Casbah

Photo by John Holland, on flickr.

The Casbah is a bit of a variant on a Manhattan. Back when I was young, I took most of my drinking advice from a slightly older gentleman we nicknamed Jim "Beam". Among his drinks was a Manhattan, always with a splash of grenadine. I eventually moved on from those to different sorts of Manhattans, but the suggestion always stuck with me. So now that I have my own grenadine, it was time to play with it. Grenadine combined with sweet vermouth is just too sweet for me, but I figured I could replace the sweet vermouth, and it would be okay, so for my first recipe I got the following:

1.5 oz Rye
.5 oz Grenadine
3 dashes, Peychaud's bitters

It ended up very floral, since I added a bit more orange flower water to make the grenadine than may have been in fact ideal. It was somewhat sweeter than usual as well, and the Peychaud's seemed to aggravate that. It needed a different sort of bitters.

The second time I tried, I used 1/4 oz grenadine and added hellfire bitters.This version was much better and had a great finish. The third version I used Angostura bitters, and again, it was quite floral, though not exceptionally sweet. Not a bad summer drink for someone who likes brown spirits.

Sun and Sand

The other night, I was looking to relax with a drink. I was feeling something tiki influenced, perhaps something with the homemade grenadine. So naturally, I decided to make a variation on the Blood and Sand. Nothing says Polynesia like Scotch! To lighten it up a bit, I replaced the usual Cherry Heering with the grenadine. The number one thing I noticed about this drink? I should use fresh squeezed orange juice. The other is that, while the grenadine did lighten up the drink in comparison to the original, and added some floral notes, it's still a pretty heavy drink. Recipe after the jump.

Jack Rose

The Jack Rose is a cocktail with a long history. Popular in the 1920s and 30s, it appeared in a scene in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I was unaware of this drink until an eponymous bar opened up on the south end of Adams Morgan. I tried it when I went there for New Year's Eve, but for some reason don't recall the details of the drink. So having made some homemade grenadine, I thought this would be a great opportunity to try the drink again.

I found a couple different recipes in my cocktail books, and decided to go with the one from Dale DeGroff's Craft of the Cocktail. It was very tasty and refreshing, similar in fact to the effect I'm trying to get with my Apple Beverages. Sadly, it was way too sweet. My wife couldn't even finish it! So it's probably better without the simple syrup. Recipe after the jump.