The Brandy Crusta and "sweet" drinks

Every so often it occurs to (horrifies) me that most people don't fart around all day thinking about cocktails and mixology.

Last night for instance: I had just emerged from a three minute rage-blackout caused a customer returning a $12.00 cocktail that involved 6 different ingredients and flamed egg white in favour of a vodka with pineapple juice, because she had wanted "something sweet". 

I took a step back and reassured myself that this poor girl would look back on the error of her ways and laugh, but right now she just wanted a nice glass of juice that got her a little buzzed, her and her pals Cosmo Girl and Sour Appletini chick just not quite ready to step off the Malibu train and join the cool kids at mixology station, but that's okay.

Actually, it's more than okay, I'm beginning to see it as a huge opportunity, I need to identify those perfect "crossover" cocktails. The perfect breadcrumb trail of ingredients that can lead the novice imbiber from Apple Sourz to Campari in a few easy steps.

My first favorite is the Pisco Sour, which is an effective romancer of manys the tentative tippler, but some people just can't get over the whole egg white thing. So my next experiment will be with the 

Brandy Crusta (recipe plagarised almost directly from here)

1 ½ oz Brandy

¾ oz Grand Marnier

¾ oz fresh lemon juice
1/4 oz simple syrup
dash of maraschino liqueur

dash of Peychaud’s bitters

Shake and strain into a sugar-rimmed glass   

Garnish with spiral of lemon peel

I figure that the sugared rim alone is a huge size 13 foot in the door with most ladies, plus the garnish looks really sharp, and this recipe is a little sweeter than the old Jerry Thomas version, never mind the fact that the Peychaud's makes the drink PINK, so that's another sweet little crouton along the trail. 

I've been wrong before about what people want and the venerable ol' Hammy

isn't exactly a magnet for the more adventurous drinker...yet. Maybe high-fallutin pink drinks are the answer.

The Pisco Sour

Soon after my cocktailian 'rebirth', I figured that my first priority was to do my drinking homework. I'd drag my girlfriend around to the better cocktail bars in Vancouver and look deep into the list to see what 'vanity' listing the bartender had snuck on there. The kind of cocktails that the Sour Apple crowd wouldn't go near, but that cocktail nerds would eagerly lap up. One of our first safaris took us to the wilds of Main Street in Vancouver to the Cascade Room. There, stuck somewhere between Mojito and Margarita was the exotic-sounding Pisco Sour.

Honestly the notion of cheap Peruvian or Chilean brandy sounded fairly scary, cheap French brandy is bad enough, so it seemed unlikely that the addition of a little lemon and sugar could make this stuff palatable, plus the notion of raw egg in a drink was still a new one to me (oh how innocent I was).

However skeptical you are, a well made Pisco Sour looks amazing, a frothy head that cascades into a pale yellow, with the trademark three spots of bitters running slowly through the froth and settling on top of the body of the cocktail.

If you just slam one back, the flavours of the drink are fairly straight forward, like a really well made lemonade...with booze. Upon further analysis, the round, fruity, aromatic character of the pisco kind of wells up through the drink. I find that I perceive the aroma not while nosing the drink, but while actually drinking it. Anyway, the first one was nice, but nothing to write home about, but after trying a few other things on the Cascade's list, I found myself fully craving another Pisco.

Fast forward a few months when the Pisco Sour had been on my own cocktail list at the Hammy for a few weeks and suddenly these wayward souls would wander up to the bar sort of staring into empty, egg-encrusted glasses, dreamily saying; "I don't know what it is, but I had this here a few weeks ago and it's my new favorite drink".

One woman described her Pisco Sour as the "one perfect moment" of her vacation in Vancouver.

Here is the recipe I use for my

Pisco Sour

1.5oz Pisco Capel (it's the only one we can get in BC)

1oz simple syrup

juice of 1/2 a lemon (about 3/4-oz)

one egg white (about 1/2 an ounce will do if you use the pasteurized stuff)

3 drops Angostura bitters

Mix all ingredients except the bitters in a cocktail shaker and shake the bejeezus out of it with ice until the egg white is nice and frothy, then strain (I say double strain, all that shaking creates a lot of ice chips) into a small rocks, or parfait glass. Add the drops of bitters to the top of the foam and serve.

(a great trick for getting a really thick stiff foam is to "dry shake" the the lemon, sugar and egg white, which means to shake them without ice, the foam actually stiffens better in a warm environment, then add the pisco and ice and shake a little more).

Or if you like to play with fire, you must try THIS: How to Make an Angostura Scorched Pisco Sour