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The Craft of the Cocktail: 3 Recipes You Need to Try
Brendan Cox
Creator of the Drinking Hobby
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Instagram: @mydrinkinghobby | drinkinghobby.com
Homemade Ingredients
I think that making your own drink components is widely underused at home. Making a vinegar based shrub, fruit syrup, or a tincture are all awesome ways to add fresh vibrant flavors to a cocktail. Try to use the highest quality ingredients, and pay attention to the techniques you use.
Pairings
Try creating (or choosing) a cocktail to drink while keeping in mind the food that you will eat it with. Beer and wine are often selected carefully for the food that accompanies them, but you don’t see that so much with cocktails. Maybe pick out a flavor in your meal and make a cocktail with a similar note, or try pairing a drink with a bit of acidity to “cut through” more bold flavors.
More Sherry Please
Lately I've been tinkering around with more sherry cocktails. Most people recognize the name from a dusty old bottle they bought for one recipe, but It gives a really great winter fruit cake type flavor to drinks that can work well with all sorts of other ingredients.
My Salad Secrets
By adding something sweet, and something crunchy. Let’s be honest here, the best part of a salad is not the lettuce, it’s all of the little hidden bits that have the most flavor. Orange pieces, strawberries, mango, pine nuts, and walnuts are some of my favorites, but just about any fruit or nuts does the trick for me.
Essential Ingredient
Angostura Bitters
Hashtags For Inspiration
Favorite Quote
“Comparison is the ultimate misery.”
The Peony Cocktail
INGREDIENTS
1 oz Gin
1 oz Lillet Blanc
1 oz Aperol
1 dash Angostura Bitters
1 lemon peel
METHOD
Add the liquid ingredients to a shaker tin or a chilled mixing glass. Add ice and stir until desired chill and dilution is reached. Strain over ice or into a chilled cocktail glass.
Solid Life Advice
For me, wellness means doing your best to keep a healthy balance in all the areas of your life whether it be relationships, fitness, the food you eat or anything else. Be honest with yourself and always try to be better.
My 5-Minute Meal
Brown rice with Braggs soy sauce. People make fun of me because it really is nothing special but for whatever reason I love it.
The Tailwind Cocktail
To put it simply, the Tailwind is a great after dinner drink. It has a touch sweetness with the Maraschino, Kummel and maple coming together in a almond extract/maple/rye kind of flavor. Then the Madeira wine brings warm mellow spices and the bourbon gives a strong backbone to tie everything down. It's most definitely a post meal type of drink, like a tailwind pushing you to the end of the night kind of thing. It sounded like a cool name at the time, so go with it and try it for yourself.
INGREDIENTS
¼ oz Rainwater Madeira
1 oz Bourbon
¼ oz Grade B Maple Syrup
¼ oz Kummel
¼ oz Maraschino Liqueur
2 dashes Angostura Bitters
3 drops 20% Saline (optional)
METHOD
Add all the ingredients to your shaker. Add ice and shake for about 8 seconds. Strain into a chilled rocks glass with ice. Express grapefruit oils over the top and either discard or drop in for garnish.
The Eyewitness Cocktail
A drink that takes the fairly obvious flavor combination of whiskey, ginger, and citrus, and tweaks it a bit with a background of tepache, and scotch. This drink took several stages in its' development for me to be really pleased with it. The first one I made was with Bourbon, lemon ginger syrup and tepache, super simple and pretty lackluster. Bourbon, tepache and ginger are all darker spicy flavors so it needed something to brighten the drink up. An expression of grapefruit oil over the finished drink did the trick quite nicely but it could still use a little something more.
INGREDIENTS
1½ oz Bourbon
1 oz Lemon Ginger Syrup
1 oz Tepache
½ tsp Smokey Scotch (variable)
1 Grapefruit Peel
METHOD
Add all the ingredients to your shaker. Add ice and shake for about 8 seconds. Strain into a chilled rocks glass with ice. Express grapefruit oils over the top and either discard or drop in for garnish.
