From the BourbonGuy Archives: Making Bitters Using a Sous Vide Cooker

Hello Friends! Sorry about the lack of posts last week, I injured my back a few weeks ago, and it had flared up to the point where I spent the week on Prednisone and muscle relaxers. So, no drinking and, by extension, no tastings. I know. Bourbon is much more fun than the nausea that muscle relaxers gave me. So I’m reaching into the archives for this week and pulling out an article from 2020 that has been on my mind lately. Mostly because I need to make more bitters here soon. Anyway, enjoy!

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A long time ago, I found a set of instructions online that detailed how you could make infused vodka in an afternoon instead of in weeks. It was written by a bartender at what seemed to be a high-end bar. Now you might wonder why anyone, much less a skilled bartender, would want to make an infused vodka. Today, that might be a good question, but flavored vodka was a big thing at the time. And, hopefully, there will always be a certain kind of establishment that will take pride in offering a house-made product to discerning patrons.

But back to those instructions. I found these so long ago that they are no longer available online. But they were so stupidly simple that I never had to go back to look for them again. Now, I didn’t know this at the time, but the instructions were describing a large industrial-grade Sous Vide cooker. I didn’t know what Sous Vide was, but I could understand the concept behind it. Keep a water bath at a precise temperature for a determined length of time. Easy peasy. Using a very large stockpot, a thermometer, and a quick hand on the stove controls, I used those instructions to make a lot of infusions. I was mostly just playing around, but the lemon peel infusions were the first step in some mighty tasty limoncello.

Now, being the kind of guy who likes to make things for myself, I’ve been making orange bitters at home for years. I even wrote about it way back in 2014. Originally, I used the Orange bitters recipe in Brad Thomas Parsons’ book Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All. But these days, I’ve modified the recipe some.

A couple of years ago, I bought my first Sous Vide cooker. I love to cook, I’m a gadget guy, and heck, Sous Vide cookers were finally available for less than $100. I’ve made the best steaks I’ve ever tasted using that thing.

This year, I finally realized that I could put these two things together. Instead of waiting for three weeks for my bitters to be done, I could use the Sous Vide cooker to easily make warm-infused bitters. Now, the warm infusion method doesn’t work for everything. Just like a cold brew tea and coffee taste different than a warm brew, using the warm infusion method will change the flavor. If you are infusing fruits, the result will taste more like cooked fruit than it will fresh fruit. But in some cases, this is actually beneficial, so just keep that in mind.

And since this experiment worked so nicely, I thought I’d share my recipe with you.

Spicy Blood Orange & Tangerine Bitters

Ingredients

• 2 Cups Old Grand-Dad 114

• 2 oranges

• 2 tangerines

• 2 Blood oranges

• 4 Whole cloves

• 1/2 star anise

• 8 green cardamom pods, cracked

• 1/2 tsp cassia chunks (or broken cinnamon stick)

• 1/2 tsp gentian root

• 1/4 tsp Black peppercorns

• 1/4 tsp coriander seeds

• 1/4 tsp whole allspice

• 1 cup of water

• 1 ounce rich (2 to 1) simple syrup

Equipment 

• Sous Vide Cooker 

• Food Dehydrator (optional)

• Y-shaped fruit peeler

• 2 mason jars

• Measuring spoons

Instructions

1. Read all the directions and gather your equipment. 

2. With a Y-peeler, zest 1 orange, 1 blood orange, and 1 tangerine. Make them a nice, thick zest and don't be afraid to get some pith on them. Give the zest a rough chop with a large knife. Keep the pieces kinda big as they will shrink.

3. Dry your chopped zest. I use a food dehydrator, but you can also use a baking sheet in a 200° oven.

4. After your dried zest is finished, zest your other three citrus fruits. I avoid the pith on this step, but it won't hurt if some comes along for the ride, you are making “bitters” after all. A little extra bitterness isn’t the end of the world.

5. Place your fresh zest, 1/4 cup of dried zest, and all your spices in a quart-sized Mason jar. Add 2 cups of Old Grand-Dad 114. Close the jar and give it a shake. Make sure all the ingredients are covered, if not add more bourbon and close tightly.

6. Fill your stockpot (or whatever you use for sous vide cooking) with water, set your cooker to 160° F and float your mason jar in the stockpot. There should have been enough headspace in the jar to allow it to float upright. Once the water comes to temperature let it cook for an hour and a half, shaking occasionally. After the cook is complete, do not empty your water bath unless you are finished for the day. You will need it again. 

7. Strain the solids out through a piece of cheesecloth. Set the infused bourbon aside. 

8. Place the solids and one cup of water in a second Mason jar and float in your water bath. Set temp to 160° F and let infuse for 45 minutes. 

9. Strain the solids out through a piece of cheesecloth. Give the solids a squeeze to remove as much liquid as possible. Discard solids.

10. Combine the infused bourbon and infused water together. Add rich simple syrup. Let run through a coffee filter to remove any sediment. Let cool.

11. Decant into small bottles. It is natural for more sediment to settle out, just give it a shake before using. If something starts to grow in the bottle, please discard it. For best flavor, use bitters within a year or so. 

So, right after I finished this, I realized that I didn’t have any bottles. I’d been reusing the same old Angostura bottles for years and had finally tossed them, thinking that I’d easily have emptied more when the time came to need them. Well, I did. But then I tossed them too, not remembering that I needed to save them. After some searching online, I found out that they were called Woozy Bottles and are the same bottles used in hot sauce. The smallest amount that I could get from Amazon was a case of twelve. Needing only four, I wondered to my wife what I would do with the other eight. It was then that she said the most mind-blowing thing: “You know, you could always make other kinds.”

I’m going to be honest with you, that thought had never crossed my mind. So I set out to think of what other kinds of bitters I might want to make. Well, my wife likes cherry bitters in her Old-Fashioneds, so that was a no-brainer. And I knew just the thing to base it on: my Orange-Spiced Cocktail Cherries. These have been a big hit with everyone who has tried them ever since I developed the recipe. And, since I already had many jars of these cherries in storage, I could even use them to make the bitters. Once again I got out my trusty food dehydrator and got to work sucking the moisture out of them.

Spiced Cherry Bitters

Ingredients

• 2 Cups Old Grand-Dad 114

• 1/2 Cup Dried Orange-Spiced Cherries

• 1/4 cup Orange-Spiced Cherries

• 1 TBSP Dried Orange Peel

• 1 TBSP Gentian Root

• 1 TBSP Cassia Chunks (or broken cinnamon stick)

• 1 TBSP Whole Allspice Berries

• 1 TBSP Juniper Berries

• 1 Star Anise (broken up slightly)

• 1 cup of water

• 1 ounce rich (2 to 1) simple syrup

Equipment 

• Sous Vide Cooker 

• Food Dehydrator

• Small knife

• 2 mason jars

• Measuring spoons

Instructions

1. Read all the directions and gather your equipment. 

2. With a small knife, cut about a cup of Orange-Spiced Cherries in half. Dry your cherries in a food dehydrator (I got impatient and pulled mine out when they were about three-quarters dry, they still worked great).

3. Place your dried cherries, 1/4 cup of non-dried cherries, and all your spices in a quart-sized Mason jar. Add 2 cups of Old Grand-Dad 114. Close the jar and give it a shake. Make sure all the ingredients are covered, if not add more bourbon and close tightly.

4. Fill your stockpot (or whatever you use for sous vide cooking) with water, set your cooker to 160° F and float your mason jar in the stockpot. There should have been enough headspace in the jar to allow it to float upright. Once the water comes to temperature let it cook for an hour and a half, shaking occasionally. After the cook is complete, do not empty your water bath unless you are finished for the day. You will need it again. 

5. Strain the solids out through a piece of cheesecloth. Set the infused bourbon aside. 

6. Place the solids and one cup of water in a second Mason jar and float in your water bath. Set temp to 160° F and let infuse for 45 minutes. 

7. Strain the solids out through a piece of cheesecloth. Give the solids a squeeze to remove as much liquid as possible. Discard solids.

8. Combine the infused bourbon and infused water together. Add rich simple syrup. Let run through a coffee filter to remove any sediment. Let cool.

9. Decant into small bottles. It is natural for more sediment to settle out, just give it a shake before using. If something starts to grow in the bottle, please discard it. For best flavor, use bitters within a year or so. 

Of course, since I’d gone this far, it’d be silly not to do an Aromatic Bitters as well, right?

Arok’s Aromatic Bitters

Ingredients

• 2 Cups Old Grand-Dad 114

• 1 TBSP Molasses

• 1 TBSP Gentian Root

• 1 TBSP Cassia Chunks (or broken cinnamon stick)

• 1 TBSP Blade Mace

• 1 TBSP Whole Allspice Berries

• 1 TBSP Dried Orange Peel

• 1 tsp Green Cardamom Pods (cracked)

• 1 tsp Whole cloves

• 1 Star Anise (broken up slightly)

• 1/2 tsp black peppercorns

• 4 pieces Dried, Sliced Ginger Root

• 4 Orange-Spiced Cherries

• 1 cup of water

• 1 ounce rich (2 to 1) simple syrup

Equipment 

• Sous Vide Cooker 

• 2 mason jars

• Measuring spoons

Instructions

1. Read all the directions and gather your equipment. 

2. Place your molasses, cherries, and all your spices in a quart-sized Mason jar. Add 2 cups of Old Grand-Dad 114. Close the jar and give it a shake. Make sure the molasses is dissolved and all the ingredients are covered, if not add more bourbon and close tightly.

3. Fill your stockpot (or whatever you use for sous vide cooking) with water, set your cooker to 160° F and float your mason jar in the stockpot. There should have been enough headspace in the jar to allow it to float upright. Once the water comes to temperature let it cook for an hour and a half, shaking occasionally. After the cook is complete, do not empty your water bath unless you are finished for the day. You will need it again. 

4. Strain the solids out through a piece of cheesecloth. Set the infused bourbon aside. 

5. Place the solids and one cup of water in a second Mason jar and float in your water bath. Set temp to 160° F and let infuse for 45 minutes. 

6. Strain the solids out through a piece of cheesecloth. Give the solids a squeeze to remove as much liquid as possible. Discard solids.

7. Combine the infused bourbon and infused water together. Add rich simple syrup. Let run through a coffee filter to remove any sediment. Let cool.

8. Decant into small bottles. It is natural for more sediment to settle out, just give it a shake before using. If something starts to grow in the bottle, please discard it. For best flavor, use bitters within a year or so. 

So there you have it. Four bottles each of three different kinds of bitters, all in one afternoon. Not too shabby. If you’re curious, I sourced all my spices from my local Penzey’s Spices location, except for the Gentian Root, which I ordered from Mountain Rose Herbs. Neither of them is a sponsor, I don’t take sponsors, I just like these stores. Oh, and the labels above are original Eric Burke designs cut out using a Cricut. I told you I like making things myself.

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Char & Stave Coffee Liqueurs, Classic Coffee and Cafe Amaro

I’d like to thank Char & Stave and Bluebird Distilling, along with their PR team, for sending these with no strings attached.

Busy day today. I had some work to do, plus I needed to change the light bulbs in my microwave. You’d think that would be easy enough, right? Bulbs burn out. Manufacturers should probably give you easy access to them and maybe even tell you what replacement bulbs to buy. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

Well, not so much. I spent the entire morning trying to figure out the correct parts on the manufacturer’s website. They were willing to sell the bulbs to me (though they were out of stock), but they weren’t willing to just tell me what bulbs I needed so I could buy them elsewhere. Naturally, I ended up taking the burned-out bulbs to Home Depot, comparing them to what was on the shelf, and picking out a couple that looked like they’d work. Luckily for me, they did. I’m not very happy with GE Appliances right now—it shouldn’t take all day to change two light bulbs—but whatever. Let’s just say I’ll be having a cocktail later.

Speaking of cocktails, I’m taking a closer look at a couple of cocktail ingredients tonight. These were sent to me by the producers for review purposes a couple of months ago. I’ve been sitting on them for a while, waiting for their turn to come up in the queue. Well, today their turn arrived…just in time to soothe away a frustrating day.

So, what are these ingredients? Two takes on a coffee liqueur. The Classic Coffee is exactly as it sounds—essentially a sweet cup of alcoholic cold brew. The Cafe Amaro, on the other hand, is more like a cross between the Classic Coffee and a traditional amaro. It’s nuttier and more coffee-forward than the Amaros I have in my cocktail stand, but it offers more depth of flavor than a standard coffee liqueur. Before I dive into my tasting notes, let’s see what the producer has to say about them.

Char & Stave Classic Coffee Liqueur is crafted using Char & Stave Arabica Coffee and Bluebird Distilling Vodka, one batch at a time with no artificial flavors. The spirit presents a velvety smooth mouthfeel, with savory chocolate notes up front followed by tinges of citrus, and a finish of slightly sweet dried fruits. Shines in an Espresso Martini, White Russian, or “Night Cap” (3 oz. on the rocks).

Char & Stave Cafe Amaro Coffee Liqueur is a bittersweet coffee liqueur blended with a balance of citrus and botanicals spanning Oris root, angelica, cardamom, chamomile, lemon peel, gtrapefruit peel and gentian root – made one batch at a time with no artificial flavors. Shines in a Coffee Negroni, Char n’ Tonic, and more.

All Char & Stave coffee beans are roasted in-house, with beans sourced from small farmers and microplots worldwide. Both spirits are made with Char & Stave Arabica Coffee (62% Peru Cajamarca, 20% Costa Rica Central Valley, 18% Natural Papua New Guina Wahgi Valley). After the beans are roasted, a two-day Cold Brew method is employed to ensure maximum flavor and velvety smoothness.

Let’s see how they taste, shall we?

Char & Stave Classic Coffee Coffee Liqueur

Purchase Info: This bottle was sent to me at no cost for review purposes. The suggested retail price is $34.99 for a 750 mL bottle.

Price per Drink (50 mL): $2.33

Details: 30% ABV

Nose: Rich and roasty coffee notes (think a medium to dark roast, not a bright acidic light roast)

Mouth: Sweet and chocolaty coffee notes with a hint of a burn from the alcohol.

Finish: Gentle and of medium length with notes of caramel and chocolate lingering.

Char & Stave Cafe Amaro Coffee Liqueur

Purchase Info: This bottle was sent to me at no cost for review purposes. The suggested retail price is $39.99 for a 750 mL bottle.

Price per Drink (50 mL): $2.67

Details: 30% ABV

Nose: Coffee, nutty, gentian root, and a touch of citrus.

Mouth: Coffee, caramel, and gentian root.

Finish: On the longer side of medium and bitter with notes of coffee, cardamom, and bitter citrus peel.

Thoughts:

Both of these are very nice. Super tasty. I LOVE coffee. I love it even more than bourbon. And the Classic Coffee is just like drinking an alcoholic glass of cold brew. I could easily see myself having a pour of it one lazy afternoon. The Cafe Amaro would make a good sipper if you like to sip Amaros. Not many do. I like to have an Amaro and Soda now and then but I get that I’m an unusual person in my love for bitter drinks.

But where these will shine for people that are not as weird as I am is as a cocktail ingredient. I didn’t know a recipe for a cocktail that used both coffee liqueur and bourbon so I asked ChatGPT for a couple of recipes. They are as follows:

Coffee Old Fashioned

2 oz bourbon
1 oz brewed or espresso coffee (chilled) or coffee liqueur
1 tsp maple syrup
A few dashes of bitters (optional: coffee or chocolate bitters)

The Revolver

2 oz bourbon (preferably a rye-heavy one)
0.5 oz coffee liqueur
2 dashes of orange bitters
Orange peel for garnish

The Coffee Old Fashioned is based on a recipe from Happy Honey Kitchen. The Revolver is from Serious Eats.

Both of these liqueurs work great in both of these recipes. I’m extremely happy with both. The Old Fashioned is pretty basic when using the Classic Coffee, but that’s to its benefit. The Cafe Amaro has just a little too much going on for me when used here. The Revolver is amazing with either, and I am completely floored by how well bourbon, coffee, and orange flavors pair with one another. So good. That’s the one I’m having tonight to round the rough edges off of a frustrating day.

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Four Roses x Ooni Bourbon Barrel Aged Honey

I’d like the thank Four Roses, Ooni, and their PR team for sending me this sample with no strings attached.

I am a pizza fanatic. I have it at least once a week and always on Saturday. I choose Saturday because my pizza is not a frozen disk out of the freezer but a fully-from-scratch affair that needs time. To give you a taste of how much I like pizza, we grow about 100 tomato plants of various varieties per summer, with 95% of the harvest going into pizza sauce (the rest goes into my wife’s Bourbon and Beer Chili). I spent twenty years crafting a recipe to my liking, at one point tossing the entire last decade of development when I realized I wasn’t satisfied, then starting from scratch before tweaking it with every batch until I locked in something that I was completely satisfied with. That sauce recipe is a richly spiced Midwestern-style sauce, not a tomato-forward New York/East Coast style. And it was developed to work best with a sourdough crust, whole milk mozzarella, and pepperoni, and to bake well in a home oven.

This is not the style of crust that the people who developed tonight’s pizza topping had in mind. This honey is a partnership between Four Roses and Ooni Pizza Ovens. I thought about getting an Ooni at one point before realizing that my preferred crust isn’t really cut out for that high of heat. People who have them seem to like them, though. And I’m definitely in the “live and let live” camp when it comes to pizza styles.

Here is what the companies have to say about their newest collaboration:

“The bourbon barrel aged honey was crafted in partnership with Bohman Bee Company, specialists in creating local raw honey. Once sourced, the honey was then aged in ex-Four Roses barrels that once aged its Small Batch bourbon. The barrels were freshly dumped and never rinsed to fully impart the richest essence of bourbon. The end result is a honey with tasting notes of ripened red berries and dried spices, perfect for drizzling on freshly made pizza and a sweetener in summer cocktails.”

So if you’ve been around a while, you know I love honey. Almost as much as I love pizza and bourbon. And even though that is the case, I seldom remember that a honey drizzle is the perfect topping for a spicy pepperoni pizza. I am going to need to remember it in the future because this is just the best addition to my home-cooked Saturday pizza. The sweetness of the honey really complements the spicy, salty flavor of the pizza. Because this honey was aged in Four Roses barrels, which can be fruitier than other brands, it brings out the fruity notes of the tomato. It’s really quite tasty.

Of course, if you are not a pizza fan (gasp!) that doesn’t mean that you can’t try this honey. On its own, it has a wonderfully fruity and slightly boozy note from the barrel aging. Not as much as other barrel-aged honey that we’ve covered, but it’s very mellow, much like Four Roses. It also works great as the sweetener in cocktails made with Four Roses. All in all, if you are a Four Roses fan, like I am, give this one a try. It’s available on the Ooni website for $16 for a 10-ounce bottle. I like this one a lot.

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If you want to support our work at BourbonGuy.com, please consider a one-time donation at ko-fi.com/bourbonguy or paypal.me/BourbonGuy. Or you could buy some merch that I’ve designed and/or built (tasting journals, t-shirts, stickers, pins, signs, posters, and more) at BourbonGuyGifts.com. Use code BOURBONGUYREADER at checkout for 5% off any order of $50 or more.

McMann & Tate Cocktail Bitters

I’d like to thank McMann & Tate Cocktail Co. for providing this review sample with no strings attached.

A few weeks ago, a very nice person wrote to me offering a sample of their company’s cocktail bitters. As I am always in the mood to add to my bitters collection (seriously, I think I need to pare it down—three shelves full is a bit overkill), I happily accepted, as I’d never heard of the brand.

When the bitters arrived, well, let’s just say that I was smitten. I love, love, love the late 1950s-1960s “space age” style design language. Give me a kidney-shaped design element, and I’m going to perk right up. It’s the same design language that inspired my “retro” styled bourbon t-shirt and die-cut sticker (for sale now at BourbonGuyGifts.com). Though honestly, I didn’t lean into it as much as the designers of the McMann & Tate Cocktail Company brand did. So, without even tasting the bitters, I was on board with this. I just hoped that they tasted as good as they looked.

But before we get into that, who is McMann & Tate? And no, I don’t mean the fictional ad agency that employed the husband in the old Bewitched TV show (though the company might want to work on the ol’ SEO since the fictional agency was what filled the first page of Google). They are a cocktail ingredient company out of New Jersey. They sell nine types of bitters, four types of freeze-dried citrus wheel garnishes, and three types of flavored rim salts. And yes, they all look amazing.

I received three bottles from them: the Wildly Aromatic, the Moroccan Orange, and the Bing Cherry. These are the exact three flavors that we use most often in our house, having developed our own recipes for them over the years. I was most excited to try the aromatic. In my experience, one aromatic bitters can differ from another much more than one orange bitters from another orange bitters. Same with cherry.

When I test bitters, I tend to do it in the most reproducible way possible. Namely, I make my favorite non-alcoholic, non-mind-altering drink (bitters and soda water) and then an Old Fashioned. Both are very simple drinks, and the differences from drink to drink are solely from the bitters. For the Old Fashioned, I used Maker’s Mark 101 proof as it is a pretty plain palette to paint the bitters across, and it tastes delicious. The impressions below encapsulate both testing methods.

McMann & Tate Cocktail Co. Bitters

Purchase info: These were sent to me at no charge for review purposes. Each bottle is $14.99 for a two-ounce bottle on the brand website.

Details: 40% ABV.

Bing Cherry Bitters

In soda water: Cherry and spice notes finishing with a nice bitterness.
In an Old Fashioned: Pairs well with Maker's 101. Brings out the inherent cherry notes in Maker's with a strong cherry finish.

Wildly Aromatic Bitters

In soda water: Baking spice on the nose. Mouth has a lot of Coca-Cola, vanilla, and backing spice notes.
In an Old Fashioned: Coca-Cola on the nose. Baking spice notes led by clove and anise on the mouth. Finish is Coca-Cola again.

Moroccan Orange Bitters

In soda water: Citrus zest on the nose. Bitter orange notes with very little spice.
In an Old Fashioned: Orange on the nose. Hints of orange on the mouth. This really shines on the finish with a strong orange flavor.

Thoughts:

The Cherry is great on its own. I’m a big fan. It didn’t show much on the nose, but the mouth and finish are very flavorful. For the Orange, I'd probably add a touch of aromatic if I was using it in an Old Fashioned. There isn’t quite the level of spice that I like in my Old Fashioned, but that is something I find in most brands of orange bitters. The Aromatic is delicious on its own. I was always on the Coke side of the Coke and Pepsi Cola Wars, and this reminds me of that tasty beverage. Made a damn fine old-fashioned. What I like about having multiple bitters, though, is using a couple of different ones together. The orange and cherry work nicely together. We’ve already discussed orange and aromatic. And cherry cola is always tasty. I’d recommend giving them a shot. I know I’ll be doing a little shopping after I’m done here.

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If you want to support our work at BourbonGuy.com, please consider a one-time donation at ko-fi.com/bourbonguy or paypal.me/BourbonGuy. Or you could buy some merch that I’ve designed and/or built (tasting journals, t-shirts, stickers, pins, signs, posters, and more) at BourbonGuyGifts.com. Use code BOURBONGUYREADER at checkout for 5% off any order of $50 or more.

Dashfire Ready-To-Drink Cocktails: Bourbon Old Fashioned and Fig & Cascara Manhattan

I will start tonight by saying that I honestly don’t care about how much traffic this site gets. I don’t take advertisements, so I don’t have advertisers breathing down my neck. I get enough samples and am on enough press release lists that I don’t need to “introduce” myself to PR folks anymore (except Brown-Forman; I just can’t get a hold of anyone there and have given up trying). But this morning, I went down a rabbit hole while procrastinating doing actual paying work. While in that rabbit hole, I looked at the BourbonGuy.com site analytics for the first time since 2021.

Holy shit, folks! Almost 50,000 of you visited in December! I am incredibly humbled by that fact. So thank you.

For a little perspective on that, I also looked at the earliest available analytics for the site. Way, way back in 2014, I had about 80,000 visits all year. The main reason that 2014 was on my mind this morning was when I interviewed one of the founders of a then-new bitters startup called Dashfire, which, if you saw the photo above, you will know is relevant to tonight’s post. I went back to reread it. I still think it was a great interview.

Shortly after that interview, I started making my own bitters, so I hadn’t thought of Dashfire in a while. Well, until I saw these cute little canned cocktails at the checkout counter of a local liquor store last night. I’d had a product lined up for tonight’s post that fell through, and serendipity was working in my favor to provide a replacement. They have expanded well beyond bitters in the last decade or so. Their offerings now include not only bitters but liqueurs, boozy coffee drinks, THC drinks, and, of course, ready-to-drink cocktails like we are exploring tonight.

I like making cocktails, but with the fact that I’ve cut way back on my drinking (I’m trying to move away from my Wisconsin upbringing and be a bit healthier about my relationship with alcohol), I don’t always have the more perishable ingredients on hand. For example, it is unlikely that I will ever use a 750 mL bottle of vermouth before it starts to feel the effects of being open for too long. I don’t make enough Manhattans to use that bottle in a year, much less the month (to a few months) the experts say it will take for the flavor to start going downhill. But occasionally, I want a Manhattan all the same. In those times, I can either buy a bottle of vermouth, knowing I will dump most of it out in a couple of months. Or I can buy a ready-to-drink version like I bought last night.

Dashfire currently makes ten different ready-to-drink cocktails. We are going to look at the two that I found last night: the Bourbon Old Fashioned and the Fig & Cascara Manhattan. I served each of them as instructed on the can, including garnish.

Dashfire Bourbon Old Fashioned

Purchase Information: $5.99 for a single-serve 100 mL can at Lunds & Byerly’s Liquor, Burnsville, MN

Serving Instructions: Pour over a large ice cube and garnish with orange zest.

Nose: Cherry and orange.

Mouth: Thick, rich, and sweet with notes of brown sugar, cherry, orange, vanilla, and baking spice.

Finish: Sweet with notes of cinnamon, caramel, vanilla, and orange.

Dashfire Fig & Cascara Manhattan

Purchase Information: $5.99 for a single-serve 100 mL can at Lunds & Byerly’s Liquor, Burnsville, MN

Serving Instructions: Stir with ice to chill and garnish with a cocktail cherry.

Nose: The sherry comes through strongly, along with some cherry notes.

Mouth: Thick and rich with notes of caramel, cocoa, orange, and baking spice.

Finish: Smoky notes of chocolate-covered raisin and cherry.

Thoughts: These taste like well-made Manhattans and Old Fashioneds from a fancy cocktail bar. I'd be happy paying bar prices for something that tastes like either of these. Hiking? Camping? Just don't want to keep the ingredients on your home bar? Toss a few of these in your pack or cupboard, and you'll have a tasty treat with little to no prep. And for $5.99, they are as good as you'll find in a good cocktail bar.

I look forward to trying their other offerings in the near future. The THC drinks sound delicious, I love coffee, and that Orange Bourbon Liqueur will certainly be coming home with me as soon as I find it on the shelf. You can look forward to that one being talked about here soon.

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Tempus Fugit Spirits and the Wisconsin Grasshopper Cocktail

I think that my appreciation for alcohol started early in my life. In Wisconsin, it is legal for your parents to serve you alcohol, so I was very young when I had my first sip of “Grandpa’s Pop.” I apparently liked it because, well, there is a photo of me as a baby where I was trying to steal a swig from Grandpa’s returnable bottle of Old Milwaukee. I only know this because there was a county directory that was printed shortly after I arrived in this world, and that photo ended up being printed there.

The 1970s were a weird time. Not that I remember much of them. (Because I was young, not because I was drunk…geez.)

My family has never shied away from alcohol at family gatherings. To this day, my stepmother will mix up an ice-cream pail-sized batch of “Grasshoppers” for the family to have as we exchange gifts. Now, unless you are from Wisconsin or deal with folks from there a lot, you might have the wrong idea about what I am talking about.

In most of the country, a Grasshopper cocktail is an after-dinner cocktail made from equal parts Crème de Cacao, Crème de Menthe, and cream. In Wisconsin, they have their own spin on it. Theirs uses ice cream instead of the cream and is basically a boozy milkshake. How boozy is up to the person making it. The “official” Supper Club recipe is a half ounce each of green Crème de Menthe and clear Crème de Cacao mixed with three scoops of ice cream and blended well. While I don’t know for sure what my stepmother’s recipe entails, I do know that she includes vodka if not serving it to the kids.

Rural northern Wisconsin is also super weird.

So, Frozen Grasshopper Cocktails make me think of Christmas. And when I saw a Crème de Cacao and a Crème de Menthe, each for over $30 per bottle, I decided to make some for my own Christmas celebration, even if it is just going to be my wife and I and a bunch of dogs. I’ll be honest as far as I know, I’ve never had a Grasshopper made with anything but Phillips or DeKuyper brand liqueurs. The bottommost-shelf of bottom-shelf brands. I had to know what one using booze that cost more than $12 per bottle tasted like. Hell, I needed to know what the liqueurs themselves, at triple the cost, would taste like. Could I actually drink them on their own? Would I be disappointed? Enraged? Excited? No idea. But it’s Christmas, and I was on a mission to try and make a better version than the one I grew up with.

OK, before we get into the meat of this, let’s take a moment to look at the purveyors of these upscale liqueurs. According to their website, Tempus Fugit Spirits is a California company that started out importing European Absinthes when they became legal in the US again in 2007. Along the way, they expanded…you know what? Let’s just let them tell it:

Along with the world’s finest absinthes, Tempus Fugit Spirits was determined to seek out fine rare liquors that were once staples in classic pre-prohibition cocktails, but have been lost in time. In most cases, we re-create these liquors ourselves, using historic 19th century protocols, many cross-referenced in several languages, to arrive as close in taste to these forgotten spirits as is possible, or surpass them – rare fruit, flower and plant liqueurs, bitters, amari, vermouths and chinati – we pride ourselves in finding out what’s missing from the back-bar that our cocktailian friends are searching for.

Our focus is on what is often called a cocktail ‘modifier’; those spirit-based ingredients used to transform whisky, gin, rum, etc. into a cocktail. We find today this category abused by industrial methods of production, artificial flavors and colors. We know these liqueurs were created in the past to be drunk alone, as aperitifs or digestifs, and were made with great pride and care by the best distilleries and liquorists.

So yeah. That sounds exactly like what I was hoping for when I picked up the bottles for my Christmas Grasshoppers. Here are the tasting notes, and then I’ll get to my own recipe.

Tempus Fugit Crème de Cacao

Purchase Info: $37.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Viking Liquor Barrel, Prior Lake, MN

Price per Drink (50 mL): $2.53

Details: 24% ABV.

Nose: Nutty and chocolatey. Think of the best gourmet chocolate bar you've had.

Mouth: Thick and sweet with a wonderful taste of cocoa nibs.

Finish: Sweet and gentle with the lingering flavor of a good candy bar. Notes of milk chocolate, caramel, and vanilla.

Thoughts: This is the best Crème de Cacao I've ever had. It's nutty like Cacao nibs, obviously chocolatey and sweet. Much better than the cheap stuff I used to buy. If it weren’t so sweet, I’d drink this on its own.

Tempus Fugit Crème de Menthe

Purchase Info: $46.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Curiada.com

Price per Drink (50 mL): $3.13

Details: 28% ABV.

Nose: Straight candy cane peppermint

Mouth: Liquid candy cane.

Finish: Long, very minty, and cool.

Thoughts: Very sweet and minty, just like you'd want from a mint liqueur. It is very tasty even if it is less complicated on the palate than the Crème de Cacao. I’m very happy with this as well. Both of these taste like what you’d want them to taste like, not like there are a bunch of artificial flavors in there.

Ok, now, after all that, here is my base recipe for a Frozen Grasshopper. This is just a base. You can adjust all of the ingredients as you wish and even leave some out, or be like my stepmother and add even more booze to it. This is the most forgiving cocktail recipe you’ll make.

Arok’s Frozen Wisconsin-Style Grasshopper

• 3 small scoops of a good vanilla bean ice cream (about 150-200 grams total)

• 1 fluid ounce Tempus Fugit Crème de Cacao

• 1 fluid ounce Tempus Fugit Crème de Menthe

• a splash of coffee or coffee liqueur

• green food coloring (optional, if you want the traditional Grasshopper color that would usually come from the green-colored Crème de Menthe. I tend to leave it out, but I wanted the picture to be accurate)

Blend the ingredients on low to medium-low to mix well but not melt the ice cream. Pour into a suitably vintage glass. Garnish with a mint sprig and/or a crushed-up York Peppermint Patty. And enjoy!

I’ll be taking next week off to enjoy Christmas with my family, so I hope each and every one of you has a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year!

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Chinola Passion Fruit Liqueur

I don’t know about you, but I hate advertising. I have a visceral reaction to it. So much so that I voluntarily pay for “free” content to remove ads. YouTube? I pay for Premium. Podcasts? I join Patreon to support them. I refuse to listen to the radio, preferring Spotify (which I also pay for to remove ads). If you stop by my house because “you are working at one of my neighbors.” I will shut the door, and if I am handed your info, it immediately gets tossed in the trash bin. Same with the direct mail that lands in my mailbox. That hits the recycling can before I reach the house.

I just really hate advertising. Very probably this is because I’ve spent the last twenty years making ads of one sort or another to the point where I just don’t want to see them or hear them. In fact, the only places where I even see ads anymore are while watching sports on tv…and my email box.

The email ones are insidious. Most of the ones I still get are “newsletters.” You know, the ads where they pretend it is a piece of content. I say they are insidious because they are just good enough at the content part that you don’t quite want to unsubscribe. So, imagine my surprise when I opened my email a couple of months ago and saw a very intriguing thing. It was a liqueur being sold by one of the online liquor stores that I occasionally order from. It sounded delicious. I know that because, much to my chagrin, I actually read the damn thing. Before I knew it, I was searching the websites of my local liquor stores trying to see if I could buy it locally (couldn’t give the online store the satisfaction of a sale based on their sneaky advertising). And it just so happens that Total Wine carried it. I texted my wife a request to stop on her way home to pick some up. And before I knew it I had two bottles in my possession (she misread my text).

So, what is this liqueur that caused me to almost break my commitment to not letting advertising work on me? It is called Chinola Passion Fruit Liqueur. And let me tell you, it is delicious. But before we get into that, let’s see what the producer has to say about it:

Vine to bottle. When we were experimenting with chinola (passion fruit), our ultimate goal was to make an all-natural liqueur that still possessed the aromatic fragrance and taste profile of raw passion fruit juice. As our product came to life, it felt fitting to name the liqueur after this sacred Dominican fruit, to honor its origin and forever create memories of sipping chinola-inspired cocktails on the beaches of the Dominican Republic. CHINOLA liqueur is a handcrafted beverage made from distilled spirits and real passion fruit. Through our unique blend and proprietary formulation, we have created a ‘natural’ liqueur with unparalleled taste and versatility. It can be consumed by itself or mixed with any base spirit into top quality cocktails.

Chinola Passion Fruit Liqueur

Purchase Info: $29.99 for a 750 mL bottle at Total Wine, Eagan, MN.

Price per Drink (50 mL): $2.00

Details: 21% ABV

Nose: Passion fruit, pineapple, and citrus.

Mouth: Thick and syrupy with tart passion fruit notes.

Finish: Tart and tangy and warmer than I had expected.

Thoughts: This is my new favorite cocktail ingredient. It adds depth to any drink that calls for citrus juice. It tastes good enough to drink straight, but it is a bit too thick for my tastes when on its own. But as far as a cocktail goes? I’ve tried it with every spirit I can think of and it works wonderfully with all of them. I started out with the Chinola Daiquiri that is on their website. That was tasty enough that I needed to send my second bottle home with my daughter when she and her fiance visited because they loved the cocktail. Then I added it along with the lemon juice in a Whiskey Sour. I’m not usually a fan of Whiskey Sours because I find them a bit thin in the mouth. But the Chinola added both depth of flavor and a nicer mouthfeel. Last night, in preparation for this post, I added it to a Margarita on the Rocks for my wife, and she loved it. I added some to a Gin Ricky, and it paired very nicely with the floral gin. All in all, if you like passion fruit, buy this. If you like citrus cocktails, buy this.

I think I’m in love.

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Angostura Cocoa Bitters

I’m a big fan of cocktails. As such, even though I usually use my own house-made bitters, I also keep an extensive collection of commercial bitters on hand as well. Either because a cocktail that I want to make calls for a specific ingredient or because I was wandering down the store aisle that had bitters in it when something caught my eye.

Such was the case with tonight’s bitters. I was wandering through the digital aisles of curiada.com, looking at a collection curated by one of my favorite YouTube cooking and history shows (Tasting History with Max Miller), when I clicked on a link that took me somewhere I didn’t expect. Among the many items on that new page were Cocoa Bitters from Angostura. Honestly, I didn’t even know Angostura had released a third product in their line of cocktail bitters. Though since it happened during the summer of 2020, I can probably be forgiven for missing the news. I have a vague recollection of something more important going on during that time. So after searching online to make sure no local stores carried it, I added it to my cart and had it shipped to me (along with a few other deliciously tasty treats).

Before we get into what I thought of it, here is what the company has to say about its relatively new product.

Few flavours delight one’s palate in a way that leaves you wanting more. None more so than the rich taste of cocoa! ANGOSTURA®, celebrated worldwide for its rich history in creating aromatic and orange bitters, has expanded its renowned collection to include ANGOSTURA® cocoa bitters. We only use the world’s finest, the Trinitario cocoa from Trinidad and Tobago. This paired with 200 years of unparalleled bitters expertise have resulted in this truly decadent, indulgent new flavour.

So…how is it? Let’s find out. First, we’ll try it on its own.

Like most Angostura bitters, Cocoa Bitters is delightfully spicy on the nose. Bright minty notes pair with earthy clove and spices. Under that, there is nutty depth provided by the addition of cocoa nibs. On the mouth, it’s just like a delicious spicy chocolate cookie. There are strong chocolate fudge and cinnamon notes that would make a candymaker weep. The finish is pure, rich dark chocolate. Honestly, I could drink this on its own. It’s really good.

Now that we’ve seen what we are dealing with, let’s try it in a few applications. I love to drink soda water with a few dashes of bitters in it as a refreshing, non-sweetened drink. In this case, the bitters weren’t quite right, though. The intense dilution of the drink highlighted the nutty flavors and pretty much lost the chocolate. Maybe I just don’t like acidic and carbonated chocolate, though. So let’s move into more traditional uses.

The whiskey cocktail I consume most often is an Old Fashioned. It’s not my favorite cocktail, but it is the easiest, so when my wife asks if I want a cocktail, she usually makes that one. And let me tell you, Angostura Cocoa Bitters make an excellent bourbon Old Fashioned. It pairs so well with the aged spirits, making it richer and more balanced. After looking on the Angostura Bitters website, I found an unexpected use for Cocoa Bitters that I also had to try. The After Eight Mojito uses white rum, lime, mint, sweetener, cocoa bitters, and soda water. I was blown away by how good that was. I didn’t have Angostura white rum, but the white rum I had on hand had a bit of funk to it and the chocolate notes played so well with it.

Overall, I love it. And if you haven’t tried it yet, maybe you are like me and missed its release in the midst of the VID, give it a try. It’s well worth the $12.99 I paid for it.

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