Preview: Bols Barrel Aged Genever

“Gives you a taste appreciated not only by man, but by woman too.” – Piet Van Leijenhorst, Master Distiller

Something may have been lost in translation, but Piet’s sentiments at The Vault last Monday were clear: Bols Barrel Aged Genever is dangerously drinkable. Nevermind that most of the women there could drink me under the table …

This is a grown-up version of the clear bottled Bols Genever that first came to the U.S. market a few years ago and has since spread just about everywhere. They are both Oude Genevers*, but the new one is aged a minimum of 18 months in new-ish Oak in a nod to the American Whiskey tradition. I’ve gone this far assuming you know what Genever is, but for the initiates, it is a traditional Dutch liquor made from distilled Malt Wine and neutral grain spirits flavored with herbs, most notably Juniper.

*Oude literally means old in Dutch, but in the context of Genever it refers to the style of production and not the age. Oude Genever is the “old style” and has >15% Malt Wine (the remainder is water and neutral grain spirits), while Jonge Genever is the “young style” and has <15%. Corenwyn is a different beast altogether …

Left to right: Jonge (Dutch market only), Oude Barrel Aged, Oude Unaged

In addition to being oaked, the new/old Barrel Aged Genever uses a slightly different recipe for its Malt Wine base than the currently available Genever. I snapped a shot of the Master Distiller’s secret recipe book, but I can’t quite make out all the details. Or read Dutch.

The secret ingredient is ... cough syrup?! No, that can't be right

Regardless, the most important difference is of course taste. Starting with the unaged Bols as a reference, the Barrel Aged bottle comes out sweeter, maltier and more complex. It has, basically, the same flavors of Juniper, Vanilla and Cinnamon. But at the same time, the aging marries them together and, unexpectedly, makes them easier to single out because they aren’t all trying to push each other aside. Whereas the unaged is fantastic for mixing in just about anything because of its distinct contrasts, the Barrel Aged is much better on its own or in cocktails that keep it simple.

Frank stirring an Aged Bols Manhattan

Think classics with only a few ingredients like the Old Fashioned, the Martinez, the Manhattan and the Julep. For the drinks with vermouth though, a little caution is warranted. The Barrel Aged does best with herbal, fruity spirits that compliment its flavor profile. The standard Noilly Pratt or Dolin isn’t going to taste quite right. Substitute Cocchi Americano or Lillet Blanc for dry vermouth and Carpano Antica or Cocchi Torino for sweet vermouth to get a more balanced drink.

Scary good Mint Julep

In the Netherlands you’d be far more likely to find this alone in a glass, scarcely sharing space with ice. Something to be sipped and savored like a good scotch or bourbon. Here’s the problem: in the U.S. Market there will only be four Genevers available when this is released and two of them aren’t all that interesting (Boomsma Jonge and Boomsma Oude). With whiskey though, you have an incredible number of choices across brands and styles and grains and ages, making it downright fun to try them all and discover where your tastes lie. I happen to love Bols, but it’s not necessarily for everyone and there’s nothing to directly compare their Genever to. I’ve got a smuggled bottle of Jonge (tastes like a good, lightly distilled wheat vodka) to have another style for comparison, but that’s it. Until we start seeing more Genevers coming into the U.S., the perception of Genever as a niche product is unlikely to change. That said, it does make a damn fine cocktail. Here are my favorites so far

Genever Julep

• 2oz Bols Barrel Aged Genever
• 1 sugar cube
• 8-ish mint leaves
• mint sprig for garnish

Place sugar cube in a Julep cup and muddle with a 1/2oz water. Simple syrup can be used instead, but you won’t get the crunchy bits of sugar that are essential to a classic Julep. Add mint leaves and gently muddle to release the oils. Cover with crushed ice and pour in Genever. Garnish with a sprig of mint.

Oude Martinez

• 1 1/2oz Bols Barrel Aged Genever
• 3/4oz Cocchi Torino or Carpano Antica Vermouth
• 1/4oz Maraschino Liqueur
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
• Lemon twist

Add the Genever, Vermouth, Maraschino and bitters to a mixing glass and stir with ice to chill. Strain into a coupe and garnish with a twist of lemon, making sure to get the oils on top of the drink and around the rim.

Manhattan (New Amsterdam?) / Perfect

• 2oz Bols Barrel Aged Genever
• 1/2oz Cocchi Americano
• 1/2oz Cocchi Torino
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
• Maraschino cherry

Add the Genever, Angostura, Cocchi Americano and Torino to a mixing glass and stir with ice to chill. Strain into a coupe and drop cherry to the bottom of the glass.

Bols Barrel Aged is scheduled for a September release with a suggested retail price of $49.99 / 1 Liter.

Who Gives a Fuck About an Oxford [Punch]?

I’ve drank those Arrack punches too

They’re cruel

So if there’s any other way

To mix a bowl

It’s fine with me, with me

After having hosted way too many parties at my apartment stuck behind the bar, manning the waffle iron, and shepherding sheets of bacon to the stove, I had enough. Having to cut one of them, and not trusting anyone to understand the ‘quirks’ of my appliances, I decided to make a punch and let people serve it themselves.

Enter Punch, David Wondrich’s authoritative tome on the history of ‘The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl.’ Having cut my teeth on the blindingly strong Chatham Artillery, I set myself up for failure with the Oxford Punch. Wondrich confessed it to be ‘one of the most complicated recipes in this book.’ Who could resist a challenge like that? Also, it has jello in it. JELLO!

Preparation

Like a great many punches, this one starts with an oleosaccharum … huh? Sugar and oil,  sugar and oil. Punch came long before the cocktail, but you’d recognize this best as a bartender squeezing a lemon peel over your cocktail and rimming the glass with it. This is to get the oils out of the citrus skin and into your glass so they can flavor and aromatize the drink. For punch, you’re going to extract the oil in advance and just mix it straight in.

The lemons and minneolas are so reflective because of the oil in their skin.

The oleosaccharum starts with peeling the citrus and putting it into a large glass bowl. This is easier if you strip the lemons in one piece, but it certainly won’t hurt your punch to have it in smaller segments. The recipe calls for 5 lemons and 2 Seville oranges, but the latter are hard to come by and are sadly out of season. As a substitute I used minneolas and orange bitters.

5 lemon and 2 minneola peels

The peels aren’t going to do much on their own and letting them soak in the punch to extract would take far too long (ever make limoncello?), so we muddle them with sugar. Ordinarily an oleosaccharum uses 2 ounces sugar for every peel, but we’ll be sweetening this later with capillaire so we’re only using 4 ounces here. Thoroughly mix and muddle the sugar with the peels and after as little as five minutes, you’ll start seeing the oil come out. An hour is enough to fully extract, so I make this first and then set it aside while putting together all the other components.

Oil = flavor

After waiting the appropriate time, juice your lemons and add them to bowl. You’ll need 10 ounces so you might need to grab a few more than the five you peeled. 4 ounces of Seville orange juice goes in as well, but since we’re lacking in that I added an extra 2 ounces of lemon juice, 2 ounces of minneola juice and a few dashes of orange bitters. Remove the peels, bottle the liquid, and refrigerate.

The next oddball component to this recipe is capillaire, which is really just rich simple syrup with orange flower water added. Boil 2 cups sugar in 1 cup water until it completely dissolves and add an 1/8oz orange flower water. Let the mixture cool, then bottle and refrigerate. If you’re impatient like me, a quick way to cool it down is put the pot you boil it in inside a larger pot of ice water.

The last component is the gelatin. Just read the box (omit the fruit juice), two 1/4 ounce packets will do.

All Together Now

Most of the hard work is done, now comes the fun part.  The base for this punch is an imperial pint (20oz) each of VSOP Cognac, aged rum and orange shrub, and half a pint (10oz) of dry white wine. The cognac I used was Adet, the rum Angostura 1919 and the orange shrub a 2:1 mix of Clement Creole Shrub and water. If I go to the trouble of making this again, I would upgrade the cognac and rum.

Since this punch isn’t going to be served over ice cubes that’d rapidly chill it, I recommend sticking all your bottles of alcohol in the freezer the night before so it starts out reasonably cold. Just mind the corks when opening them; they have a tendency to crack in the freezer.

Start by stirring together the cognac, rum, white wine and oleosaccharum in a punch container with two quarts water. (ed. thanks to John in the comments for pointing out the missing water) Next start adding the orange shrub and the capillaire: 24 ounces of the 2:1 creole shrub:water mix and 16 ounce of the capillaire should do. Start with half that and add from there. You can’t unsweeten a punch, so do just a bit at a time and taste as you go. When you’ve got it where you want it, add the 2 packets of gelatin you’ve prepared and stick the whole thing in the refrigerator until you’re ready to serve.

If you add ice, use a single large block so you don't break apart the gelatin

It’s a little tough to make out in the picture, but there is a layer of gelatin on top that’ll end up in your cup when you ladle it out.

Jello, Really?

Originally they would’ve used calves-foot jelly (this is from 1827!), but we’re just going to cheat a little bit on that point of history. It’s easy to associate jello and alcohol, especially poorly made jello shots, with all manner of douchbaggery. I did too, until I tried this punch. You may get a bit of snobbery from people who don’t like the idea of gelatin in their glass, but just tell them it’s historically accurate ;)

The jello does two things: adds texture and makes the punch seem less alcoholic. The texture, well, some people aren’t wild about it. If it’s a problem for them, give them a straw and tell them to suck it up. As for less alcoholic, the jello adds something to chew in the drink and, although it really is just perception, makes you feel like it isn’t 15% alcohol. When I made it I did warn people of this, but nevertheless the punch was finished remarkably fast. Quoting a nameless friend’s remarks from the following day (at 3PM!)

“This is the sickest ive ever been in my entire life. 100% not joking. Never drinking again. Haha” – anonymous

Be careful with this; it can be far too easy to overindulge.

Cheat Sheet

Base

• 20 ounces VSOP Cognac
• 20 ounces aged rum
• 10 ounces dry white wine
• 24 ounces orange shrub (16 ounces creole shrub, 8 ounces water)
• 64 ounces water

Oleosaccharum

• 5 lemon peels
• 2 Seville orange peels
• 4 ounce sugar

Citrus

• 10 ounces lemon juice
• 4 ounces Seville orange juice

Capillaire

• 16 ounces sugar
• 8 ounces water
• 1/8 ounce orange flower water

One last thing, and I can’t impress this enough, taste the punch every step of the way. These proportions are guidelines and will depend on the sweetness, freshness, strength and bitterness of your ingredients. Please don’t just throw all this in a bowl; you’ll be unhappy with the results. It may also cause blindness.

Recipes: Split Turkay

Update: According to David Wondrich, “Turkay” was originally “Durkee”. It “seems to have been invented by I.D. Gilmour at the Grand Hotel in Cincinnati, as the “Durkee”: Jamaica rum, lemon, curacao and fizz water. That was around 1879. By 1887, it was in Chicago, as the “Split Durkee,” with some brandy thrown in. Somehow, by the time it reached NYC, rum had become gin, curacao vermouth, and Durkee Turkay. Drunks.” I guess that settles that! Disregard my musings below.

The “Split Turkay”, probably a misspelling of Split Turkey, is not a terribly popular drink. The recipe can be found towards the end of George Kappeler’s century-old Modern American Drinks, sandwiched between the Whiskey Sour and the Stone Fence. Stuck in the middle of those famed beauties, it’s easy to see how this one got ignored. Kappeler’s description of it as a “pleasant ladies’ drink” couldn’t have helped either.

From what I can tell this is the first, last and only surviving documentation on this drink. In modern terms, this translates to

Split Turkay (serves 2)

• 1 1/2oz Old Tom Gin
• 1 1/2oz sweet vermouth
• 1/2oz lemon
• 1/4oz simple syrup
• 1 egg white

It’s pretty easy to see where this drink is coming from; it’s just a Silver Fizz with less lemon and added vermouth. The name, on the other hand, is bewildering. What’s half a turkey got to do with it? There are precious few hints as to what this could mean, but I can still make silly speculations.

Maybe it looks like a turkey, or worse, a split turkey? Nah, if you scroll down it’s hard to picture that. The colors are vaguely Thanksgiving-y, but that’s a bit of a stretch. Tastes like turkey? No! And yuck! As near as I can tell, the turkey really has nothing to do with it and the split just refers to splitting the drink between two glasses. That, or Kappeler was smoking the ganj.

To be as historically accurate as is easy, I’m using an Old Tom style gin rather than Plymouth or a London Dry. Feel free to use either of those instead, but up the simple syrup to half an ounce.

First combine the above ingredients into a shaker, no ice. I’m actually pretty terrible at cracking eggs, so I like to separate the egg white in the small tin first. This way I don’t have to dump the drink if I mess up, which I invariably do.

The white meat and the dark meat

Shake the ingredients without ice for a good 15 seconds to thoroughly combine them, then add ice and shake some more. Strain the result into TWO glasses, my preference is for champagne flutes:

Slowly top them off with soda water to build the foam up to the rim, and enjoy!

It's like beer!

Wellllll …. not quite. As is, the drink is kind of bland. That’s not to say it’s bad, at 9AM it’s probably quite pleasant, but after downing the first one I had trouble convincing myself to drink the second. It’s only got half the lemon as an ordinary Silver Fizz, so it lacks that crispness, and the sweet vermouth quiets out the gin’s distinctiveness.

But it’s not all bad! Recipe books of old can be a bit incomplete. A dash here, a garnish there, they might not bother to mention every last detail. Assuming that Kappeler just ‘forgot’ to mention a swirl of bitters and a lemon twist, I added them to the other half of my Split Turkay.

Gobble Gobble!

Now that’s more like it! The bitters and twist liven the whole thing up and transform this “ladies’ drink” from insipid to pleasant. It even looks a bit like a Turkey, or um, something. I’m unlikely to have one of these after noon, but it is a mild and tasty way to cut through the morning fog. Also, the name makes me laugh :)

Cocktail Experiments: The No-Strain Ramos Gin Fizz

The Ramos Gin Fizz is one of the most delightful drinks to come out of New Orleans, inadequately described as a foamy, alcoholic orange creamsicle. The balance and lightness comes at a cost though: this drink’s a pain in the ass to make! (click on the pictures for the full-size versions)

Nine, count ’em, nine ingredients!

Ramos Gin Fizz*

* This was the recipe used for the experiment, but it has too much citrus unless your lemons are really weak. Should be more like 1/2 an oz.

• 1 1/2oz gin
• 1oz lemon
• 1/2oz lime
• 1oz simple syrup
• 1oz heavy cream
• 1oz egg white
• 3 drops orange flower water
• dash vanilla (optional)
• soda water

The RGF has no less than 8 ingredients (sometimes 9!) that need to be blended together into a light and airy drink. This means shaking and lots of it. Chris McMillian has a fantastic video on the history and traditional preparation, here, as part of his New Orleans’ Best Cocktails series. He uses more cream and less lemon than I prefer, but it is essentially the same.

1. Combine all ingredients except soda water in shaker
2. Dry shake to combine ingredients
3. Add lots of ice and shake vigorously for a minute
4. Strain into tall glass, add soda water and stir

This will produce a delicious Ramos Gin Fizz and doesn’t take too much care apart from remembering all the ingredients and shaking the shit out of it. The problem is when you strain it, you leave behind a LOT of foam in the shaker. And this early morning favorite is all about the foam.

A strainer is foam’s worst enemy

Since his video series was produced, Chris McMillian has come back around on this and came up with a way to preserve all that foam. Rather than using lots of ice and straining it out, use just enough so that it completely melts and no straining is required.

Well, so how MUCH ice?

This is a complicated question, and if you want to make it more complicated read the fantastic two-parter from Dave Arnold on cooking issues: The Science of Shaking (part II). The short version, which isn’t so short, goes like this. Cooling drinks is accomplished by transferring heat energy from the cocktail base to the ice it’s shaken with. Typical ice from the tray in your freezer is at -20° C and weighs 20-30 grams per cube. The two ways it absorbs energy from the base are through heating up and melting.

The larger cube is 29g, the smaller is 20g

In its frozen form, it takes 2.11 joules of energy to heat 1 gram of water up by 1° C (that’s the specific heat capacity), so with ordinary home ice that’ll be 42.2 joules per gram to reach it’s melting point. The additional energy it takes to actually melt the ice (enthalpy of fusion) is 334 joules per gram. Obviously, it’s all about the melting. Since it takes nearly 8 times more energy, it’s not going to matter THAT much the temperature of the ice you’re using so long as it’s actually frozen.

The OG RGF

Don’t rush me!

Ok, if you’re bored it takes about 30 grams (1 – 1.5 cubes) if the juice, simple, and cream are pre-chilled and 50 grams (2-2.5 cubes) if everything is room temperature.  Happy???

If you’re still interested (don’t lie!), the first thing we need to define is how cold do we want the RGF to be? To some extent this is a matter of taste, and to a large extent it’s not. If the fizz is at 5° C / 41° F, that’s JUST TOO WARM! This is a cool refreshing breakfast drink, not a shower with a broken water heater.

As a benchmark, I took the temperature of an RGF made in the classic way with a shaker full of ice that is all strained out. This came out at -1.4° C / 29.5° F, or just below freezing, and feels absolutely perfect. A ‘short’ cocktail with 3oz ingredients, like a Negroni, will get down to about -7° C / 19 ° F with a moderate amount of shaking.

Imma Lay the Math Down on Ya’ll!

The ingredients of the RGF, given the above recipe, are 6 fluid ounces and weigh in at an impressive 190 grams / 0.4 lbs. My CRC Handbook didn’t list the specific heat capacity for the Ramos Gin Fizz (go figure), but we can get a back of the envelope estimate using the mass-weighted average of its ingredients.

The RGF’s specific heat capacity (Crgf) is somewhere around 3.68 j / g ° C, but keep in mind this is pretty approximate. My scale is only accurate to +/-1 gram and heat capacities of food items can vary quite a bit, so we’ll just call it 3.7 +/- 0.1.

From this, we can calculate how much heat (Qrgf) we need to transfer from the RGF in order to cool it down to our target of -2° C from room temp, 20° C.

We’re halfway there! Now we are going to translate -15,466 joules into grams of ice. The heat transferred to the ice is equal to the energy required to bring the temperature up to -2° C, plus the energy of the phase transition, plus loss from the shaker / soda. I’m using pre-chilled glasses, so there shouldn’t be any loss from heating them up.

Assuming no losses, we would need 41.6g of ice to chill a Ramos Gin Fizz down from room temp to -2° C. This goes up to 47 grams if you are using ‘wet’ ice starting at just below freezing.  Note that Qloss is a negative quantity (the heat transferred from the shaker/soda into the ice), so the higher the loss the more ice that you’ll need. If the shaker and glass were chilled in the freezer down to -20° C, and you wore gloves while shaking, it’s possible the Qloss could be positive.

If you start with pre-chilled citrus and dairy, the RGF base will start out at a lower temperature and require less ice. When I did this my base started out at 14° C, so we’ll just go with that. In that case, a minimum of 30 grams of ice is required.

Putting Theory into Practice

The ingredients were all measured by mass using a +/- 1 gram kitchen scale to match the specs in the above chart. Temperatures were measured using a cheap Oregon Scientific thermocouple ($6 at Target) that I wouldn’t trust to more than +/- 1° C, although it does display down to 0.1° C.

Weighing the lime juice

As noted above, my ‘control’ was a Ramos Gin Fizz made the classic way with a shaker full of ice (~180g) and strained into a glass. The starting temp of the ingredients was 18° C and I did a 15 second dry shake followed by a 60 second wet shake. Before pouring in the soda water, the drink filled about 8oz of a 10oz highball glass

So much foam, lost!

The final temp after adding the soda was -1.4° C, which felt just right to me.

Now for the fun part! The first way I tried this out was at just below room temperature (-19.6° C) and with 49 grams of ice (pictured above). The preparation was exactly the same as the classic style, but because I didn’t strain it at the end it filled the same glass all the way to the top.

The no-strain version barely fits in the glass!

This is before adding ANY soda! With the classic preparation, I had to add about 1.5 ounces of soda to build out the foam, but it took just 1/2 an ounce to make the no-strain version overflow. The result is more of the base ends up in the glass and with less dilution. Win win!

Soooooo delicious

-2.2° C is almost exactly what we’re looking for, though admittedly this was on my 3rd attempt after trying a few different amounts. According to our calculations, it should’ve taken no less than 41.6 grams of ice to chill the cocktail this much. We can attribute the additional 7.4g ice required to loss from the soda, shaker and my partially frozen hands. At about 85% efficiency, this is not bad at all!

Cooling down the drink from room temperature took 2.25 grams of ice for every degree celsius. I tried a couple more times with a 16.2° C base and a 14° C base (different levels of ‘pre-chilling’) and used 40 and 30 grams of ice respectively. The results were reasonably consistent, with the ratio of ice to chilling decreasing as the initial temperature of the drink went down. This may be explained as the result of less energy transferred to the shaker and my hands, since when using less ice you don’t have to shake the drink for as long. But it’s also well within the precision of our results, so it’s not terribly significant.

Conclusions

The foam is so thick the straw stands up with only an inch submerged

Using the no-strain method for the Ramos Gin Fizz gave us more foam with less dilution and less wasted drink left behind in the shaker. It takes more care and more work than the classic style, but with a bit of effort you can get a superior drink while still keeping the temperature cool. It’s impractical to measure your ice every time you make an RGF, but if you’re using regular ice cubes out of your freezer you don’t have to. Just measure a cube once and keep that number in mind, there isn’t going to be a lot of variation between cubes. Most trays will produce ice that’s between 20 and 30 grams / cube, and if you need a 1/2 cube just whack it with the bowl of a bar spoon.

As for the amount needed, it really does depend on what temperature you’re starting at. If most of your ingredients are room temp, except for maybe the cream, it’s going to be about 20° C and require 50 grams of ice. A bit more if your glass isn’t pre-chilled or your ice is wet. If most of your ingredients are coming out of the refrigerator, somewhere between 30 and 40 grams should do it. It’s better to err on the higher side because a warm RGF can be unpleasant, so I’d go with 40g when in doubt.

Recipes: Gordon’s Breakfast

The Gordon’s Breakfast is a cocktail that has been making the rounds among the usual suspects this past year, but has gotten surprisingly little coverage. It’s a spicy/savory take on the Gordon’s Cup, a summer favorite with gin, lime, cucumber and simple syrup. A pleasant enough drink on its own, but it tends to feel like a salad in the winter and a wannabe Pimm’s during the summer.

The addition of tabasco, worcestershire, salt and pepper to this drink makes it a competitor to the Bloody Mary for your brunch time affections, and if you’re like me, a go to for that first sip to wash away the day.

Gordon’s Breakfast

• 2oz gin
• 1/2oz simple syrup
• half lime, cut into 6ths
• 2 slices cucumber, peeled
• dash tabasco
• dash worcestershire
• sprinkle salt and pepper

First, drop the two slices of cucumber into a shaker and muddle them. There’s no need to do a ‘Bacardi Guy’, just breaking them up a bit is fine.

Separately, put the lime slices into the bottom of a Tom Collins glass and muddle them thoroughly. You want to get all the juice out from limes and have it spread around the inside of the glass so that you get a really strong lime fragrance when you first sip the drink.

Lime goes in …

juice comes out.

Back in the shaker, add the gin, simple syrup, tabasco and worcestershire. A little tabasco goes a long way, so try out a few drops of each first to see how spicy and vinegary you like it. There’s no shame in adding more later; it’s certainly better than looking like a wimp when you complain your drink ‘tastes like burning’.

Add ice to the shaker and give it a few good back and forths, then put some cracked ice into your glass and strain the shaker into it. Stir it up a bit to combine the lime juice at the bottom with the rest of the drink and finish it by sprinkling salt and pepper on top.

And there you have a Gordon’s Breakfast. For the variant called the Custer, core the other half of your lime and drop in an egg yolk with tabasco and worcestershire, then rest it on top of the glass. You might remember the egg yolk shot (called a Prairie Oyster) from the Electric Current Fizz recipe.

Recipes: Electric Current Fizz

Today’s cocktail is an old one that’s been brought back to light by the crew at Dutch Kills. Given the name of this drink and its apparent absurdity, I assumed it was just something they’d made up for the idiot (that would be me) ordering a drink with an egg yolk.

Looking back, the first reference I can find to this drink appears in George Kappeler’s 1895 cocktail tome, Modern American Drinks: How to Mix and Serve All Kinds of Cups and Drinks. Like some of the other classic cocktail books, it has fallen out of copyright so you can read it for free through Google Books.

 

 

You might be wondering a few things after reading the original recipe, like “what’s a silver fizz?” or “do I really want a shot with vinegar?” or “am I going to vomit?” I can only answer the first question, the other two are up to the individual.

Recipes: Genever Blue

The bar Weather Up comes up a lot on this blog so it’s fitting the first recipe I publish should come from one of their former bartenders. This is one of the first, if not the first, properly made cocktails I was exposed to. It’ll always be special to me for that reason and its connection to the bartender who made it, James.

This cocktail uses Bols Genever as the base, a Dutch style gin that bears little resemblance to the standard London Dry. It’s similar to an Old Tom in that’s it sweet, but a bit more complex than that. If you want to make a drink with it, the easiest thing to do is pick a whiskey recipe you like and replace it with Bols. Old Fashioneds in particular work very well with this.

The drink in question today is the Genever Blue: a genever sour with blueberries and black pepper. A good drink year round, but obviously more suited towards summer when you can get fresh blueberries and are in the mood for something fruitier. The proportions given here are based on the blueberries I was using. As with any fresh ingredient, they can vary widely in terms of size, sweetness, bitterness, etc … so this is a drink where it helps to taste as you go.

Genever Blue

• 2oz Bols Genever
• 3/4oz lemon juice
• 1/2oz simple syrup
• 4-6 blueberries, depending on size and preference
• fresh ground black pepper