Cocktail Hacker

This week’s cocktail, specifically the Corpse Reviver #2, calls for the use of Lillet Blanc. Not having any experience with this ingredient I did I bit of digging and sampling. Lillet is an French aperitif wine produced in Bordeaux. The flavor is that of a sweet fruity white wine. The fruit flavors lean primarily towards citrus but there are hints of others in there as well. There are slight herbal notes but they are much more subtle than those in vermouth. Overall I really like Lillet Blanc and could see myself enjoying it on its own over ice with an orange garnish.

Problem is, although the Corpse Reviver #2 was intended to use Lillet, the Lillet they had back then, and as recent as 1986, isn’t the Lillet we have today. The original Kina Lillet was considered a tonic wine due to the fact that it contained quinine. This quinine was added through the infusion of cinchona bark (Kina Kina in Peruvian). However, come the late 80’s the Lillet company decided to modernize it’s brand and dropped the Kina from the name and a large part of the flavor along with it. The aperitif recipe was changed to be less sweet and considerably less bitter. Therein lies the rub you see. This recipe needs a bitter component to offset the sweet and sour. That’s no longer present.

So, what’s a hacker to do? Well in doing a bit of poking around I came across Erik Ellestad’s write ups on his site, Underhill-Lounge. Seems I’m not the only cocktail enthusiast in search of a replacement for the original Kina Lillet. In his search he’s found a replacement that is said to be very similar to the original Kina Lillet, namely, Cocchi Americano. After calling around to the major liquor stores in the Boulder/Denver area and checking the web I couldn’t find a ready source however, so I decided I’d try a hack Erik mentioned in his first post. Some folks have tried infusing Lillet with cinchona bark on their own. Since I had some cinchona on hand from my homemade tonic I was ready to give it a go.

I started with a cup of Lillet and 1 1/2 Tablespoons of cinchona powder. I combined them and shook until it was all well blended. I let the cichona steep for 15 minutes then strained using my custom straining rig. My rig is a coffee filter clipped to the inside of a funnel and placed in to the bottom half of my strainer. This filter setup worked wonderfully!

The results were a copper colored Lillet that was exceedingly bitter, much too bitter in fact. This info in hand I tried again. Round two I mixed a cup of Lillet with 1/2 Tablespoon of cinchona. I shook again and let this mixture steep for 10 minutes. Once fully steeped I filtered the Lillet. This time the infusion was much more pallatable but still not what I was looking for. Not wanting to waste any more of my Lillet on failed experiments I decided a better way to add the bitterness I was looking for would be to simply use orange bitters. More on that later in the week.

Erik, on the other hand, didn’t stop there. His latest endevour, linked above, is to create his own infused wine a la Kina Lillet. I look forward to hearing about the results. If you’re interested in more of Erik’s cocktail comments, check out his work on “Stomping though the Savoy” on eGullet. He’s making one cocktail at a time from The Savoy Cocktail Book.

I believe Eddie sums it up best.

Hope you all have a wonderful New Year. I look forward to another year filled with tasty cocktails.

As promised we had an Egg Nog taste off last night to determine what the best spirit is for mixing in this delicious beverage. From what I’ve read it seems the three main choices are whiskey (bourbon specifically), rum, and brandy. I enlisted the help of my friends Mike and Crystal to get to the bottom of this difficult case.

For the spirits I chose Eagle Rare 10 yr Bourbon, Flor de Cana 7yr Dark Rum, and Germain-Robin Fine Alembic Brandy (lot 23 if you care). All of these are aged spirits and therefore have a nice dark color and a complexity of flavor that can only be obtained from aging. We mixed one ounce of spirit with about 4 ounces of egg nog for the initial round of tasting.

Mike and Crystal liked the rum best because it nearly completely blended in to the nog adding nice additional flavor without adding any extra alcoholiness. I’d agree, although the rum is certainly present and you can taste it the flavor doesn’t overpower the egg nog at all. Their second favorite was the brandy. It added a nice flavor but had more of an alcohol aftertaste than the rum which although not unpleasant it wasn’t what they were looking for. The bourbon came in dead last for Mike and Crystal. Neither of them liked the additional flavors that the bourbon brought and both disliked the aftertaste. This is where I differed though. I really enjoyed the addition of bourbon. I like the extra flavor components and complexity that bourbon brings to the party.

Overall my recommendation would be to go with bourbon (or the whiskey of your choice) if you like whiskey to begin with. And this is a perfect case of really needing to use bourbon that you like to drink by itself. A crappy tasting bourbon won’t be improved with egg nog. You’ll simply end up with a crappy tasting glass of egg nog. On the other hand if you’re not a huge whiskey fan or you’d prefer a smoother, more integrated flavor then I think a good dark rum is the spirit of choice. A light rum could also be used, but since it’s not aged it won’t add that much in the way of additional flavor.

Hope you are all having a great holiday!

Well folks, we’re in a web 2.0 world these days and Twitter is a wonderful example there of. With that in mind Cocktail Hacker now has its very own Twitter account. If you’re a full fledged tweet head you can follow CocktailHacker for updates on new posts and other general cocktail ephemera. If you’re new to the Twitter game check it out, its like a blog with updates in capsule form, a micro-blog if you will. Also, on the off chance you’d like to read more of my ramblings you can follow me on Twitter as well.

This week is X-mas week and if your schedule is anything like mine then you’re busy, possibly exceedingly busy. I’m going to take a bit of a break this week. Like Thanksgiving week I’ll be making a drink, I just won’t be spending a huge amount of time on it. This week I want to create a tasty hot apple cider cocktail. I’ll check back in later in the week and let you know the results. I hope everyone has a great holiday week.