The Cocktail Spirit with Robert Hess

Kudos on this last episode on the Sazerac! The Sazerac is my favorite cocktail and I’ve been evangelizing my guests to this classic for years.  At Blue Smoke in NYC we use Old Overholt and Pernod, which is perfectly acceptable, but at home I use Sazerac Rye and Herbsainte which I brought back from New Orleans (it’s not distributed here). I’ve never seen the technique of the atomizer for this drink and I must say, it’s pretty brilliant. I hate seeing good liquor get tossed out ( not to mention what it does to the bar cost ). By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask, WHERE did you get that gorgeous jigger. Please don’t tell me it’s an unavailable antique.

I would LOVE to see the Sazerac get more exposure, but only of course if it is properly made. There are a wide variety of different ways I’ve seen folks attempt to make this drink, some of them pretty far off base.

The jigger I use to “make” the drink is the OXO acrylic “mini-angled measure”, which is my absolute favorite jigger… or perhaps you mean that white ceramic thing you see in the background of the opening/closing shot. That’s just a ceramic “egg cup” that I picked up at a kitchen shop.

If you use an atomizer for the absinthe as you see me do here, it works best if it is true absinthe and not a pastis (Pastis being the term that “Ricard” promoted as refering to the various absinthe substitutes that came out post-pan), since most (all?) pastis are sweetened, and this has a tendency to clog up the atomizer if you don’t use it regularly.

-Robert

Nice!  (Any significance to the NASA glass?)

Noticed the NASA glass eh? :-> No significance other than the fact that they are the perfect size/shape/type for the glass I like to serve Sazeracs in. Just something I picked up on eBay a few months back.

Drinking a Sazerac in a stemmed cocktail glass just seems wrong to me, even though I regularly find folks making them like that.

And while we are on the topic of a “proper Sazerac”, I’d like to comment on the practice I often see listed for either using a combination of Peychaud’s and Angostura bitters, or using Angostura bitters instead of Peychaud’s in a Sazerac. For me, this is just wrong (but as Gary always says, “nothing is written in stone"). For me, a Sazerac uses only Peychaud’s bitters. I suspect the other versions are simply trying to deal with how difficult it can be sometimes to find a bitter other than Angostura. If you’ve got Peychaud’s, use Peychaud’s and nothing else. If you don’t have Peychaud’s, then you aren’t making a Sazerac :->

-Robert

Great episode!!  I can’t wait to atomize with absinthe.  I propose a drinking game:  with each episode, one first makes the cocktail, then reviews the episode again and downs the drink each time Robert says “take and...”

How always a great episode. But there’s one question I’m still chewing on:

Are you using Simple Syrup ( 1:1) or Rich Syrup. And why haben’t you chosen the homemade Demerara Syrup?

Greetings from Germany

Nicolas, as you can see via the label on the squeeze bottle in the background, I was using the “rich” simple syrup here. For the most part, I (almost) never make 1:1 syrup, so any time you see me using a syrup it is going to be 2:1… but that doesn’t mean you can’t make the same drink with the same recipe, but using a 1:1 syrup instead.

I think it is important for all of us to adjust drinks to suit our own tastes, and come to a personal understanding of what that means. So make the drink as close as you can to how you see me do it first, and then form your own opinion about the “balance” of the drink. If you think it is too sweet, then cut back a bit on the syrup, not sweet enough, add a little mroe.

And I didn’t use the Demerara syrup because I didn’t have any with me for this shoot :->

-Robert

Robert, great episode!

Good to see the mix for the proper Sazerac getting so much coverage. I recently had an unfortunate Sazerac at a New Orleans cornerstone restaurant that rhymes with rennans. However by the end of the night they were making them right.

Also, for those of you who love the Sazerac our friend Ann, founder of Tales of the Cocktail, is on a mission to make the Sazerac the Official cocktail on Louisiana.
http://www.barmixmaster.com/2008/04/offical-state-of-louisiana-cocktail.html

If anyone wants to help out this cause email me at bar.mix.master[at]gmail.com for info.

Thanks

I hate to ask about a substitution following a series specifically designed to rekindle interests in proper Sazeracs, but I find myself with neither Absinthe or Herbsaint.  I do have a quite old (20+ years) bottle of De Napoleon Anisette.  Firstly, is Anisette even a proper substitution?  And secondly, what are the effects on the (probably accidently) bottle-aged Anisette?  If it matters, I am fairly certain that the bottle was unopened until a few weeks ago.

-Mark

Mark, since the amount of absinthe being used in the Sazerac is so slight, your anisette will be a “decent” substitution. It will lend a slightly different flavor profile to the drink, but at least it is in the right direction. As for being 20 years old, that won’t be a problem.

Absinthe never really caught on here in America back in the 1800’s, it was mostly used similarly to how you see it being used here in the Sazerac, just as an “accent” to the drink, as opposed to being drunk by itself. Many bartenders whould have had a “bitters bottle” on the counter filled with absinthe, and add a dash or two to a drink much the same way they might use Angostura bitters.

-Robert

Sigh, I didn’t get enough of a heads up to head out to this altogether too interesting cocktail revival!

I live in “The City” as San Francisco is known by it’s locals, and I didn’t even know this event was even in the works!  I wish I was able to make it to Elixir (I’m about 10 min away).  Maybe I’ll order the Sazerac when I check out 16th and Mission.

Robert, I too love the atomizer, especially for pour costs as well as dramatic effect (I love when customers look at me wierd and ask questions for doing fun stuff like that). I usually serve Sazeracs in a glass like you used, but I found these cool old glasses at a local thrift shop and thought the drink fit nicely in it. That’s what I’m using in the Shirazerac video. Unfortunately they’re fragile and will be gone when customers or bartenders break the last ones and I’ll be back to the thrift shops. Alan, I just hand selected and bought an entire barrel of Sazerc Rye, so we’ll be making sazeracs for a long time. AND, I’m donating the profits for that and the t-shirts I made for the event to Tales of the Cocktail until July 16th, the first day of the event. So come down and have one with me! (feel free to contact me at ) Cheers!

Driving home this evening I was pleasently surprised to hear my good friend Lu Brow discuss the “Sazerac” cocktail in light of it recently being declared the official cocktail of New Orleans!

You can check it out over on NPR’s website here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91912549

Although I might personally disagree with Lu’s addition of Angostura bitters to the drink. It’s my feeling that this was an evolution of the recipe that occured for places where Peychaud was difficult, if not impossible to find.

As far as i know the sazerac company first produced a cognac. So the original recipe has to be with cognac. rye came later. and with cognac the use of peychaud`s AND angostura makes sense.

by the way, were was the first sazerac recipe published? and is it with or without ice in the glass?
than you robert for all.

Oliver,

We are working on tracking down the often confusing history of the Sazerac cocktail, it is confusing because the proper name “Sazerac Cocktail” and a firm recipe, don’t always come together throughout history, instead there are recipes, and indications that these recipes were served at the Sazerac Coffee House, and other listings of recipes and indications that these were Antoine Peychaud’s drink, which was then eventually served in one form or another at the Sazerac Coffee house… it makes for such confusing research that it drives you to drink :->

David Wondrich is diving into some of these details, and the results should be facinating when he is finished.

Oliver,

The “Sazerac Company” is different from the brandy which was originally used in the cocktail served at the Sazerac Coffee House. The brandy was “Sazerac-du-Forge et fils”, and is no longer manufactured. The Sazerac Company came much later.

As for the Peychaud/Angostura debate, it is my feeling that a “true” Sazerac cocktail should just contain Peychaud’s, since the drink was originally formulated by Anotine Peychaud, and he most certainly would not have included Angostura.

Ok, so I’m a stickler for Peychaud, but not for brandy? Reason being that I’ll recongize the evolution (which includes the addition of Absinthe), but also want to recognize the origins of the drink, and pay homeage to Antoine Peychaud.

I personally feel that the addition of Angostura evolved due to the often inability for bartenders to get Peychaud bitters outside of New Orleans, so they started substituting Angostura. I think it makes a decidely different drink.

But if you are going to be doing a cognac based Sazerac, then I don’t think there is any argument but that you have to also only use Peychaud’s, because I think it would have been far less likely for anybody to have been using Angostura in that version of the drink since it was still mostly being served just in New Orleans, where Peychauds (or one of the competing variations, none of which are available anymore) would have been readily available.

-Robert