Silver or Gold: A Comparison of El Espólon Tequilas

El Espólon tequila has made a fairly recent reentry to the American market, this time with some rather attractive bottle designs. I first stumbled upon the brand while looking for a reasonably priced reposado tequila to supplement the tasty but somewhat pricey Corralejo on my shelf. Tastings.com reviewed it quite favorably and a local store had recently started stocking it. With a quite reasonable price point of $27 for both the blanco and reposado bottlings, I was pretty much sold.

El Espólon Blanco


The younger of the two bottlings, this tequila is crystal clear. On its own or in a more delicate drink like a margarita, there is an undeniable harshness to this spirit that I find somewhat off-putting. Either because of the roasting process or the hearts cut being started a wee bit too soon, this just isn't quite as smooth as I would hope for from a spirit that markets itself in the 'premium' category, no matter how debased that adjective may be these days. Underneath that less pleasant layer, there are significant amounts of agave flavor coupled with somewhat indistinct fruit flavors. Thus, while it makes a reasonable base in drinks with other strong flavor components, I don't think that it's sufficiently refined to be the anchor in simpler drinks. Here's one example where I think it works fairly well, a margarita variation with cinnamon syrup and falernum providing a one-two punch of flavor to balance the blanco tequila's assertive nature.


Canela Sunset

1.5 oz blanco tequila
0.5 oz lime juice
0.25 oz orange-kumquat tincture
0.25 oz cinnamon syrup
0.25 oz falernum

Combine all ingredients, shake with ice and strain into a chilled glass.

This is unfortunately going to be a little tricky to make. Unwilling to pony up for Gran Marnier or Cointreau, I turned to the Homebrew Underground's Orange Kumquat liqueur recipe. After making my last batch, which would have produced more than a liter of finished liqueur, I decided to not add any sugar syrup and essentially make liqueur by adding the proper amount of simple syrup each time to make it in situ for each drink. What this also allows for is substituting in different syrups instead of regular ol' simple. So in essence I'm adding 0.5 oz of orange-kumquat-cinnamon liqueur to the drink. 0.5 oz of orange liqueur and 1 tsp each of falernum and cinnamon syrup is a decent substitution, though you'll want to add a bit more lime juice as well to balance the sweetness and overall the drink won't be quite as spicy.

El Espólon Reposado


This tequila is aged for six months, which has the effect of adding a very pale golden color to the spirit and rounding off many of the shaper edges found in its blanco cousin. There is still quite a bit of agave flavor, but it's less aggressive and helped by a small dose of vanilla and spices, unsurprising results of barrel aging. I'd like to say that there are overtones of pineapple, but I'm not sure I can quite put my finger on the fruity notes in this tequila. While it works beautifully in a margarita, especially with the cinnamon and clove-tinged orange-kumquat liqueur mentioned above, it also slots well into one of the more bizarre drinks to come out of Beachbum Berry's books:

J

Jim's Special

2 oz dark Jamaican rum

2.5 oz reposado tequila 

1 oz lime juice

1 oz passion fruit syrup (Trader Tiki)

0.5 oz orange liqueur

0.25 oz simple syrup

0.25 orgeat syrup

Combine all ingredients with a small handful of crushed ice, blend for five seconds and pour into a double old fashioned glass or similarly sized glass filled with more crushed ice.

Yes, rum and tequila can play well together. There are a lot of strong flavors playing around including dark Jamaican rum (I used Coruba), which tends to have an almost burnt sugar flavor, to the tequila, which brings its distinctive vegetal agave, and the passionfruit syrup, which is an explosion of fruitiness with a sour edge. Balancing those elements are the orange liqueur (the cinnamon and clove of the orange-kumquat liqueur also slot in fantastically here) and orgeat, which somehow manage to do the job. Each part is in tension with the other, but they come together in a delectable whole. Don't believe me? You can also scale this drink down to half size, which is much more manageable and less likely to leave you sitting on the floor.

To summarize, I can heartily recommend the reposado bottling. It's an excellent deal that compares favorably with the other two reposados on my shelf, which cost $5-10 more. However, I'd skip the blanco. It isn't particularly distinctive, offering nothingthat the reposado doesn't but brashness. Even more damning is the fact that unlike most other tequilas, there is little to no price premium for the reposado over the blanco. Hopefully the distillers will be able to refine the blanco and differentiate the two in future, but right now the choice is clear.

Homemade Gin

A few months back, I was kvetching about the lack of high-proof gins available in the US. While that still bugs me, I decided to take a page out of Jeffery Morganthaler's book and make my own.

My recipe diverged a bit from his, mostly because I was trying to make something akin to Plymouth Navy-Strength gin. There are seven listed botanicals in Plymouth and I was able to get all of them from without much trouble. For anyone in the Portland area, Limbo, off SE 39th & Holgate, is an absolutely fantastic place for getting herbs and spices.

Experimental Gin #1

400 mL 100-proof alcohol
1 cardamom pod
1/4 tsp coriander pods
1/4 tsp angelica root
3/4 tsp juniper berries
1/4 tsp powdered orris root
1 Tbsp orange tincture
3 Tbsp lemon tincture

Lightly crush all solid ingredients and add to liquid. Seal and store overnight, shaking occasionally. Filter through coffee filters until sufficiently clear.

For something where I was fudging a lot of the measurements, this turned out rather well. I probably could have filtered it a time or two more, largely because of the powdered orris root (I need to find it in unground form at some point), but it's no big deal. The orange and lemon tinctures were also shortcuts because I happened to have them on hand, but a couple of strips of orange and lemon peel (without any white pith) would work just about as well. This recipe used a mixture of Everclear (95% EtOH) and water, but 100-proof vodka will work too if you can't get your hands on the former. Ultimately I'd like to try making batches at different proofs to see how the flavor profile changes depending on the extraction efficiency of various flavor compounds.

Much like Morganthaler's recipe, this is entirely provisional. I was aiming for a particular set of flavors, but you should feel to adjust it to your own tastes. A lot of his suggestions for additional spices to try are good and I would add cucumber to that list if you happen to like gins such as Hendricks or 12 Bridges. Also, this wasn't a particularly juniper-forward gin, so if you want more of that evergreen snap, you should add some more.

In no small measure, my ultimate reason for wanting to make high-proof gins came from an article on Oh Gosh! about a gin-based tiki cocktail, the Winchester. Since it's a) hard to find and b) a bit spendy, I've yet to plonk down the cash for a bottle of Martin Miller's Westbourne Strength gin. While my own version doesn't have the visual clarity, it is certainly up to proof and then some. In trying to make my own Winchester, I had to make a few substitutions due to other missing ingredients, but the final product was pretty good.

Pseudo-Winchester
0.75 oz Ransom Old Tom Gin
1 oz Experimental Gin #1
1 oz Hendrick's gin
0.75 oz lime juice
0.75 oz grapefruit juice
0.75 oz Yellow Chartreuse
0.5 oz grenadine
0.25 oz ginger syrup
1 dash Angostura bitters

Combine all ingredients, shake with lots of cracked ice and pour unstrained into a chilled single rocks glass or tiki mug.

If you haven't glanced at the original Winchester recipe yet, I'll fess up and point out that I had to sub just about every ingredient on the list, except for the juices and syrups. I also eased up on the Old Tom, both because of the higher proof of my experimental gin compared to the MMWS and because the Ransom Old Tom has an awful lot of cardamom, which can easily overpower a drink. I also don't have any St. Germain (yes, I am a terrible cocktail blogger). The Yellow Chartreuse was the most floral liqueur I had on hand, so in it went (probably bumping up the alcohol content of the drink a bit as well). Combined with the Hendricks, which is a rather floral gin, the overall flavor profile is hopefully reminiscent of, if not exactly the same as, the Oh Gosh! recipe.

This is quite a powerful drink, both in terms of alcoholic strength and flavor. There was still a lot of cardamom (I might bring down the Ransom a bit more and sub in some Plymouth if I was making this again), but the ginger bite, floral and herbal flavors from the gins and liqueur still made themselves known. I actually forgot to add the Angostura bitter straight off and had to add them later, but the drink has a fairly similar flavor profile even without them. The bitter simply accent what is already present and give the drink a bit more snap. The other elements tend to play supporting, but still important roles, with the grenadine and lime balancing each other and providing a nice fruity roundness and the grapefruit adding it's own bitter character to that of the gin.

It's been fun to explore the realm of non-rum-based tiki drinks and I'm hoping to get to more of it in the future. While rum will always be my main love, there's plenty of tasty drinks to be made with other base spirits.

Whiskey Tropicals

My recent review of bourbon and rye whiskies got me thinking about new ways to incorporate whiskey into tropical drinks. While whiskey may not have quite the same range as rum, there still quite a bit of variety that can be mixed to provide new flavor combinations that are unlikely to be found in a single product.

An Is Fearr
1.25 oz Bushmill's Black Bush Irish Whiskey
1 oz Rittenhouse Bonded Rye Whiskey
0.5 oz orange liqueur
0.75 oz lemon juice
0.5 oz orgeat
0.25 oz simple syrup (or to taste)

Combine all ingredients, shake with ice and strain into a chilled old fashioned glass.

Apologies if I got the Gaelic wrong. The internet can only help so much.

The Bushmill's Irish whiskey is something of an odd beast as it's aged in used oloroso sherry barrels for  some of its life, which adds a distinctive fruity raisin flavor to the usual single malt character. There's also just a hint of wine, which makes me think of the brandy notes in rhum agricole. Rittenhouse has tons of spicy character, somewhat analogous to a full-bodied Jamaican rum. So it made a certain amount of sense in my mind to put the two together into a sort of whiskey Mai-tai.

Ultimately, this is following the basic path of tiki drinks: start from a simple sour and elaborate by using multiple liquors, fruit juices and sweeteners to make a complex yet unified drink. Here we've started off with a simple whiskey sour, and elaborated on the ingredients to make something distinctive. By combining a floral, fruity whiskey with a funky, somewhat raw whiskey the drink has a number of different layers of whiskey flavor. The lemon juice gives it a bit of zip, while the orange liqueur gives it some sweetness and rounded fruity flavor. The orgeat has a distinct nuttiness that syncs up well with the whiskies.

While I'm not the first person to think of making a whiskey-based mai-tai, I'd like to think that this is a decent elaboration and in keeping with the spirit of tiki drinks. 

Highland Breezes
1.25 oz Elijah Craig 12-year bourbon
0.25 oz McCarthy's Single Malt Whiskey
0.5 oz Rittenhouse Bonded Rye
0.25 oz Trader Tiki's Passionfruit Syrup
0.5 oz lemon juice
0.5 oz orange juice
0.25 oz cinnamon syrup
0.25 oz Don's Spices #2 (50/50 mix of vanilla syrup and allspice dram)

Combine all ingredients, shake with ice and strain into a chilled glass.

While a bit of a departure from the original, the inspiration for this drink came from the Waitiki corner of the Cocktail Journal. I wanted to find a way to integrate the smoky flavor of scotch, a notoriously difficult liquor to mix with, into a tiki drink. Again, I'm far from the only person to head in this direction, but I think the results speak for themselves.

Unsurprisingly, the scotch tends to dominate the nose. There's a heavy dose of peaty-smoke, though a healthy whiff of cinnamon isn't too far behind. The smoke is much more subdued on the tongue. There is a distinct grainy flavor from the whiskies, with a rounded fruitiness from the citrus and passionfruit and various spicy notes from the syrups. Altogether a quite pleasant drink to sip. Especially if you're like me and have an organic chemistry problem set to wrap up.

While I should be returning to the world of rum in the near future, it's been fun to see how far I could push distinctly American, Irish and Scottish spirits into the faux-tropical world of tiki.

Quick and Dirty (But Tasty!) Ginger Syrup

After trying a few different types of commercial ginger beer (I'm especially looking at you, Reed's Extra Ginger Brew), none of them really seemed to have the kick that I was looking for. I tried Jeffery Morgenthaler's method, which was good, but always seemed to have a yeasty taste to it. The standard method for making ginger syrup, simmering chunks of ginger in simple syrup and filtering the resulting mess, worked alright but seemed to lose its kick fairly quickly. I finally despaired and gave up hope for a while.

Then, as luck would have it, I stumbled upon Summit Sips. While browsing the archives, I came upon a new recipe for ginger syrup. This, folks, is the way to go. All the convenience of ginger syrup, which lets you make as little or as much ginger beer as you want, with the snappy tasty of Mr. Morgenthaler's recipe. Truly a gift from the gods, especially if one happens to have a bit of a sore throat or a stuffed up nose.

Finally, it'd be a shame to leave without a recipe using ginger syrup. While I quite enjoy it in a Bourbon Special, it plays a little more prominent role in another tiki drink:

Queen's Road Cocktail (from Beachbum Berry's "Sippin' Safari")

0.5 oz lime juice
0.5 oz orange juice
0.5 oz honey syrup
1.5 oz gold Puerto Rican rum
0.5 tsp ginger syrup
1 dash Angostura bitters

Combine all ingredients, shake with ice and strain into a chilled glass.

Without the ginger syrup, this would be a passable but unremarkable cocktail. Some decent fruit flavor, the smooth sweetness of honey and gold Puerto Rican rum, which is usually good, but doesn't particularly stand out in comparison to Jamaican or Guyanese rums. The ginger syrup adds another new dimension to the drink, giving it snap and spice.

For those who like that ginger bite a bit more, you could easily bump the ginger syrup up to 1 tsp without disturbing the balance of the drink, though you might want to use a hair less honey syrup so that it doesn't get too sweet. Overall, it's a fairly simple but definitely tasty cocktail.

Orgeat Syrup Recipe

While I am far from the first person to venture into this realm, I wanted to add my fairly simple but tasty recipe to the crowd.

•2:1 ratio of blanched almonds to water, by volume
•1/4 tsp almond extract

Toast the almonds until fragrant, but not burnt. Blast the almonds into little pieces with a food processor. Simmer the almonds and water together at very low heat for an hour or two. By that point there should be an obvious layer of extracted oils from the almonds floating on top of the mixture. Strain the mixture through a tight mesh sieve or cheese cloth to remove the solids.

At that point, you should check to see how much volume you have. It'll probably be about half the volume of water you put in. Mix the almond milk you've just made 1:1 with simple syrup. Toss in a bit of vodka or grain alcohol if you like so that it will keep longer.

This syrup has a really great toasted almond flavor. Additionally, I find that it works well to smooth out rougher flavors and also gives just a bit of frothy head to shaken drinks. One drink in that vein is on Death & Co's menu. I had to guess at the proportions, but it turned out to be quite tasty.

Fix Me Up

1-1.25 oz Rittenhouse rye whiskey

0.5 oz Lustau Oloroso sherry

0.5 oz lemon juice

0.5 oz orange juice

0.25 oz simple syrup

0.5 oz orgeat syrup

1 dash Fee’s Old Fashioned Bitters

Combine all ingredients, shake with ice and strain into a chilled glass.

This is a great cocktail to sit and sip. Even with a fairly healthy dose of simple and orgeat syrups, it manages to be balanced, even edging towards being dry. The nutty flavor of the Oloroso sherry and the orgeat fit rather well with the spicy flavors of the rye whiskey. The herbal notes of the bitters also fit well with the rye grain flavors, while the juices give the drink a bit of snap. While I have no clue how this compares to the drink made at D&C, I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out.

Tiki Classics: the Navy Grog

Just in case it wasn't already abundantly clear, I rather like tiki drinks. And as many are now showing they weren't always the syrupy sweet neon disasters that they became after the first golden age of tiki. Instead, the originals, many pioneered by Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic were exquisitely balanced potions with significant amounts of thought behind their construction.

To me, one of the emblematic tiki drinks is the Navy Grog. Many tiki drinks began their lives as elaborations of a few basic recipes such as the daiquiri or the Planter's Punch. Starting with the simple combination of rum, citrus and sugar, there are a host of ingredients that can be slotted into each category to build an endless array of drinks. Another key feature of tiki drinks is the use of multiple rums to produce flavors that no single rum could contain on its own. The Navy Grog fits those features to a T, with multiple rums backed up by lime and grapefruit juices with honey syrup to sweeten the pot. All easily fit within the basic mold, but combine to produce a drink with a very different character from the daiquiri of yore.

Navy Grog

1 oz honey syrup
0.75 oz lime juice
0.75 oz grapefruit juice
0.75 oz soda water
1 oz Puerto Rican rum
1 oz Demerara rum
1 oz dark Jamaican rum

Combine all ingredients except for soda water, shake with ice and strain into a chilled glass. Top with soda water and add ice cone. (Recipe from Beachbum Berry Remixed)

I will admit that I usually stray from the recipe just a bit. Since I usually like my drinks a bit sweeter, the honey syrup (2:1) gets bumped up by a quarter of an ounce. From what I understand, there may have been a few issues translating the older Grog Log and Intoxica recipes, which used straight honey, to the Remixed recipes that call for 1:1 honey syrup, so it's probably keeping in line with how the drink is meant to taste. Additionally, while the original recipe calls for light Puerto Rican rum I tend to use gold rums, such as Ron Abuelo 7 Años or Bacardi 8 Años to give the drink a bit more depth. However, if you'd like to have a bit more snap, Flor de Caña Extra Dry might not be amiss.

Where you really get to play with the nature of the drink comes from the Demerara and Jamaican rums. These days we are blessed with quite a number of rums from each country, all with their own distinctive flavors. This allows you to construct very different drinks depending on what rums you pick. Want something more assertive that'll give you a kick in the pants? Use some Smith & Cross or Coruba for the Jamaican or Lemon Hart 80 for the Demerara. Want a drink that's smooth as the honey going into it? Shoot for Appleton 12 Year for the Jamaican or El Dorado 5 or 12-Year for the Demerara. Shooting for a balance between the two extremes? Pick Appleton V/X for the Jamaican and El Dorado 5-Year for the Demerara. I'm sure there are plenty of other options (Plantation Jamaican and Guyana rums are on my list to buy), but even just picking from my personal collection there's an enormous amount of flexibility.

To wrap this all up, the Navy Grog is a very tiki tiki drink that is well worth your while to mix up. Even with a fairly short list of ingredients (for a tiki drink), there's a lot of room to play around with flavors and make something new and exciting each time.

Amber Waves of Grain

While it's arguable that rum was America's first national spirit, these days whiskey is likely to be the first drink that they associate with the country. It didn't take long after settlers began moving west, especially once they had crossed the Appalachian Mountains, for them to realize that it was much more efficient and profitable for them to turn their grain into whiskey and sell that than it was to sell the grain itself. It didn't take long before America was a nation of whiskey drinkers and boy did they know how to put it away. By the early 1800s there were about 14,000 distilleries in the country producing millions of gallons of whiskey [1]. The average American drank roughly five gallons of absolute alcohol in a year, translating roughly into a normal bottle of 80-proof booze a week. Given that it was also a time of religious revival and a not insignificant portion of the population were tee-totalers, that average hides a rather bimodal distribution with a relatively small number of people consuming most of the alcohol.

American whiskies have generally fallen into two categories: bourbon and rye. In each case, this is primarily determined by the mash bill, with bourbon containing more than 51% corn and rye containing more than 51% rye. In both cases they are usually a mixture of corn, rye, barley and sometimes wheat, though there are a few 100% ryes on the market right now. Also, both types of whiskey must be aged in new, charred oak barrels (this creates a ready supply of used bourbon barrels that are often used to age rum). While the flavor is largely influenced by the mash bill, the barrel aging also rounds off some of the sharper edges of the spirit and adds vanilla, caramel and wood flavors to the mix.

Bulleit Bourbon

© Four Roses Distillery

On a whim I decided that I should finally get around to trying some whiskey, as it was one of the spirits that I hadn't tried. After poking around some of my favorite booze blogs for recommendations, there seemed to be a consensus that Bulleit was a really great value. I'll have to admit that my initial impressions were not overwhelmingly positive. Despite being a reasonably stiff spirit at 90 proof, it just wasn't punching through drinks in the way I expected it to. Compared to my usual base liquor of choice, rum, bourbon doesn't have quite the same heft. But after a little playing around, I finally figured out how to make it work well.

Bulleit Bourbon has a higher proportion of rye in the mash bill than a lot of other bourbons, which gives it a somewhat spicy and snappier character to counterbalance the smooth caramel sweetness that one normally finds in bourbon. All in all, this is a great spirit and a fine bridge between traditional bourbons and rye whiskies. And it makes a mean tiki drink.

Bourbon Special (adapted from Beachbum Berry Remixed)

1.75 oz Bulleit Bourbon
0.5 oz lime juice
0.25 oz simple syrup
0.25 oz dark falernum
0.25 oz ginger syrup
one dash Angostura bitters

Combine all ingredients, shake with ice and strain into a chilled rocks glass.

The original recipe called for ginger beer, but I prefer a bit more snap from ginger syrup made with fresh ginger juice. All of the spicy ingredients play nicely with the bourbon without completely obliterating it. The extra oomph that Bulleit brings to the table helps to give the drink some backbone. All in all, a great drink.

Rittenhouse Bottled-in-Bond Rye Whiskey

© Heaven Hill Distillery

 Normally, I have a hard time trusting liquor that comes with a plastic screw top. Even the metal ones are a bit better, but corks can't cost that much more and just look classier. But Rittenhouse Bonded is gold in disguise.

As noted above, rye whiskey takes the normal bourbon mash bill and more or less inverts it. So there's a whole new layer of flavors riding on top of the sweet-ish corn and caramel flavor of bourbon. There's a lot of spice, primarily cinnamon, grainy rye, a bit of wood and a touch of pepper. Together, the result is fairly dry but quite balanced. Surprisingly for being 100-proof, there's almost no alcohol flavor and very little burn. The best thing I can say about this whiskey is that it has depth. Which is probably why it's currently a darling of mixologists. Some liquors won't assert themselves very well when you want to pair them with other strongly flavored ingredients. Rittenhouse will easily hold its own without completely dominating a drink. And for something so distinctly American, it also works rather well in tiki drinks.

Monongahela Punch

1.5 oz Rittenhouse Bonded Rye

1 oz grapefruit juice

0.75 oz lime juice

0.5 oz cinnamon syrup

Combine all ingredients, shake with ice and strain into a chilled glass.

This is a simple substitution into the Donga Punch, but it works just as well as the original. I suspect that this is partially because many varieties of rhum agricole clock in at 100 proof as well, so the recipe is made to balance with a strong base liquor. Subbing in cognac works well too, which is part of why I still wish that I could get some Force 53. Rittenhouse works perfectly here, both because of its strength and because the spicy flavor of the whiskey synchronizes perfectly with the cinnamon syrup, while both are balanced by the acidic and bitter citrus flavors. If you enjoy whiskey at all, you owe it to yourself to go pick up a bottle of Rittenhouse (if you can find it). At roughtly $20, it's pretty hard to beat in terms of value.

[1] Watman, Max. Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw's Adventures in Moonshine. 2010.