House of Nettles: #alcohol

El Presidente

2025-02-26T06:26:58Z

0.75oz amber rum, 0.75oz white rum, 0.75oz blanco vermouth, 0.25oz dry curaçao, 1bsp grenadine

The color on this ended up so intense that it kind of blew out my phone camera a bit. I'd previously made this with dry vermouth and it was not very good, but it's quite pleasant with the proper blanco, which is much sweeter than dry but not as rich and tannic as sweet vermouth. I'm pretty sure the grenadine is here mostly for color, so you'll either want to use Rose's for the bright red hue or else leave it out entirely, since nice homemade grenadine tends to be brown like the pomegranate molasses used to make it.

Stone Fence

2025-01-31T06:11:08Z

4oz dry apple cider, 1.5oz apple brandy, 0.5oz Benedictine

Today we got an ice machine! Well, technically, we got an ice machine like seven years ago, when a local bar whose owner we befriended upgraded and wanted to offload their old one for cheap. But today we finally had a plumber in to hook the ice machine up! And now we've got lovely clear cubes^[1] that look incredibly nice in the glass. I'm looking forward to making some really lovely built drinks in the coming months.

Cylinders. ↩︎

Hot Buttered Rum

2024-11-15T03:11:24Z

2oz amber rum, 8ds allspice dram, 1bsp vanilla liqueur, 4oz hot water, 1tbsp butter, 1tsp cane syrup, several shooks cinnamon, two cloves

I love hot drink season. There's something so nice about serving someone a warm drink that's so buttery it's almost a pastry. One recipe I found called for 1/2tsp butter which is just comically small. The one major flaw with this mix is that it puts in all the water first, which makes it too cool by the time everything's all mixed. If I were to make it again (and I will!) I'd mix all the liquid ingredients separately, dissolve the syrup in half the water, mix the two, and then add the last half of the water to get everything nice and toasty for serving.

One cocktail book I have advocates for just shoving a red hot poker into the glass and heating it that way, but I think that's a little too hardcore for me.

non-alcoholic spirits kinda piss me off

2024-11-10T02:18:56Z

First, let me lay my cards on the table: I like alcoholic beverages. I'm not much of a drinker as such—it only takes a drink or two to get me feeling Done for the night and I very rarely even hit that limit—but I really enjoy the depth and breadth of flavor offered by both spirits and cocktails. They're particularly good at expressing flavor outside the savory/sugary spectrum that most other comestibles occupy. Spirits and cocktails are a particular interest of mine, and that definitely shapes my feelings on this subject to some degree.

But that's not the heart of my complaint. As someone who makes a lot of cocktails, I consider it part of my basic hospitality to have non-alcoholic options available for people who want them for any reason. And I don't just mean the basics like a can of soda—I keep a thorough repertoire of non-alcoholic mixed drinks on hand specifically so I can make everyone something that feels fancy and tailored to their palate.

It's from this angle that I mostly approach the category of "non-alcoholic spirits", and through this lens that I find it lacking. Part of it is that most of the ones I've tasted—admittedly not a terribly broad swath—just aren't very good. They lack textural body and their flavors are often just a bunch of separate notes that don't come together into a unified whole. But the heart of what bothers me is that they're aping alcoholic spirits, and there's no reason to do that.

In fairness, "no reason" may be overstating my case a bit. I'm sure there are compelling marketing reasons to describe something as "non-alcoholic gin" or "zero proof whiskey", but I don't think it does the product itself any favors. It simultaneously oversells and undersells the so-called spirit by standing it up for an impossible comparison while also failing to say anything about what it actually is. Is it water, oil, or vinegar based? Is it an infusion, a decoction, or a percolation? What flavor profile is it bringing to the table? All of these are critical questions when actually planning to drink a spirit or mix it in a cocktail, but they're all overshadowed by the framing as a "spirit replacement".

A chemical aside: why are non-alcoholic spirits so different?

The experience of drinking a liquid has a lot of sensory components. There's the texture and even temperature of the liquid, the "burning" sensation of a high alcohol content, the flavor on your tongue, and the scents in your nose (which themselves change over the course of a single sip). The temperature is pretty easy to control. The alcohol burn is hard to replicate and debatable whether it's even worthwhile^[1]. But the parts in between—flavor and texture—are more complicated, and intimately tied to the actual chemistry at play.

For better or for worse, ethanol (the chemical name for what we commonly call "alcohol" in beverages) is particularly good at providing both flavor and texture. It binds eagerly with molecules like esters, aldehydes, and ketones that communicate flavor to our mouths and noses. Because it's much less polar than water, it's also far better at binding to oils to create a more diverse range of textures on the tongue.

Alcohol isn't the only chemical that can do this—fats, sugars, and acetic acid (vinegar) are also good carriers of flavor, but they all carry their own flavor and/or textures. Which isn't a bad thing! It's fun to play with the constraints that exist and try to build something that works with them. Which is another issue I have with non-alcoholic spirits as a category: rather than building on the existing foundation, they seem to just want to apply "technology" to reproduce something that doesn't even need to be reproduced.

Case study: the "Sparkling Negroni" mocktail

detailed image description

A peach-colored can labeled "Wild Folk Sparkling Negroni" with "Non-alcoholic cocktail" printed below.

This post was actually sparked not by a spirit but by a canned mocktail I bought. I love bitter flavors (they're making moves lately), and as mentioned I don't actually drink that much, so I'm always on the lookout for nice bitter beverages^[2]. I also love a good Negroni, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity. But I was tragically disappointed.

It's not that the beverage itself was bad. Aside from the carbonation level being undetectable, it's something I wouldn't be unhappy at all to serve a guest. But it was absolutely not a Negroni. The sweetness was light and fruity rather than the rich deep roundness of vermouth, and although the bitterness was there Campari's distinctive flavor was replaced by something much more similar to the flavor of tea.

I wish I lived in a world where something like this could be simply and accurately billed as a "Bittersweet Herbal Tea". I promise you don't need to be a Negroni. A Negroni is already a Negroni! The world of beverages can be so much richer when it's not constrained to simply mimicking its alcoholic subset and instead sets off in exploration of flavors and textures work well in their own right.

Even alcohol drinkers vary in how much they perceive this. Back when I was more regularly drinking cask-strength spirits, I wouldn't feel any burn from spirits at 50% or more ABV, while people who were used to cocktails would often find 40% ABV to be so hot on the tongue as to make it hard to even perceive flavor. ↩︎
The best I've found so far is San Pellegrino's Sanbittèr, but I try not to buy Nestlé products if I can avoid it because I don't like slavery, water theft, union busting, or really any of their numerous crimes and misdeeds. ↩︎

Happy Hour Manhattan

2024-10-29T08:12:43Z

1oz pretty good well whisky (Evan Williams 100 Proof), 1oz pretty bad well whisky (Four Roses Yellow Label), 1oz totally decent vermouth (Dolin), 3ds Angostura bitters, one brandied cherry

I take pride in my cocktail mixing. I've put in a lot of work into honing my judgment of flavor combinations, learning how to construct an effective cocktail recipe, and building a stable of excellent ingredients. Whenever anyone comes to visit my house, I do my best to give them a beverage experience that's perfectly tailored to their desires, whether it's sweet or bitter, punchy or mild, alcoholic or not. Although sometimes experimentalism takes me in a direction that is not worth repeating, by and large I believe the drinks I make are excellent.

But excellent is not always what's called for.

Liz and I used to love going out to bars. Our signature move was to take off work early of an afternoon, show up just as the doors opened around 4pm or so, and just shoot the breeze with the bartender during the easiest hours of their shift. Bartenders are great conversation because they're always up to something else in their lives, and the best ones also care a lot about the craft of serving people just what they want. We'd stick around for a few hours, get some snacks, maybe order dinner if the bar served it or head out for pizza, and end up home by 8pm feeling like we'd had a full night out.

All that ended, of course, in 2020. Other than a few mostly-outdoor visits during the vaccine honeymoon^[1], we haven't been back to a bar since, and every day I miss that experience of lazily sipping on the latest Negroni variant while merrily chatting with someone who an hour ago was a total stranger to me.

For Liz, that experience was wrapped up inseparably with the particular flavors of happy hour, during which bars served cheaper drinks off a special menu to draw customers. Happy hour drinks are usually well-known classics such as a Manhattan, and they're usually substantially less fancy than a cocktail bar's primary menu. They'll often use only "well" ingredients, the inexpensive stuff that the bar buys in bulk to form the backbone of cocktails that are then made more flavorful with higher-shelf ingredients.

So when that's where Liz's mood takes her, I put away my high-end vermouth and adulterate my usual mixing whisky. Sometimes an excellent experience calls for mediocre flavor, and I try never to let my pride get in the way of mixing the right drink for the moment.

Our cheeky term for summer/fall 2021, in the all-to-brief gap between getting vaccinated and vaccine-resistant COVID variants taking over the world, when people at large were still taking common-sense precautions despite COVID numbers being lower than they've ever been since. In some sense I miss those days even more than I miss the era before the pandemic, because in those days I really believed that people writ large would act to value the lives of those around them. ↩︎

2024-10-21T07:45:52Z

Liz wrote:

10 (official) Years of Type 1

my festive cocktail… I promise it’s actually delicious (recipe at the bottom)

(cw: talk about death [specifically mine, theoretically])

As of today I have (officially) stayed alive with Type 1 diabetes for ten years¹. I’ve done a little bit of reading on the history of Type 1 treatment, one of the first acute conditions turned chronic through medical intervention (thank you, Drs. Banting, Macleod, and Best). The longer I live, the more “I would have died by now” milestones I pass, and the more I am reminded of how grateful I am for advances in diabetes treatment. I have passed the “I would have lived this long on a starvation diet” milestone. In a few years, I’ll probably make it past the “lethal atherosclerosis” line, then the “renal failure” line, assuming I retain access to current diabetes and other medical technology². I’ll probably also mostly avoid the non-lethal sequelae, the blindness and the amputations and the peripheral neuropathies. Apparently in a few years I’ll need to start taking statins even if my cholesterol is good, because diabetes often brings vascular complications. As good as diabetes technology is, I am, fundamentally, manually running one of the primary metabolic loops in the human body. It’s decidedly imperfect even when running at top performance.
…

It's really tough for me to read this post which is, to a substantial degree, about the hypothetical of my wife dying. But I think it's worth sharing both as a celebration of the fact that she is very much alive and as a meditation on what life is like with only the ongoing application of modern medical treatment between oneself and the void.

Also, I gotta say, I am pretty proud of that beverage. The flavors meld really well—I wanted to make sure the black sesame was still very much the primary note, which it absolutely is, while giving it a bit of richness with the scotch and cacao as well as a touch of liveliness with the amaretto and absinthe. I might actually seek out more black sesame ice cream to be able to make this for friends.