Summer Cocktails and Appleton Estate Rum

San Francisco summers are a strange bird: Hot, sunny days are intermingled with grey skies, fog, and icy winds off the Bay. What is a girl to drink? Today Josh and I headed down to the Appleton Estate Rum cocktail event at Heaven's Dog. It was serving up three great summer sips for happy hour. Featuring rum (naturally!), the drinks were refreshing but also warm. Pull up the lawn chairs, we've found some great summer cocktails!

Here were the yummy cocktails featured today:

Savannah Planters Punch
A fruity and refreshing cocktail served over a beautiful bed of crushed ice. This is the dream of a drink you'd love to drink poolside—or at least when you're sitting at a bar wishing you were poolside. The delicate hearted, beware! The drink goes down easy, but it's backed with ironside Smith and Cross rum (114 proof, kids!). Appleton V/X, Delord Armangnac, Smith and Cross, pineapple, lime, Angostura bitters.



Son of a Gun
A bright but also warm and spicy cocktail, thanks to a heavy dash of angostura bitters (enough to make the drink burn dark pink!). Appleton V/X, Angostura Bitters, Lime, Orgeat.



Will P. Taylor Hotel Nacional Special
Another vibrant cocktail, almost creamy from the pineapple gum, brand, and egg whites, despite the absence of any dairy. It's like drinking summer clouds. Appleton V/X, lime, pineapple gum, apricot brandy, Angostura bitters.


Happy summer, all!

Queen Park Swizzle

I came upon a really lovely recipe for a Queen Park Swizzle this evening. The ingredients included lime and mint—great flavors for a summer’s night. Even more enticing: the blogger said he first tried this drink at Milk and Honey, of NYC and London fame!

So I tried it out. Here’s the recipe, via spiritedcocktails.com.



Ingredients:
- 2oz aged white rum

- 1/2 of a lime

- 1/2oz simple syrup

- 2-3 sprigs of mint
- A few dashes of Angostura bitters

- Club soda

- Plenty of crushed ice

Instructions:

The technique for this cocktail is a little different than anything we’ve used in the past. There’s no shaking involved, so we’re going to build the entire cocktail right in the glass. Start by squeezing half a lime into the glass. (Some people will choose to drop the shell of the lime in once you’ve squeezed it – your choice.)

Next add the simple syrup, and the leaves of 2-3 sprigs of mint. Finally, add the rum, and fill the glass with crushed ice. The use of crushed ice here versus cubes is important – you want the ice to really mix with the ingredients. Once you’ve added the crushed ice, use a swizzle stick to – yes – swizzle the cocktail. That is, use the swizzle stick to agitate the ingredients along with the ice, which will not only help mix everything, but also chill it (you’ll notice a nice frost form on the outside of the glass within 30-60 seconds.)

A few notable substitutions. I didn’t have any aged white rum laying around, so I used the white Bacardi I had instead. I also used some dark demerara sugar, not white sugar, since I thought it might work with the lime and rum.

Overall, the drink came out quite tasty! It’s light, bubbly, and a bit more spicy (due to the angostura) than similar drinks, such as the mojito and caipirinha.

I did have some initial issues with the layering—sipping from the top, I could only taste the soda water and angostura. So I had to give it a mix before everything came together (although this ruined the beautiful angostura float).

Making it again in the future, I’d like to peel back on the amount of lime. A proper highball glass would also capture the layered aesthetic better. But overall, yummy.

Before closing this entry, I’d like to speak to one aspect of my cocktail tonight. What, Bacardi white rum? Blasphemy, Noelle! Blasphemy! And to you, I say, I am unashamed of using such a common spirit. I don’t think we’ve ever addressed this explicitly in our blog, but Josh and I like to think of our cocktails as the drink for the common man or woman. Our goal is to make well-balanced cocktails that don’t need hoity-toity spirits you’ll have to smuggle in from the Netherlands. We love the craft and the taste and damn right we’ll be tasting the more exotic spirits at the bar—we raise our glasses to you, fancy ingredients and ingenious bartenders! But you won’t find that stuff in our kitchen. Our mission is to make classic cocktails affordably.

By the way, Spirited Cocktails is a delightful blog that seems to focus on serious, classic cocktails. The author, Joshua Hoffman, writes out of New York, which seems to give him some extra cred. ;-) I took the extra step and added the blog to http://spirits.alltop.com, so you can also look for it there. I look forward to trying out many more drinks from this blog.

Summer Cocktails

Yesterday I wrote about an article by Gary Regan on 10 Essential Cocktails. There's another noteworthy link on that same page: Summer Cocktails. Some great ideas there.