4 posts tagged “gin”

It’s a nice calm easy Independence Day weekend at The Aerie this year.  In addition to our national holiday, the weekend is always one of the biggest for tennis fans – this is the weekend of the Wimbledon finals.

So, to honor, I’m sorry, honour our nation's forefathers and tennis heroes alike, we made a very good cocktail from the latest issue of Imbibe Magazine.

The English Afterthought

3 oz gin
¾ oz St Germain liquor*
1-tablespoon fresh blueberries
1-tablespoon finely chopped ginger
Ginger beer**

In a Collins glass or large tumbler, muddle the blueberries and ginger.  Fill the glass with ice and add gin and St. Germain.  Stir and top with ginger beer.  Garnish with a skewer of blueberries.

d36 --- English Afterthought

This drink is very tasty and effervescent – perfect for a relaxing summer afternoon.   The mix of the tart blueberries, sharp ginger, sweet liquor and aromatic gin make for a great drink.

Cheers!

* St Germain is an elderflower liquor that has a very light, sweet honey-ish-but-not-quite taste.  It rocks.  In a pinch, you could probably substitute Drambuie, but I’d use less, I think.

** Ginger beer is a carbonated ginger soda that has a more intense ginger flavor than ginger ale.

I had a whole “Friday Night Happy Hour” ready to go in my head today.  I was going to write about a new drink that I’ve been working on (I’ve been trying to reconstitute one that I had at dinner in Chicago in September... and I think I finally got it) – but I actually ended up going out with some friends and former co-workers for a Friday Night Happy Hour.  So, the Blackbird Orange will have to wait…

So, another thing caught my eye in the scientific literature the other week – namely the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, in which a paper described the use of very low pressures and temperature to distill a better gin.

House Gins

Now, your physical chemistry might be a little rusty, but it so happens that when you decrease exterior pressure, liquids will boil at a lower temperature.  The bright fellows that published this paper (they work for Bacardi) did experiment where they compared a gin distilled at normal pressure and about 80C, with one distilled at ~1/10000th atmospheric pressure and -15C and found that it produced a gin “cleaner, and the flavor more crisp and refreshing…quite extraordinary, superb really…”  with 10x fewer impurities, like the wonderfully named phellandrene, which apparently ain’t so great for gin.

Bad for gin

What does this mean for your martini?  Probably not much right now.  Creating that scale of vacuum and low temperature on an commercial scale may not be very practical.  But it might not be too long before we see some “small batch” gins made by vacuum distillation.  That might be one that I add to the house collection!

Nothing cures a blogging slump like a good meme....

The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

Wow 10 years ago I was living in Northern Illinois and working in drug discovery for Abbott Laboratories.  I had just finished my first NMR structure of a protein that was pretty important at the time.  Important enough that the group that beat us to the structure by a few months published their structure in Nature, and so I had to settle for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* -- but that’s cool.

I was also about the mid-span of my time with She Who Must Not Be Named, though at that point I think she was more like She Who Is Causing You To Second Guess This Whole Thing – but that would still take a couple of years to play itself out.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?

Prepare for upcoming prioritization meeting with direct reports
Write up latest results
Meet a friend I haven’t seen in a year for lunch
Prepare slides for upcoming presentation
Practice piano

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Cheese and crackers (I’ve been really digging the big block of manchego cheese from Costco – though I will consistently mispronounce it as ma-cheng-o for reasons that I can’t quite identify), nuts (almonds and crunchy peanuts), gin.

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

The self-indulgent things I would do would be to have a house on the shore, in the mountains and in a big city, and travel travel travel.  Once I scratched that itch enough I’d donate a lot of my time (and that extra dough) to literacy programs, food programs for the poor and natural-space conservation efforts.

5) Places I have lived:

Camden NJ, Newark DE, Chapel Hill NC, Wilmington DE, Gurnee IL, San Diego CA.

6) Jobs I have had:

Janitor, paperboy, car buyer for leasing agency, college cafeteria worker, mass spec technician, organic chemist, biochemist-biophysicist, research program team leader

7) Bloggers I am tagging who I will enjoy getting to know better:

I thought I'd tag a few of the newer folks in my Neighborhood....SinCity Blonde; Jack Yan; Kellysouth; and Eli's Dad

*which has the unfortunate (and snicker-inducing) acronym: PNAS

Note:  Apparently, I’m starting a series of some of my favorite drinks using my favorite cocktail shaker.

The Sidecar is a one of the earliest known cocktails – thought to have originated in Europe around the end of the First World War.

The classic sidecar is made with equal parts brandy (or cognac), cointreau, and lemon juice.  In many ways, it is the grandfather to very popular drinks like the margarita.  Generally, you have the spirit, a sweetened citrus liqueur, and citrus juice (booze+sweet+tart = :D ).

Tonight, my choice is the Chelsea Sidecar.

Chelsea Sidecar

1 comment

The Chelsea Sidecar is made with gin in place of the brandy/cognac.  You can vary the ingredients to taste.  Here’s my version:

2 oz. gin (use a good one too, like Bombay Sapphire or Hendrick’s)
1 oz  triple sec (we like the Patron citronage, cointreau is good too)
¾ oz lemon juice

Shake vigorously in an ice-filled cocktail shaker and stain into a martini glass.  Enjoy!