Author: John Fladd

October’s cocktail dilemma – Drinks with John Fladd

Argument – There comes a time when a rational adult needs to set aside emotion and accept Reality.

Counter-Argument – What has Reality ever done for me?

OK, it’s October.

October, in a year that has been circling the flush-line since March and promises to circle even faster around the bowl before we give up on 2020 entirely and hope for something better next year. Summer is gone and we have to brace ourselves for a grim fall and a winter of — I don’t know — discontent?

That’s one way to look at it.

Another is to adopt, as P.G. Wodehouse put it, a campaign of stout denial. You know what I’m talking about — grown men wearing shorts, sandals and Santa hats in December. Women who wear white after Labor Day and meet your gaze with steely determination.

Whichever camp you fall into, you could probably use a drink.

Case No. 1 – “I Grudgingly Accept That Summer Is Over and Will Adopt a Serious, Adult Demeanor”

The cocktail for you:

Black Tie Cocktail
2 oz. dark rum, such as Myers
½ oz. triple sec
¼ oz. orgeat
½ teaspoon blackstrap molasses
½ oz. fresh squeezed lime juice
1 teaspoon simple syrup

Put all ingredients into a cocktail shaker with five or six ice cubes. Shake until you can feel the ice splintering (see below). Pour without straining into a rocks glass.

The Black Tie is a deceptive cocktail. On its surface it is dignified, sober (in an emotional sense) and entirely appropriate for the season.

On tasting it, though, you will be surprised. It has complex, playful flavors that come in stages — the molasses and lime play off each other unexpectedly well. It is a bit subversive.

Case No. 2 – “Fall Foliage Is Just Another Way of Describing Tiki Trees”

The cocktail for you :

Rum Runner
1½ oz. navy rum like Lamb’s or Pussers, or dark rum like Myers
½ oz. crème de mûre, or blackberry liqueur, or blackberry brandy (the kind you find sometimes in little single-portion bottles in the sale bin at the liquor store)
1 oz. crème de banana
1 oz. fresh squeezed lime juice
2 oz. pineapple juice
½ oz. grenadine (pomegranate syrup)

Again, put everything in a cocktail shaker with five or six ice cubes, then shake brutally, until you feel the ice shatter. Pour into a tall glass. Garnish – Several weeks ago I described the Jungle Bird as too serious a drink to garnish with frou-frou paper umbrellas or fruit. This drink is a defiant rebellion against the changing of the seasons. It calls for a minimum of two cocktail umbrellas, and as much fruit as you want to cram into it.

Just as the Black Tie is deceptively playful, this drink is deceptively sophisticated. The key ingredient here is the blackberry brandy, which insists on shining through all the other goofy ingredients.

A word on cocktail shakers
When you first start making serious, grown-up cocktails you will probably buy a cocktail shaker with a strainer built into its spout. “This looks easier,” you will say to yourself. You might even congratulate yourself on keeping your common touch and not buying into cocktail snobbery.
Eventually, you’ll start getting impatient with how long it takes to pour your entire drink into your glass through the built-in strainer. You will probably have to re-shake and re-strain your drink several times to get all of it out of the shaker.
The solution is what is called a Boston Shaker. It consists of one large steel canister, and a smaller one. It is what most professional bartenders use. You put your ingredients into the larger canister, turn the little one upside-down, wedge it firmly over the ingredients in the larger one, then shake.
It seems like it should leak. It doesn’t. It seems like it would be hard to strain drinks with. It isn’t. The drinks end up colder, somehow. As you shake, you can feel the ice cracking and splintering — which is profoundly satisfying — and you can pour your drink quickly and efficiently into your waiting glass, and shortly thereafter, into you.

Drinks with John Fladd: The Paisley Jane

The Paisley Jane

At the risk of oversharing, it seems like when it comes to decision-making I have two settings: overthinking or not thinking at all.

Throughout my life, a series of exasperated parents, bemused drill sergeants and my long-suffering wife have asked me, in varying degrees of anxiety, “What were you THINKING!?” To which, I only have one answer: “Uhhh… what?”

And then, there’s the other extreme.

Sometimes, without warning, I will fall down a rabbit hole of obsession, hyper-focusing on some objectively trivial matter. Last week, after watching a movie where one of the characters had to go on the run and retrieved a “go bag,” I spent hours thinking about what would go in my go bag, how much of what currency should go in it, and how I could inconspicuously buy everything I needed with untraceable cash. Never mind that I would probably never need to flee anywhere, or that I’m too fundamentally lazy and timid to do it if I had to; the fact remains that I spent hours working out an elaborate escape plan. (The secret is to include a Flowbee in the bag, so I can shave my head in a convenience store bathroom, then grow a beard, to blend in with all the other aging hipsters.)

And then, there’s the orgeat. Orgeat (supposedly pronounced “Oor-Jot”) is an almond syrup that is used a lot in tropical drinks to add depth and a sweet fruitiness to the background flavor. I’m mostly alone in this, but I think it tastes a bit like maraschino cherries. People with a more sophisticated palate than mine get very particular about their orgeat, saying that the cheap stuff tastes “artificial.” (I kind of like “artificial”, but they do have a point. The more chi-chi stuff definitely tastes more sophisticated.)

Some people will even go so far as to make their own orgeat.

[There… Right there… Did you hear it? The ominous music in the soundtrack as I start to overthink things?]

I was reading recipes for homemade orgeat — some simple, others much more complex and involved — when I started to wonder about making it from pistachios, rather than almonds. This led to more research than I can really justify, and several trips to the store, for ever-larger amounts of raw pistachios.

In the end, here’s what I came up with:

Pistachio Orgeat
Equal parts, by volume:
• sugar
• water
• raw, shelled pistachios

1. Chop the pistachios in a blender
2. Boil the sugar and water together to make a simple syrup
3. Steep the pistachio crumbs in the syrup for several hours
4. Strain the pistachio solids out, then squeeze

The Paisley Jane
• 2 slices of cucumber
• ½ oz. unsweetened pomegranate or cranberry juice
• 1½ oz. vodka
• 1½ oz. pistachio orgeat
• ½ oz. full fat plain yogurt
• Exactly 3 drops rose water (seriously – no more, no less. Trust me on this.)
• A pinch of sumac powder for garnish (Not optional. See below.)

1. Place the cucumber slices at the bottom of a cocktail shaker, then top them with ice. If you do it this way, you don’t have to muddle or bruise the cucumber. The ice will do it for you.
2. Add all the other ingredients except the sumac.
3. Shake vigorously for longer than you think you actually need to. Remember that you are throwing down a beating on the cucumbers.
4. Strain over ice into a rocks glass or an Old Fashioned glass.
5. Top with a generous pinch of sumac.

A note on sumac: Sumac is a Middle Eastern spice that has a distinct, sour, astringent note to it. It is one of the garnishes called for in the original Hazy Jane recipe. Without it, this pistachio version is missing something. You can buy sumac at any Middle Eastern grocery store or online.
You have to be somewhat obsessive to try this, but the good news is that you won’t have to drastically change your appearance.

Featured photo: Paisley Jane. Photo by John Fladd.

Drinks with John Fladd

The Jungle Bird

He stumbled in off the street, leaving the dust and noise behind.

“Afternoon, Mr. Peterson. The usual?”

“Hi, Charlie. I think I need The Bird today.”

Charlie mixed the drink and slid it to Peterson without a word. He knew from long experience that on days like this, words were like razors to the older man.

Peterson stared at the pink depths of his drink for a minute, then for a minute longer, then closed his eyes and took a long pull. For a moment — just the fraction of a breath — he was back in Kuala Lumpur. He didn’t even remember her name anymore.

All he had … was this.

The Jungle Bird was first created at a luxury hotel in Kuala Lumpur* in the 1970s as a welcome drink for arriving guests. It is often referred to as a tiki drink, but I think that is a bit misleading. Yes, this cocktail is built around rum and fruit — in this case, the classic combination of pineapple and lime — but it isn’t at all kitschy; it has an elegance about it. It dances on the edge of being almost too sweet, but is pulled back from the brink at the last moment by the addition of Campari, which adds bitterness and emphasizes the alcoholic taste of the rum. It announces to the world, in a quiet way, that you have hidden depths.

(* The capital of Malaysia. I had to look it up.)

A brief rant about pineapple juice:

In theory, you could juice your own pineapple, and if you were to find yourself somewhere with a ready supply of great, fresh pineapples, that would be an excellent idea. But for most of us the most consistent and convenient source of pineapple juice is from a can. That’s fine. There’s no shame in canned pineapple juice — except perhaps from a historical colonial perspective, but let’s set that aside for the moment — but there is a problem with it. Most cans of pineapple juice are enormous — generally 46 ounces. Even if you think ahead enough to buy a six-pack of tiny six-ounce cans of it, six ounces of pineapple juice is enough for four Jungle Birds, which means that either you are blessed with friends or you’ve settled in for the evening.

I get around this by using a silicone baby food freezer tray — basically an ice cube tray designed to allow parents to freeze neat one-ounce pucks of baby food for future use. Mine came with a snap-on lid, which means that I don’t spill the juice on my way to the freezer. Because it’s made of silicone, I can easily pop each pre-measured pineapple puck into a zip-close bag for future use without it sticking to the mold like it might in a traditional, metal ice cube tray. Just make sure to thaw your juice before adding it to your cocktail; frozen juice won’t melt any faster than the ice in your shaker and might throw your drink proportions off (30 seconds in the microwave is just about perfect to melt two ounces).

The Jungle Bird
Ingredients:
• 1½ ounces dark rum – preferably Myers’s or Pusser’s
• ¾ ounce Campari
• ½ ounce simple syrup
• 1½ ounces pineapple juice
• ½ ounce fresh lime juice
Pour all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, including the spent half of a lime that is left over from juicing it. (Why? I feel like it adds depth to the fruit flavor in the background of the drink. Can I prove it? Not even remotely.)

Shake the cocktail until it is very cold. You will know that it is cold enough when the outside of your shaker isn’t just wet with condensation but visibly frosts and your hands start to burn with the cold. Pain is the price you pay for excellence.

Pour into a rocks glass, discarding the lime rind, which at this point has given everything it has to this operation.

Historical purists will tell you to garnish a Jungle Bird with pineapple fronds carved into the shape of a bird. I feel like that was appropriate in the lobby of the Kuala Lumpur Hilton, but is a bit too precious for anywhere less exotic. Drink it ungarnished.
Peterson would not tolerate a paper umbrella.

Featured photo: The Jungle Bird. Photo by John Fladd.

Pimm’s Cup

Drinks with John Fladd

At this point in my life I’ve more or less made peace with my physical appearance, which can best be summed up as “rumpled.” I’m mostly OK with the fact that very few people will ever describe me as dapper. I will probably not be invited to sophisticated cocktail parties in the Hamptons, where I will casually lean against a doorframe, dressed in a crisp linen suit, making small talk with elegant women and men with monocles. And yet… There are days in late summer, when the heat and humidity collaborate to suck a person’s will to live right out through their pores, when the idea of drinking something civilized becomes extremely appealing.

That’s where Pimm’s comes in.

Pimm’s is a quintessentially British drink. Although brownish in color, it’s a gin-based liqueur that the Brits have sipped in a reserved sort of way for the past 150 years or so, while watching cricket or orphan-taunting, or whatever the Victorians were into. The traditional cocktail made with Pimm’s is called, reasonably enough, a Pimm’s Cup.

Here’s the thing about the Pimm’s Cup: It requires what English people call “sparkling lemonade” and a shocking amount of garnish. In the past I’ve always drunk a pared-back, minimalist version of the Pimm’s Cup — basically a Pimm’s and soda, with a single, important garnish. It has always struck me as being cold, crisp, and perhaps a little bit classy.

But, if I’m going to recommend a Pimm’s Cup, it only seems like due diligence to compare the two versions. And in the spirit of “in for a penny; in for a pound” it makes sense to go even a step further and compare both of them against an over-the-top premium version. So I did.

Sleek, Minimalist Pimm’s Cup
2 oz. Pimm’s
7 oz. plain seltzer
3” section of cucumber, cut in half lengthwise and bruised

1) In a tall glass, add ice, Pimm’s and seltzer.
2) Cut a three-inch section from a cucumber. Cut in half lengthwise, then lay it facedown on your table or counter. Spank it vigorously with the back of a spoon.
3) Yes, I know what I said. Just do it.
4) Add it as garnish to the drink, stir and enjoy.

Truth be told, this was the version of the cocktail that I was rooting for. It is crisp and classic.

Official Pimm’s Cup
2 oz. Pimm’s
5 oz. lemon soda (I used SanPellegrino)
2 orange wheels
2 slices cucumber
1 fresh strawberry, sliced
sprig of fresh mint

1) To a tall glass, add two slices each of orange, cucumber (unbruised) and strawberry slices. Feel free to cram them roughly into the bottom of the glass.

2) Add ice.
3) Add the Pimm’s and lemon soda.
4) Stir and top with a sprig of fresh mint.

I didn’t want to admit it, but this was a step up. Each garnish shone through and this was — OK, not superior to Version No. 1, but definitely more nuanced. Things become classics for a reason.

Trying Too Hard Pimm’s Cup
2 oz. Pimm’s
2 oz. homemade lemon syrup
5 oz. plain seltzer
2 orange wheels
2 slices cucumber
1 frozen strawberry
sprig of fresh mint

1) Make lemon syrup. Bring equal parts lemon juice and sugar to a boil with a pinch of salt. (Four lemons gave me about 1¼ cups of juice) Take it off the heat as soon as the sugar has dissolved, then steep the zest of one lemon in the syrup for about half an hour. Let it cool, then strain out the zest, which might make it bitter if you left it in.
2) Arrange orange and cucumber slices around the inside of a tall glass, so they look impressive from the outside.
3) Add ice.
4) Add Pimm’s, lemon syrup and seltzer. Stir gently.
5) Top with a sprig of fresh mint and a frozen strawberry. (The reason for using a frozen strawberry here is that when you freeze fruit, sharp ice crystals form that puncture the cell walls inside the berry. When you add the frozen berry to this drink, it looks like a proper, self-respecting strawberry, but it oozes strawberry juice into your cocktail, while still putting up a good front.)

The extra work and fiddly details were actually worth it. This version was definitely the sweetest of the three and if you are looking for that clean, pared-down taste, this is probably not the version for you. But the freshness of the mint and the flavors of the fruit really set off the taste of the Pimm’s itself.

After drinking three Pimm’s Cups, I feel as rumpled as I look.

Featured photo: Pimm’s Cup. Photo by John Fladd.
John Fladd is a veteran Hippo writer, a father, writer and cocktail enthusiast, living in New Hampshire.

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