Vermouth julep

For my second drink last night, I asked Rhiannon for another low-proof drink, and she served up a julep.  How, you might say, is a julep low-proof with all that whiskey?  Good point, but like I said in an earlier post, a julep is anything with a spirit, mint, sugar, and ice as its only ingredients.  Rhiannon made me a vermouth julep.

2 oz Carpano Antica Formula vermouth

1 tsp demarara syrup

several mint leaves

Rhiannon muddled the mint in the julep cup, making sure that all the sides of the cup were aromatized before discarding the mint.  She then added vermouth and sugar, stirred, and filled the glass with cracked ice.  The garnish, as you see, was a beautiful bouquet of mint.

If we're talking about making a drink with vermouth as a main ingredient, Carpano is the way to go without a doubt.  Its rich, herbal character sets it apart from the better known and cheaper brands.  I hate that it's $32 for a liter, but what are you going to do?  Beauty can be expensive.

Lillet cobbler

I've been away from this blog for a while, not for lack of drinking, though.  I don't know what I've been doing but I think it must've been fun.  

Last night, I was exhausted from work and lack of sleep, but I drug myself to Cure for 3 drinks, anyway.  What a horrible life.  

I wasn't interested in drinking much, for sure, and didn't even want to be able to feel it much, so I decided (as I have recently been wont to do) to go low-proof.  Low gravity, wine-based mixed drinks are a venerable bunch, and they've been much-neglected recently.  I asked Rhiannon for a cobbler of some sort, and she delivered with this:

This drink was awesome, and not just because it made me the guy with the best looking drinking vessel in the bar.  Cobblers, as I've posted before, are just a bit of wine (or a spirit), a little sugar, some fruit and some ice, served with a straw.  I presumed this would be a sherry cobbler, so i was surprised to taste how incredibly light the taste was.  In fact, Rhiannon made me a Lillet blanc cobbler.  I don't know her exact proportions or whether she added a small embellishment to the classic cobbler recipe, but I'm sure it was something like this:

2 oz Lillet blanc

1 tsp simple syrup

a slice or two orange

plus some cracked ice in a julep cup.

Garnish with fresh fruit and serve with a straw.

Harry Johnson's 1888 Bartender's Guide calls the Sherry Cobbler "without a doubt the most popular beverage in the country, with ladies as well as with gentlemen."  Deservedly so.  In the last half of nineteenth century, only the mint julep approached the cobbler's popularity.  It's also worth mentioning that the cobbler, according to David Wondrich, was the application which first fully utilized and popularized a new American invention, the drinking straw.