Blitzed Smashed and Drunk: Building Cocktails and Breaking Down Flavor Profiles

Originally, I wasn’t planning to write about the art of breaking down a cocktail this week, but after hearing from @'ArcherVice', I thought this might serve as a good jumping off point to a much larger topic – food and beverage pairings. Pairing food and beverages is a big deal, be it when dating, going out with friends, hosting affairs or going to a client dinner. Although I am partial to the idea of “Drink what you like”, when I am out, I try and choose my drinks to enhance my meal and fully enjoy what I am going to eat. The crux of pairing food and beverage is understanding the balancing act and interplay between the ingredients and their preparation. The same idea that goes into food and wine pairing also into building a cocktail. It’s also easier to discuss building flavors and pairing them when discussing something that you can tangibly see constructed and how it shapes the way we drink and, more importantly, how we pair food and beverage.

The easiest way to understand flavor is by just picking a bottle of something random and pouring yourself a drink to sit and sip. Can you describe what your tastings? Do is have a clean crisp flavor reminiscent of water? Is there peaty flavor? Is there a smokiness or a sweetness that stays on your palate? Does it taste herbaceous and floral or earthy and chalky? Do you get berries rolling across your tongue? Is there a creaminess to it that distinctly overpowers all of the other flavors? Does it taste sweet like sugar or more drawn out and lingering like molasses? Does it have an overbearing taste of ethanol? Can you pinpoint the basic flavors of what you are drinking? That is the first step to understanding how flavors come together in order to pair them.

Now that we understand what we’re looking at, it becomes much easier to break down the components and flavors that we are trying to bring together into individual parts and understand why it works when combined. Seeing as alcohol can be easier to work with than food can for explaining the interplay of flavors since there are so few components we are working with, I’ve chosen three very different cocktails, all with different ingredients, profiles and compositions that speak to the vast possibilities of how flavor ties things together. I have chosen the Rusty Nail, the White Russian and The Cosmopolitan. All three of these drinks pair ingredients that don’t necessarily complement each other; in fact both the Rusty Nail and the Cosmopolitan have ingredients that don’t want to play fair with each other. Still, we can best understand the all-important interplay between flavors by looking at what each ingredient brings to the table.

Our first two drinks are a Duo and a Trio respectively. The Rusty Nail and the White Russian serve as great jump off points to understand how flavors can come together. These drinks have limited ingredients and are meant to showcase the liqueur component. Ironically, most of these drinks have “Love it or Hate it” written all over them; you either readily enjoy them or you don’t. In particular, the Rusty Nail epitomizes that philosophy. When you look at the ingredients, it is nothing more than Scotch and Drambuie. Depending on who you ask, I’ve heard all sorts of ratios being used, some which favor Scotch over the Drambuie and others flip flopping the ratio. I prefer my Rusty Nail as follows:

  • 2 Ounces of Blended Scotch
  • 1 Ounce of Drambuie

Add both ingredients to an ice filled glass and stir until glass is significantly chilled.

What you end up seeing here is two very distinct ingredients being brought together to make an interesting cocktail. First, you have the blended scotch which will carry grain notes, a hint of smokiness and a bit of peppery spiciness. Drambuie, on the other hand, is the granddaddy of honey liqueur; Wild Turkey American Honey and Jack Daniels Honey are the poor man’s imitation of a 250+ year old drink. In the Drambuie, you find the subtle presence of scotch, which provides both a base and a more than hefty base to build on, amidst a very forward honey sweetness accompanied by strong herbal notes and subtle spiciness. By adding the two together, something unexpected happens. The harshness that is often attributed to Scotch is mellowed by the Drambuie which, in turn, mutes the honey flavor without destroying the overall sweetness of the drink. This allows secondary flavors in both the Scotch and Drambuie to come forward and create a pleasant drink. Even substituting a blended Scotch with other whiskeys or even a Mezcal and produce an astonishingly flavorful cocktail. Having a Rusty Nail with Laphroig or Lagavulin will bring out a smokiness and a peatiness that is balanced against the sweetness. If we want to be a bit less classy, we can make our Rusty Nail with a nice Canadian Rye Whiskey and sip our Donald Southerland (yup, that’s what it’s called) in our Canadian Tuxedo ‘eh.

Our second drink of choice, the White Russian, allows us to see what ingredients can do to entirely change the composition of what drink. Lebowski jokes aside, because this could be rife with them, the White Russian is nothing more three simple ingredients. It resembles the Alexander but comes nowhere close to tasting like one. Unlike the Alexander, which draws its flavor from brown Crème de Cacao, the White Russian uses Kahlua to produce a memorable drink. The White Russian, being only 3 ingredients, shouldn’t see much of a change when all three are mixed together except it does. The White Russian is a great example of the 2:1:1 ratio and can be modified immensely, but it is just simply as follows:

  • 1.5 Ounces of Vodka
  • 3/4 Ounce of Kahlua (or Tia Maria if that is your preference)
  • 3/4 Ounce of Cream

There are two ways to make this. The first is that you add the Vodka and Kahlua together into an ice filled Old Fashioned glass then top with cream and slowly stir together. The second, and my preferred way is to add the ingredients to a shaker, shake vigorously and then double strain into an Old Fashioned glass (or Cocktail glass if available).

The first two ingredients, the Vodka and Kahlua, create a Black Russian. The drink, named so because of the combination of a traditionally Russian spirit and the blackness of the Kahlua, is very much a liqueur forward cocktail. Vodka, although crisp and clean across the palate does not contribute much to the flavor of the drink. Instead, we look at the Kahlua to provide the bulk of the flavor. Kahlua, on its own, tastes similar to drinking a cup of coffee taken black and sweet. In addition to the obvious sweetness and strong coffee flavor, Kahlua also has notes of vanilla running through it. The Black Russian allows us to enjoy both the coffee and vanilla while diluting the sweetness a bit. Adding cream to the Black Russian changes the composition entirely and produces a far different drink. Cream is just a heavier, fattier milk. For lack of a better expression, it brings a creaminess to the Black Russian that isn’t there. When the cream is added and then shaken in, two things happen. First, air is introduced into the drink which creates an effervescence and lightness that wasn’t necessarily there in the first place. Second, the cream cuts the coffee flavor and allows the vanilla notes to come forward more prominently. This changes the nature of the drink significantly; as you move from coffee forward to a more vanilla forward drink you end up with a cocktail that feels like sipping an alcoholic chocolate milk. Just by adding cream, the entire complexion of the drink changes.

Oddly enough, in understanding what goes into cocktails, we start to see the interplay of how ingredients work together. There are times when balance is essential and a subtle shift can completely destroy a drink. Nothing speaks to that more the Cosmopolitan. Crack as much wise as you want, the Cosmopolitan is one of the hardest drinks in the world to make. Despite the reputation as a drink adored by Carrie Bradshaw and the Sex in the City crowd, the Cosmopolitan is not a drink for faint of heart. This cocktail is much maligned for its sweetness and is often made poorly and incorrectly. It is a drink that every bartender makes differently despite the fact that, for such a famous cocktail, it is quite hard to have it made properly.

The Cosmopolitan comes from the New Orleans family of Sours drinks. Like the name implies, the Cosmopolitan uses lime juice to help bring that citrus taste forward. The Cosmopolitan is considered to be an International Sour, or as it’s more commonly known – the Complex Sour. As you may recall, the complex sour eschews simple syrup in favor of using liqueurs to bring sweetness to a cocktail. Even then, the Cosmopolitan falls into a particularly special group of International Sours, the New Orleans Sour. To be a New Orleans Sour, a cocktail requires that the liqueur be an Orange Liqueur. Whether it be Cointreau, Grand Marnier, Triple Sec or Curacao, the flavor profile of these drinks is significantly altered by the presence of a dry orange taste. Such classics like the Margarita and the Sidecar come from this family of cocktails.
Although there is no real consensus as to how the Cosmopolitan should be made, is not particularly difficult drink to make. In fact, it’s extremely easy. I prescribe to the following recipe:

  • 1.5 Ounces of Vodka
  • 1/2 Ounce of Dry Orange Curacao (or Cointreau if you can’t find a nice Dry Orange Curacao like Pierre Ferrand)
  • 3/4 Ounce of Cranberry Juice
  • 1/2 Ounce of Lime Juice

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake well and double strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a Lime twist

There are a ton of variants. Some use citrus vodka as opposed to regular vodka. Some prefer triple sec or Cointreau. There are tons of recipes which use Rose’s Lime Juice (a no go in my book), or are far more reliant on Cranberry. I prescribe to using Cranberry Cocktail as pure juice happens to be extremely tart and unless you are using a small amount, pure juice can overwhelm the balance that there is to be had. Although I believe that this should be made with regular vodka, some bartenders will use a citrus vodka to help keep the drink even keeled. As you can tell, this doesn’t prescribe to the 2:1:1 ratio of making cocktails. Even moreso, it doesn’t conform to the Embury rules and the 1:2:8 ratio he believed in. It’s all over the map for good reason.

In deconstructing the Cosmopolitan, we have four ingredients with distinct flavors. Vodka, our base, is meant to be a dilutant to reduce the jarring flavors that the rest of the ingredients can bring. The lime juice brings an assertive sourness and a hint of bitterness. The orange liqueur provides the drink with sweetness and a subtle orange flavor to balance against the lime juice. Finally, we have the cranberry which provides an astringent tartness that is offset by a bit of added sweetness. The Vodka purely serves to dilute. So you end up with a drink that competes with itself to bring flavors forward. The problem is that it becomes easy to favor one ingredient over the rest creating an undrinkable cocktail. Add a bit too much lime juice and you have a cocktail that sees the sour overpower; adding cranberry juice no longer makes the drink a shade of light pink and makes the tartness the dominant component. Most bartenders tend to make it a little too sweet because, in their minds, it’s easier to have a sweeter drink than one that favors the lime or cranberry. This creates a drink that no longer represents what it is supposed to be, a refreshing sour that is subtly tart without being too sweet.

At the end of the day, we end up with three different drinks describing how the interplay of flavors work. This holds true in all mediums of cuisine. Braising produces a different profile than smoking does; grilling brings a far different flavor out of a dish than does pan searing. When we look at flavors, we look at the entire picture. The entire idea of pairing is meant to bring the flavors of what we drink together with what we eat. When we understand the flavors and ingredients we are using, we can start to look at how they pair with other things. Whether it’s a Sauvignon Blanc with a Dover Sole, a margarita and a Carne Asada fajita, an IPA with a nice Goat Biryani, or a glass of tawny port and profiteroles, the entire idea of bringing flavors together is meant to enhance our dining experience. Good food tastes even better with good booze. Just like looking at how a cocktail will taste, looking at what we can expect from our food helps us shape our decision on what to drink with it. Next week, we’ll discuss what we’ll discuss what we look for as diners in our food to help us decide what we are going to pair it with. Until then… Drink well.

 

@"Frieds"- thanks for the very interesting post. Do you have your own outside blog where you link these posts from? I am looking to branch out from rum & cokes and vodka red bulls and enjoy your expertise.

 

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