The Steampunk Drink (Part 2)

So – we have Byrrh. Now what?

On the back of the Byrrh bottle, I found what turned out to be 95% of the drink I wanted to make. The Le Negociant is a 4-ingredient French lovefest:
- 1 ounce Byrrh
- 1 ounce rhum agricole (which means "rum made straight from sugarcane, skipping the molasses step)
- .5 ounce elderflower liqueur
- .5 ounce lemon juice

Rhum agricole is by default French, since Clément or Rhum JM are the usual go-tos, and both hail from Martinique in the French West Indies. "Elderflower liqueur" is St. Germain, and do not waste time with anything else. And with Byrrh's pedigree, we're not only solid French, but we're golden on the age of all of the above – 1866 for Byrrh, 1887 for rhum, and 1884 for the process used to make St. Germain. ("Le Negociant", by the way, refers to a French wine producer who buys grapes from a mix of smaller vineyards and combines them to create their own label's release.)

The drink is terrific - the Byrrh's red wine (and, to be clear, this is mistelle – fortified red wine that's sweeter than a traditional red) gives it a front sweetness, the St. Germain gives it floral and citrus notes and a gentle sweetness, the rhum adds a light rum flavor that contributes another sweet note, the herbals and undernotes of the Byrrh and the St. Germain dancing just out of reach. It's a great drink...

Von's 1000Spirits. I took their word for it.

...but I did say the word "sweet" four times in the above paragraph. One of my mandates, as you'll recall, was that the current drink being served was "too sweet." Now, this is not pina colada sweet, but it's definitely going to register as sweet on the palate. This is not necessarily going to be a problem, but the closer I can walk to the border of sweet and tart, the wider the audience I can reach with this drink.

So, we flash forward to September, on a beautiful night in Seattle where my friend Ron and I are walking the streets of Seattle looking for Byrrh. (In reality, we're just looking for drinks, but if you've got a goal, it's purposeful drinking, right?) Surprisingly, there was no Byrrh at Von's 1000Spirits (though I did pick up another nifty trick for the steampunk bartender), and I had a great throwback drink with a nifty local story. At The Diller Room, I got a pity-carding at the door (at my age, always appreciated), and a great side-by-side comparison of a variety of quinquinas. No Byrrh, but I did get to try Cocchi Americano straight for the first time (think Byrrh, but with a moscato base) and the local entry into the category, Chinato D'Erbetti. Both were interesting, but not what I was after...

Finally, we ended up at the Zig Zag Café, tucked away as you head down towards the shoreline from Pike Place Market. Ron had been there the night before, and had sung the praises of the place effusively. Ricardo was our bartender for the evening, and upon asking about Byrrh, immediately produced a bottle of the stuff for our amusement. So, we had him mix up a Le Negociant, parse it out into a couple of glasses for control sample purposes, and resolved to come up with the perfect variant of the drink for our purposes.

After a couple of abortive attempts to add additional ingredients, Ricardo made an observation. The sweet is coming from three sources in the drink; what if we can modify one of the existing spirits in the drink to take the sweet edge off? The Byrrh was off-limits, and the St. Germain is a beloved favorite, so the rhum became the sacrificial victim. I really wanted to keep rum, but didn't want to add a rum that would overwhelm the drink (Bacardi would add a sharp undertone, anything dark would drown out the herbals, and so on).

Suddenly, Ricardo reached over to the rack and pulled down a semi-familiar bottle – Smith & Cross Jamaican rum. This was one of the stars of our rum dinner from a few months ago, providing a knife-like palate-cleansing alongside foie gras. The rum is navy-strength (meaning that it would not prevent gunpowder from igniting), and is a blend of two traditional Jamaican run processes (part aged less than a year, part aged 18-36 months). Adding it to the drink not only took a bit of sweet out (both in its own flavor and in the extra proof knocking a bit out of the front of the drink), it added some additional spice notes that worked beautifully with the drink. And, as required for steampunk purposes, the Smith & Cross mark dates to 1788. We had our cocktail recipe.

The drink is pictured in the
Etched Bullseye Martini Glass
and is available for purchase
on the Contemporary Complements website.

Finally, we needed a name. Adding the Smith & Cross gets us a British/French blend that doesn't have a lot of commonality–Jamaica was a British colony, and I couldn't find anything evocative of a connection between the spirits or the countries of origin. So, I fell back on the original creators of my primary ingredient. We're only swapping one ingredient from the Le Negociant, but both to separate it from that drink, and to not force inebriated passengers to butcher French in front of our poor bartender, a simple nod to The Violet Brothers seems in order.

The Violet Brothers
1 ounce Byrrh
1 ounce Smith & Cross Jamaican rum
.5 ounce St. Germain
.5 ounce fresh lemon juice

Shake with ice in a cocktail strainer. Serve in a martini glass.

It's been a fun ride, and to all of my companions along the way, (especially Ricardo at the Zig Zag), I'm delighted to have a drink that I'm confident to pass along to our steampunk partygoers. Thanks to Kim Maita for the challenge, and if you try it, let me know what you think!

The Steampunk Drink (Part 1)

I met Kimberly Maita on a cruise ship. I'm sure that I talked to Kimberly, who runs an enterprise named Gamer Adventures, at a game convention or two before cruising with her, but I MET her onboard, over many drinks and shipboard relaxation. She is a delightful cruise coordinator, and a fun person to hang around with. (We keep trying to meet up in Las Vegas at Frankie's Tiki Room, but so far, no luck. The fact that we're still trying is to her credit.)

Early this year, I received a message from her, asking me to create a drink for her Steampunk Symposium onboard the Queen Mary in January. I said yes, because Kim is a friend and I figured it would be worth a few free drinks when next we met. Her requirements were modest–the current drink was "too sweet," and it should be something appropriate to the theme of the cruise.

I, of course, needed to make it harder. I had to rule out alcohols released after 1910 or so (which is pushing it for true steampunk, but I wanted some validation chronologically), and my starting point was something evocative of the theme. Steampunk is about creating an creative, just-off-center experience, with internal rules governing the flights of fancy on display. So, I wanted the drink to adhere to the same sorts of rules that I would apply to creating a costume for a steampunk event.

Additionally, there was one more rule Kim added: no absinthe. This struck me as an odd rule, and I'm not sure if this is a shipboard rule, or a personal preference, or just such a Victorian stereotype as to be instantly dismissed. This wasn't a huge deal, of course, but it did prevent one line of exploration (which would have been nice, as I have four bottles of the stuff at home, and I'd like an excuse to use a bit more of it than I do).

I also wanted to remember that this was going to be part of a cruise bar offering, of which its patrons are not known for their overall self-control. One drink becomes two, two becomes four, and by the end of the night it's hard to tell the rolling of the ship from the variations in gravity caused by your inebriated state. So, it needed to be a high-volume drink–no five-minute production processes, no eight-hour garnishes, but something that a working bartender could produce quickly and efficiently.

Two major avenues of exploration occurred to me. The first was to play off the "showy" side of steampunk–find something reactive in color or presentation that would provide a bit of a show during the production of the drink. In retrospect, it's not surprising that I found little on the subject; chemical reaction in consumables presents the challenge of taking two edible substances that combine into another edible substance, without the production of bad by-products or overly endo- or exothermic reactions. I'd love to explore this topic in the future, but I'm resigned to the the idea that it might need to be a much more controlled atmosphere for success than a working bar would provide. A few side explorations proved fruitless as well (who would have thought that Pop Rocks would be so very boring when added to vodka?...).

The second avenue also involved showmanship, but of an external variety. I imagined that a simple lightbox might be added to the bar as a mixing platform, allowing me to create blacklight-sensitive drinks. It's a very well-known fact that quinine is blacklight-reactive, casting off a bluish glow under ultraviolet. As quinine is an ingredient in tonic water, it means that any drink that uses tonic water to any great extent will provide that glow. Thing is, it works best with clear drinks–a gin and tonic is very pretty as the clear drink glows blue, but introduce any other color to the drink and the effect gets washed out enough as to not justify the extra bother of a lightbox.

This was my research status as of May, when I made a trip out to Charlottesville, Virginia for a Mayfair Games production meeting. When people ask if I play games for a living, these are the days where I can say "yes" - fourteen hour days where we're hammering at designs, or churning through a design an hour, or eating while discussing games and game designs. But, this is being done in a beautiful, relaxed setting, in the shadow of Monticello, with friends who are as engaged and focused on the games at hand as I (and usually more so).

The drink is pictured in the
Wave Polka Dot Shooter
and is available for purchase
on the Contemporary Complements
website

On our last day, we were making our traditional morning run to Spudnuts (a now-defunct national chain, with individual franchisees still operating, that makes lighter-than-air potato flour doughnuts). Needing my morning mocha, I wandered across the street to The Farm C'ville, a small grocery/deli with a bit of a wine selection on the side. While waiting for my coffee, I glanced over at a display shelf next to the register, and was immediately fixated on the word "quinquina." This is important because it means that it's in a family of apertifs that includes cinchona bark, which means quinine.

What I was looking at was Byrrh (pronounced "beer," to the dismay of anyone wanting to buy a bottle somewhere, and having to start every conversation with a clerk with "Do you carry [beer]?"). It's an French herbal aperitif, created by two French brothers in 1866 and marketed as a health drink. In a typical French manner, they use red wine as the base, and the drink is sweet, but with a palate-clearing edge thanks to the quinine fluttering about at the end of the taste. It fell out of fashion pre-Prohibition in the US and has only been available again since 2012, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

I immediately snagged up a bottle, somehow knowing in my heart of hearts that this was the ingredient I needed to inspire my drink. But what to do with it?

That, dear friends, is a story for next week...