· James Torr · Personal · 1 min read
An old fashioned with marmalade in place of the sugar syrup, and distilled water ice. Was aiming for clear, but this is rather funky.
As an alternative holiday souvenir, I decided to collect ingredients for a foraged herb bitters. From top left, clockwise: mugwort, clover, rock samphire, yarrow, rosemary, spruce, meadowsweet, wild carrot, tansy, sage. Collected around south Devon and Dartmoor. I've added some bitter and sweet orange peel (we took a few with us!), as well as gentian root (to up the bitterness quotient a bit. I'll leave this to infuse for a month, strain and simmer the dry ingredients with a bit of water, which I'll add back to the alcohol.
"Super" juice experiment. Been making a few cocktails recently, and have been getting through quite a few citrus fruits in the process. Kevin Kos has a video on super juice, a technique used by some of the modern cocktail makers to save money, time and waste by stretching citrus fruits much further than their usual yield. You zest, weigh the zest, add a ratio (1x) quantity of acid (citric, malic) to the zest and leave it to macerate for several hours. You then blend this with a quantity of water (16x the weight of the zest).
Mirto bramble. Twist on the classic blackberry cocktail using myrtle berry liqueur. This is a Sardinian drink that was first brought to me by an Italian couchsurfer 10 years ago. I didn't forget it and planted a tree about 6 years ago that was nearly destroyed when part of my wall fell down in a storm. Thankfully it didn't and I'm now able to enjoy a delicious summer cocktail with the fruits.
Trying my hand at an Angostura style bitters. Rough ingredient list: 1 tbsp bitter orange peel dried 1 orange zest 1/2 tsp gentian root 2 cardamom pods crushed 4 cloves 1/2 tsp vanilla essence 1/2 cup of feverfew, tansy, sweet cicely and artemisia herbs from the garden. Covering this with about 250ml of vodka. Recipe (from Parsons 'Bitters' book) says to strain, boil the ingredients and steep in water separately for another week. Then I'll filter, add to the alcohol, and add a sugar syrup.