Well hello there cocktail chums. Time for a drink? If you check your watch, you’ll see that it is indeed #MasterofCocktails-o’clock – what perfect timing!
This week we’re making a little something I robbed from the St Germain website. It’s a ‘Go Lightly’ recipe, and it is *delicious*. We’ll of course be using St Germain’s excellent elderflower liqueur, and I’ve also gone ahead and amended the recipe a bit to make it more of a long drink.
Greetings all. Anyone fancy a drink?
We’re making a cocktail using Champagne for this week’s #MasterofCocktails – it’s The Magic Number recipe. It’s not a ‘Champagne cocktail’, as that’s a thing in its own right. This is a variation on a recipe I nicked from the Kamm & Sons website. Variation only in quantities, not ingredients. It’s a great showcase for the Kamm & Sons British Aperitif – which is sort of bittersweet. Closest comparison would probably be Campari.
Anywhoo – this really is a very easy-to-make drink, and is a break from the Christmas tradition of ‘all the Champagne’.
An incredibly simple drink this week, which is so often fucked right up by one stupid ‘ritual’. Sugar Cubes. I saw a cocktail this week from some place in London which they’re claiming is the world’s most expensive (at £8888) and from the looks of it, even at nearly £10k, you get a load of idiotic sugar-sludge in the bottom of your glass.
Using a sugar cube instead of sugar syrup not only makes a nonsense of the ‘as served’ concentration of sugar as more and more will dissolve as the drink is consumed, but even worse, it provides hundreds upon hundreds of nucleation points (the sugar granules), which are pretty much guaranteed to knock all the fizz out of champagne. Not exactly ideal for a Champagne Cocktail recipe, eh? So, for that reason we’re going to be using sugar syrup like a non-mental person.
We hope you were all able to enjoy a little time with the family, some nice pressies and plenty of bread sauce over Christmas, now it’s time to look towards New Year. That, of course, is all the excuse you should need to indulge in a little mid-holiday excess! This week’s #MasterofCocktails recipe is therefore a festive twist on the French 75 – tasty, refreshing and indulgent.
A good party drink this as we reach for the Champagne and wish good riddance to 2013!
It’s been a quite the year here at Master of Malt though (I’ll probably do a round up at some point), and we’ve also celebrated the arrival of many, many tiny humans, with babies seemingly popping out all over the business like Champagne corks on New Year’s Eve!
One day we went on an expedition into our warehouse, looking to see what wonders and secrets it might hold. It’s a dark, ominous place, with towering piles of boxes, creaking noises all around, and a creature known only as “the thing” – it lives on malt and the occasional placement student…
Kitted out in leather jackets and fedora hats, we’d reached the farthest corner of the building (we’d only been this far once – when scaling the north face of Mount Talisker, a leaning tower of Island malt). Pushing a curtain of cobwebs aside with a bullwhip, our jaws dropped. Before us there stood a good-sized pile of our house champagne, Cattier Brut, covered in dust. More…