Botanicals and Herbs, Cocktail Recipes, Techniques and Methods
From rosemary to saffron, Arnd Heißen builds drinks around herbs and spices, each with a story. These are the ideas and techniques behind the chapter.
At a glance
From rosemary to saffron, Arnd Heißen builds drinks around herbs and spices, each with a story. The article presents the fourteen drinks of the herbs chapter and the few techniques they share: a light muddle, a hard shake, a double strain and a citrus oil finish.
The chapter opens with a short claim: it began with rosemary, as an experiment, and the experiment worked. Herbs and spices, Heißen says, bring luck. Each drink that follows has a short story or a legend and one or two plants at its centre.
The Chi takes its name from the Taoist life force and is balanced by fennel, with lavender and chamomile for calm, in a stirred drink of chamomile-infused rum and Antica Formula vermouth. The Poet & The Alchemist combines saffron, cardamom and vanilla with tonka bean and pear. The Szechuan Rosemary uses rum infused with Szechuan pepper, which tastes woody, hot and prickling with a note of anise and lemon, and which can numb the lips and tongue; lemon and the fruity fig syrup are its partners. The Mary Poppins mixes gin with ginger, lime and thyme and a cocktail umbrella, and the 47 Monkeys builds on Monkey 47 Gin with sage, grapefruit syrup and a herbal liqueur.
Some drinks take a classic as the starting point. The Verbena Paloma varies the Paloma, which the author calls Mexico’s most drunk cocktail, ahead of the Margarita, using tequila infused with verbena tea. The Maharajah Mojito keeps the mint and the lime of the Cuban classic, which he places between 1910 and 1920 and links to Hemingway, and adds Darjeeling tea, orgeat and a spiced cola. The Black Tea 1837 Old Fashioned stirs aged rum infused with black tea with muscovado sugar and old-time bitters, adding ice in stages so the drink slowly takes over.
The Mahe puts galangal and lemongrass into a wine drink, the Shiso Girlie uses shochu, cucumber and almond orgeat, and the Nippon No Mori combines a gin made from grapes with green apple, fennel and jasmine tea and a kaffir lime leaf. The Phi Phi Island Smash uses Thai basil and the Japanese milk drink Calpico, the Raspberry Nights combines vanilla shochu with raspberry and passion fruit, and the Yuzu Watermelon is a short drink of yuzu sake, lemon and watermelon syrup.
Most of the drinks ask for the same few moves. Press fresh herbs, ginger or spices only lightly in the shaker with a muddler, just enough to release their oils; the author even says to crush cardamom capsules gently so the shell opens. Shake hard on ice, and strain through a fine sieve as well as the shaker’s strainer, the double-strain technique, to keep every particle out of the glass. Finish with a spray of citrus oil from a peel and drop the peel in the glass.
The fourteen drinks of the herbs chapter are collected on this site as drafts until we have permission to publish them.
In the author's words
Kräuter und Gewürze sind Glücksbringer. (in English: Herbs and spices bring luck.)
Page 9
Es begann mit Rosmarin. Es war ein Experiment. (in English: It began with rosemary. It was an experiment.)
Page 9
Where this comes from
Written for this guide from the chapter Kräutercocktails of Trend Drinks by Arnd Heißen (Edition Styria, 2011), pages 9 to 31; the ideas are the author's, the wording and the English are ours, and the quotations are given in the original German with a translation.
Keep reading
Techniques and Methods
Ice carries 80 calories of chilling power per gram, which is why it beats almost everything else at the bar. Dave Arnold explains specific heat, heat of fusion, and why ice melts in a martini, the same logic as salt on ice for ice cream.
Techniques and Methods
Dave Arnold's practical notes on carbonation bottles: which sizes he stocks, what PET can and cannot take, why plastic bottles go flat in weeks, the new short caps, and the foam trap in a Sodastream.
Techniques and Methods
Weigh the bottle before and after to know how much CO2 went in. Dave Arnold also shows how much a pour loses (11.5 to 8.4 g/l in champagne), why foam control is nine-tenths of good carbonation, how bubbles form like balloons, and what a volume of CO2 is.
Watch
32:38
13:46
24:10