 48% rather than 40%. 

Sipsmith

This wasn’t very interesting. It had some of the pleasant sweetness of the others, but not much other than that to recommend it and finished with a not very pleasant chemical twang. A shame, as I rather like their gin. 

Conclusion

So, am I now a vodka drinker?

Well… no, probably not. 

While these were pleasant enough on their own if I’m going to be drinking neat spirits there are neat spirits I’d much rather be drinking - gin or whiskey primarily. I’ll probably give them a try occasionally to confirm my opinion here, and I will experiment with a few different ways of drinking them, but I feel reasonably comfortable that I’m not going to change this opinion wildly. 

They might be nice in a cocktail, but I can’t help but feel that most of what makes them interesting versus normal vodka would be lost in that. There’s definitely an interesting flavour over just the alcohol and water and unpleasant chemical impurities taste I associate with vodka, and they’re a significantly superior spirit to what I expected, but ultimately the flavours on top of the base alcohol are not that strong, and it would be hard not to overpower them. The only thing that comes to mind as an option is a vodka martini, and I’m pretty sure I’ll just end up thinking “Well, it’s nice I suppose, but it’s not really a martini is it?”. That being said, I could be wrong and I will experiment to find out.

I’m glad I tried these, and I definitely consider them worthy additions to my collection, but I suspect I’ll have finished and replaced several bottles of my preferred spirits before I make a significant dent in the level of these. 

Babička vodka

I bought a bottle of Babička wormwood vodka today. 

I don’t really have much to say about it at the moment other than it is interesting and quite tasty. It’s got a taste I’ve not really encountered before - pure wormwood, but without the bitterness you get from pure wormwood infusions, which makes it much easier to tell what it tastes like without your mouth shutting down. I assume the wormwood is distilled with the vodka and the bitterness doesn’t come through with the distillate.

I’ve tried it neat, on the rocks and in a martini. Neat it doesn’t quite work - the flavours don’t quite work together and you get a much more pronounced finish. Adding ice seems to fix that - I don’t know if it’s the dilution or the drop in temperature but the result is a much better balanced drink. On the rocks is probably my favourite way so far - it makes a decent martini but the flavour is too mild to easily balance the lillet blanc I used with it.

How I make coffee

My coffee making is a bit non-standard. 

I’m controversial amongst coffee snobs in that I don’t like espresso very much. I find it skews the flavour of the coffee away from the flavours I like and towards those I don’t - basically I prefer a slightly less bitter coffee.

So the two main ways I drink coffee in the past have been cafetiere and filter (using over mug paper filters rather than a machine). The problem is that cafetiere coffee is a bit muddy and filter coffee can be a bit boring. This is the system we’ve put together to fix that and get the best of both worlds. It’s ridiculously simple but seems to be unusual so I thought I’d mention.

1. Grind the coffee to espresso grind (or buy it pre-ground at that)
2. Add it to a cafetiere pot with boiling water. The fact that it’s a cafetiere is irrelevant - it’s basically just a large heat-proof jug
3. Leave for about 5 minutes
4. Stir
5. Pour through a paper filter

The result is nothing that special - it’s just a stronger filter coffee - but it’s a low effort way of producing coffee which is consistently flavourful and nice.

Cocktail: London Iced Tea

The Tea Vodka I made last week is just ever so slightly too bitter to drink neat (alas), so I’m looking for ways to mix it. This is my first attempt.

Conception was very simple. I have a tea flavoured drink, iced tea is tasty, so…

Then I messed with the idea. I’m not entirely sure why. Possibly because I’m incapable of doing things simply.

Ingredients:

• 25ml Tea Vodka
• 25ml Tanqueray Export Strength
• Quarter of a lemon squeezed
• Lemon wedge to garnish
• Tonic water to top up the glass (I used Silver Spring 1870, but only because I happened to have it to hand)

What’s it like?

Honestly, it’s like iced tea. Perfectly pleasant iced tea, still a little on the bitter side, but the lemon and tonic offset the bitterness of the underlying tea vodka enough that it just takes like a decent strength of tea. Between the tonic and the tea there’s really no hint of the gin coming through at all. 

Would I make it again? Nah, not really. I mean, it’s fine, but it’s nothing to write home about. It’s one of those annoying fusions where what you get is tasty enough but strictly worse than both of the things you’ve combined.

(Apparently there’s already a cocktail called the London Iced Tea. Oh well, since I won’t be making this again I happily cede the name)

Sciencing up the Tea Vodka

As per last post, I needed to make myself some tea vodka. I decided to get more precise about brewing times to figure out what worked.

My procedure was as follows: I made this in a glass cafetiere (basically just using it as a carafe). At 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes of brewing I drew off a 5ml sample (I have measuring syringes) and put it aside with a little taste to see how it was doing. Then at the end I compared the different samples. 

I used slightly different ingredients and quantities this time. Specifically I used a Finlandia vodka instead of an Absolut, as I couldn’t find any 750ml bottles of Absolut (limited things open on a Sunday evening) and I measured the tea by weight instead of a rough “heaped tablespoons”, so used 25mg of tea.

Sample notes

5 minutes: Basically coloured vodka with a hint of tea. Not bad, but not very interesting. Noticeably lighter in colour than the others. Quite a lot of harshness coming through from the vodka.

10 minutes: Surprisingly bitter. Compared to the 5 minute one it’s mostly acquired bitterness. Still a bit of vodka harshness coming through.

20 minutes: This was the nicest of the lot. All the tea primary flavours I liked have come through at this point and offset the bitterness of the 10 minute one. It may be slightly more bitter, but if so I didn’t notice because I was paying attention to the more interesting flavours. No chemical aftertaste remains. 

30 minutes: Still nice, but mostly adds bitterness to the 20 minute brew. Nice, and a bit more complex than the 20 minutes, on the fore-tongue but when you swallow you get a bitterness that is reminiscent of over-brewed tea. 

Mistakes

This is not nearly as nice as the last one I made, sadly. It’s still good, but the last one I would happily have drunk neat whileas this one I think needs something to sweeten it. 

I think were I to do this again (whether I do so being highly dependent on if I can find a recipe that works with it) I would use less tea (probably only 15mg) and brew it for only 20 minutes. I have no idea whether the choice of Finlandia vs. Absolut makes any difference.