Alcohol in moderation 'can help prevent heart disease'
"An alcoholic drink a day can help keep heart disease at bay, according to a review of 30 years of research.
The work, published in the British Medical Journal, showed a 14% to 25% reduction in heart disease in moderate drinkers compared with people who had never drunk alcohol.
Another article, by the same Canadian research group, showed alcohol increased "good" cholesterol levels... For many years, studies have suggested that drinking alcohol in moderation has some health benefits.
Scientists at the University of Calgary reviewed 84 pieces of research between 1980 and 2009.
One unit of alcohol in the UK, equivalent to half a pint of normal beer, contains 8g of pure alcohol.
This review showed that the overall risk of death was lower for those consuming small quantities of alcohol, 2.5g to 14.9g, compared with non-drinkers. The researchers also say regular moderate drinking reduced all forms of cardiovascular disease by up to 25%."
So I guess this means "bottoms up" ... in moderation of course ;)
I assume that this cocktail, like its cousin who we reviewed earlier this week, The Pegu Club, was named after the club it was created in: The Stork Club. This cocktail is almost identical to The Pegu, except this one has some orange juice in it, the gin and cointreau are scaled back a bit and it is garnished with an orange twist instead of lime. I give you the Stork Club courtesy of Robert Hess:
The Stork Club
1 1/2 oz Gin
1/2 oz Cointreau
1 oz Orange Juice
1/4 Lime Juice
1 Dash Angostura Bitters
Shake with ice strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with an orange peel.
In my previous post, The Pegu Club Cocktail, I mentioned the renowned mixologist Salvator Calabrese, which reminded me of a funny commercial involving him making a cocktail while being driven by Formula 1 racer Michael Schumacher.
Recently I stocked up on fresh limes and I have been trying to find new ways to use them in cocktails, like we did last week here at Keep Your Spirits Up with the Caipirinha. Usually, when I find a new ingredient that I am interested in using in a cocktail, be it a spirit, fruit or anything else, I search for recipes by ingredient in one of three places:
After Plugging in lime I came across the usual suspects: The Margarita, The Daiquiri, Kamikaze, etc... Then one of them caught my eye... The Pegu Club Cocktail.
The Pegu Club Cocktail
The reason that the Pegu stood out for me is because in addition to lime juice it contains two ingredients which I really enjoy together: Gin and Cointreau (swappable w/ Triple sec & Curacao). In the past here at keep your spirits up we have wrote about at least two other cocktails which use those two ingredients: The Corpse Reviver #2 & The Jasmine Cocktail, both of which I recommend my readers and fellow cocktail enthusiasts try.
The Pegu Club Cocktail was invented at The Pegu Club (no, really?!), a Victorian style Gentlemen's club in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). You know, where Rambo 4 takes place and kills half the country. This club was created for British Army officers and civilians after the British annexation of Burma in 1885 and was one of the most renowned clubs in Southeast Asia mentioned by Rudyard Kipling in his novels. There are many different recipes for this cocktail but below I am providing you with Robert Hess' recipe.
The Pegu Club Cocktail
2 ounces of gin
3/4 ounce of orange curaçao (or Triple Sec)
1/2 ounce of lime juice
dash of Angostura Bitters
(dash of orange bitters)
Stir with Ice. Pour into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a lime twist.
According to Hess if you don't have one of the bitters you can still make this cocktail but he himself feels that it will be lacking. I only used Angostura bitters because I do not have orange bitters at the moment.
People have claimed that this cocktail's taste is reminiscent of that of grapefruit juice, I am not sure if that is how I would put it. I felt that The Jasmine Cocktail tasted a lot closer to grapefruit juice. The Pegu was sweet, sour and bitter all at once. It is an excellent thirst quencher for hot or warm nights. Make sure to give this one a try.
Last time we left off we had spoken about Cachaca. The most famous cocktail which utilizes Cachaça and happens to be the national cocktail of Brazil is the "Caipirinha". This cocktail is a good gateway drink to experience Cachaça, which may be hard to find, but, if you can get your hands on some Cachaca all you need is sugar, a lime, some ice, a low-ball glass & a muddler.
There are tons of recipes out there in regard to the proportions so I would like to share two which I have tried and enjoyed.
The first is from a book my wife got me as a birthday present, it is called "Classic Cocktails" by Salvatore Calabrese ("The Maestro"), who claims to be "one of the worlds leading bartenders".
Salvatore Calabrese's Caipirinha:
50 ml Cachaça
1 small fresh lime
1 1/2 spoons of powdered sugar (I used granulated)
Carefully wash the lime and remove the tips from the top and bottom, to remove some of the pith. Cut the lime in to wedges (going from top to bottom). Place the lime wedges and sugar in a low ball cup and muddle the lime so the juice comes out and mixes with the sugar until it is dissolved. Add the Cachaca and Ice (I like to crush my ice cubes) and stir. Place a straw in it and your ready to go.
Same as above but stir after adding the Cachaca and stir again after adding the ice.
Additionally, according to Hess: "if Cachaca is unavailable in your are you can substitute it with a good white rum". I dunno about this, with out Cachaca its not really a Caipirinha, more like a Daiquiri. Maybe if you use a rhum agricole like we spoke about in last post it would be some what closer. Still... Rum and Cachaca are different, the later is aguardente, not rum.
After discovering this cocktail courtesy of my wife it has really grown on me. Recently my wife went out with my sister and ordered a Caipirinha. Either the bartender botched it or had some other recipe that was the the equivalent of Winston Churchill's "dry Martini", where he waved a bottle of vermouth over the glass of gin, just substitute the gin with Cachaca.
I really recommend the Caipirinha to anyone who wants to experiment with Cachaca or who are fans of Mojitos, Daiquiries and rum to give this one a try.
Hi folks! We are back and gonna be better than evah!
Between papers for college and university plus work it has been very hard to post. Now things are getting back to normal at KYSU so we hope all you loyal fans (if there are any ;) will continue to follow us here
We have not touched on the subject of cocktails for a while on this blog. The last one I reviewed was "The Corpse Reviver". Since I have been away I have been trying some different cocktails which I hope to add soon.
Most recently I fell back in love with the "Caipirinha" after finding Limes in the neighborhood grocery store. Unfortunately by me Limes and good Cachaça are hard to come by. About two years ago I picked up a bottle of Cachaça 61 and tried making a Caipirinha with lemons... just plain wrong. Occasionally I would have some Cachaça & Coke, but as far as sipping goes 61 is an industrial Cachaca and just doesn't cut it. Although it does make a decent Caipirinha.
Some background on Cachaça for those who are not familiar
Cachaça is the Brazilian equivalent of a rhum agricole. Both of which are made out of fermented sugar cane juice as opposed to molasses, such as rums like Bacardi and Captain Morgan are made.
On a brief side note, recently I had an encounter with rhum agricole thanks to my father and enjoyed it thoroughly. I tasted La Favorite blanc, which is bottled at 50% abv, good for mixing and vieux (aged rhum) 40% abv , and good for sipping. rhum agricole is usually, but not always, made in the French West Indies with La Favorite being made in Martinique.
But back to our issue at hand...Cachaca... Also known as "aguardente de cana" or fire water is produced primarily in Brazil. According to USA TODAY "396 million gallons are consumed in Brazil annually". There are two types of Cachaca: artisanal and industrial as well as Silver (Prata) and Gold (Ouro) the difference has to do with the barrels and aging. Some of the well known industrial brands include: Ypioca (which we plan to review in the near future), Pitu, Cachaca 61 and the famous Cachaca 51 that most are familiar with due to their large market share. These industrial Cachacas are generally more for mixing in Caipirinhas and Batidas and less for sipping, although I have heard that Ypioca Ouro is sip-able. There are many artisanal/premium brands like Leblon, Cuca Fresca, etc... but the ones I'd really like to taste are the home made specialties.
My friend, Marcio from Rio de Janeiro, wants to invite me to try some hand made Cachaca he brought back from a four day trip out to the sticks in the country side of Brazil where the Cachaca is supposedly the best. He's really my kinda guy, I mean four days for some killer Cachaca... Awesome!
Well all this talk of Pastis has given me a hankering to discover some cocktails which put it to good use. One of my favorite ways to go about discovering new cocktails is by using the Cocktail data base's search engine. Their search engine allows you to enter either a cocktail's name and/or main ingredient, in my case pastis, and then it gives you all the relevant results.
After entering "pastis" in to the engine, I received 293 results. How do I go through all of these results you ask? well each cocktail has the ingredients listed next to it so I go down the list and picked out the ones which I had all of the ingredients for, or at least most of them, then I try to find an adequate substitute for missing ingredient. Lets see...looking through the results I come across: A La Française, already tried it in the last review. Absinthe American, nah, almost the same as A La Française. I tend to stay away from cocktails with raw eggs, not my bag. Then I saw it, The Corpse Reviver #2. I remembered reading about this cocktail, people raved that it was their favorite, how it has the perfect balance of diverse ingredients. So I thought to my self why not give it a whirl.
I went to check if I had the ingredient for it: Pastis (Phénix), check. Cointreau, check. Gin (Bombay Sapphire), check. Fresh lemon juice, check. LilletBlanc, nope, but I had Cinzano Extra Dry vermouth on hand. Now, I am sure Cinzano is not the best substitute, and I know someone will say "oh! how could you do that! substituting Cinzano for Lillet is a sacrilege." but hey, that's what I had on hand. I was also missing the cherry for garnish so I used a lemon zest instead.
Now onto some background about the Corpse Reviver:
According to a post by Robert Hess over at spirit world:
"The Corpse Reviver was in truth more of a "family" of cocktails, than an individual cocktail itself. The corpse reviver was no doubt intended as a morning after pick-me-up (aka. Hair of the dog), and besides that, there seems little to provide an indication of what specifically separated such a drink from one of the other well-known categories, such as a cocktail.
Of the various corpse revivers that were once floating about pre-prohibition, only two appeared to pop out the other side, and were listed in Harry Cradock's "The Savoy Cocktail Book", which is where we encounter what he simply listed as "Corpse Reviver #2".
This drink illustrates one of the important aspects of the craftsmanship of a well made drink. The balance of the ingredients listed here is so precarious that each one needs to be carefully measured to make this drink properly. The lemon juice also needs to be fresh, and you can't substitute common triple sec for the Cointreau." (I'm sure he'd disapprove of my substitution of Cinzano for Lillet, but hey, what can you do.) Jay, over at "Oh Gosh" has more on the subject. His ratio's are the same as the other recipes I've seen so far, Plus he has the "Corpse Reviver #1" recipe.
Corpse Reviver #2
3/4 oz gin
3/4 oz Cointreau
3/4 oz LilletBlanc (or in my case Cinzano Extra Dry Vermouth)
3/4 oz lemon juice
According to Hess: 1 drop absinthe (or absinthe substitute, such as Pernod)
According to Cocktail DB: 2 drops (1 dash) Pastis (I made mine according to this version, next time I'll try it according to Hess.)
Shake with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry.
There are variations on this cocktail in terms of the ratios. If you scale back the lemon juice and cointreau it becomes the "Miracle Cocktail". This cocktail is complex yet balanced. It is sweet, sour and Bitter. There are the sour notes from the lemon, a botanical and herbal flavor from the vermouth and gin and some sweetness from the cointreau. The finish is slightly bitter and you get that hint of the pastis anise/réglisse goodness. The color can be described as a cloudy-white with a yellowish hue to it, similar to that of diluted pastis. Certain flavors came to mind, such as the "White Lady" and the "Dry Martini". I see this as being a refreshing summertime cocktail. In fact after drinking it I must say I felt very refreshed. Now I know why they call this a "Corpse Reviver".I personally enjoyed this cocktail and recommend that you give it a go.
