A Day of Rosiness - Alpenglow

Brett did not turn up, so about a quarter to six I went down to the bar and had a Jack Rose with George the bar-man. Brett had not been in the bar either, and so I looked for her upstairs on my way out, and took a taxi to the Café Select. Crossing the Seine I saw a string of barges being towed empty down the current, riding high, the bargemen at the sweeps as they came toward the bridge. The river looked nice. It was always pleasant crossing bridges in Paris.

-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

 

 I saw this quote in Dale Degroff's Essential Cocktail, and it seemed to add the perfect connection to this cocktail. I always love retracing a literary giant's steps, and if I can somehow manage to do that while mixing a kick-ass cocktail, it's a good day. On to the Day of Rosiness...

You've made it this far. Don't stop now - finish that afternoon beer and move on towards the twilight of your day of drinking. Before it's time to get into some serious drinking later in the night.


Jack Rose
1.5 oz Applejack
.75 oz Lemon Juice
.75 oz Simple Syrup
.5 oz Grenadine Syrup

The Jack Rose is so surprisingly good it deserves its place among the cocktail greats, even though it is relatively unknown. I can't verify this, but according to Wikipedia several Washington Post writers got sloppy drunk attempting to order Jack Roses at 60 or so bars in DC. If I were those writers, I'd attempt to get an assignment researching as many cocktails as possible that way.

 I have always been a little puzzled that Applejack faded from its colonial glory. As you can see, our first president is "rumored" to have approved heartily of Laird's Apple Jack. When the alternative was Frontier Whiskey, you can imagine that he must have loved the slightly sweeter Apple-based liquor.
I have always carried a bottle of Applejack with any bar I set up, I think of its flavor addition as a welcome surprise in many cocktails. The apple finish it adds can smooth out a drink that would otherwise be too sour or have to much alcohol burn.

Other Apple Jack or Jack Rose resources:
Blog Post on Sloshed
Imbibe Article on Applejack

Shackleton's Scotch Replicated

Stranded out in the cold - frostbitten and hungry. With nothing to eat but dried seal meat, few supplies and ambitions dwindling. Nothing to drink but delicious scotch. Sounds like a hell of a good life, huh?

As a follow up to my previous post, more on Shackleton's Scotch below:

According to tasters of Shackleton's 100+ year old scotch, the frozen whisky was far from swill. In fact, it was delicious enough that the Whyte and Mackay Distillery has produced 50,000 bottles replicating its taste.

The "new" scotch is "well-balanced, with soft fruity characters and a touch of smoke." While it sounds like he's reading a cheap wine label, and 'smoke' is code for 'metal carboys' I'd drop a fair amount of money on a bottle of that in the event that they make more of them.

World's Oldest Winemaking

History has always pointed to how venerable alcohol is, but new evidence published by the Journal of Archaeological Science suggests that wine may be even older than we thought.

In a cave in Armenia, "A shallow, thick-rimmed, 3-by-3 1/2-foot clay basin appears to be a wine press where people stomped grapes with their feet." NYT Article.  How cool is that?  over 7,000 years ago, people already knew the effects of cultivating the sweet nectar of grapes - and even built a specialized facility for making it.

Download the journal entry for all the science behind how they know it was cultivated wine - some interesting data about syringic acid contents then and now as well as plenty of other archaeological practices.