MxMo XL: Bai Nai Punch

In Thai, bai nai means "Where are you going?" For my friends Barry and Rebecca, who have spent some time in Thailand and just married last month, the common greeting seemed a fitting name for a drink to mark their wedding day.

Since this month’s Mixology Monday's theme is ginger, it’s doubly fitting. More than that, maybe: Matt "Rumdood" Robold is hosting MxMo XL: Ginger this month, so it'll be worth checking in later in the week to see what cocktail recipes have been delivered to his door. The Bai Nai punch uses ginger syrup as well as falernum, a Barbadian syrups flavored with cloves, lime, and other ingredients, including ginger.

The drink is particularly suited to large gatherings such as weddings, pool parties, beach outings, or backyard cookouts. The recipe for the Bai Nai—based on Dale DeGroff’s Perfect Passion from his 2009 book The Essential Cocktail—yeilds a single serving. The syrup recipes that go into it, though, have large yields because they are particularly versatile. While I like DeGroff’s original recipe with its muddled ginger, strawberries, and lychees, it would have been a monster hassle to make it one drink at a time for 180 guests. Instead, I scaled it, made some substitutions, rejiggered the measurements…and added an ingredient.

Lychees provide an exotic but elusively familiar element—the taste is something like table grapes, but clearly not just that, and the aroma is unmistakable (once you know what it is). To give the recipe an additional lychee flavor and aroma boost, I added a small amount of Soho, a lychee liqueur imported by Pernod Ricard. Use it with a light touch—it's tasty, but it doesn’t take much to be too much.

Bai Nai Punch

1.5 oz vodka or 40-45% abv neutral spirits
1 oz. strawberry/lychee syrup (see below)
.75 oz lemon juice (freshly squeezed)
.5 oz falernum
.25 oz ginger syrup (see below)
.25 oz Soho Lychee liqueur

Shake with ice. Strain into stemmed cocktail glass. Garnish with a paper umbrella anchored with an orange slice.

The Syrups

Ginger Syrup
4 oz fresh ginger root, peeled, and cut into small dice
24 oz water
.5 oz fresh lime juice
1 tsp lime zest
1.5 c Demerara sugar

Bring the water almost to a boil in a pan. Add ½ cup to a blender with the ginger. Process briefly to shred the ginger. Rinse out the blender with the remaining hot water, then transfer the ginger mixture back to the pan. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and add the remaining ingredients. Leave at a bare simmer for an hour (do not boil). Let cool and strain.

Yield: about 24 ounces

Strawberry/lychee syrup
6 pints fresh strawberries
6 12-oz cans of lychees
2.5 quarts simple syrup (1:1 sugar and water)
The light syrup from two lychee cans

Wash and hull the berries. Add them with the lychees to a large plastic container. Add half the simple syrup and roughly chop with an immersion blender. Add the remaining syrups, cover, and let sit overnight in the refrigerator. Strain.

Yield: about 90 ounces

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Bookshelf: Cordial Waters

Volodimir Pavliuchuk is so well known among hobbyist distillers that if he spent a week in internet silence, home distillers from New York to New Zealand would call his local police to make sure the man had not fallen in his boiler.

Pavliuchuk, better known as Wal, is a pillar of Yahoo’s online distillers’ group. His near daily posts about and links to historical recipes, PDFs of old distilling manuals, ethnographic accounts, essays, and dissertations on producing spirits spur hobbyist distillers to recreate bygone, lost, and forgotten spirits. Or, at least, to know about them.

And now Wal has a book. Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World hit the shelves recently and home distillers everywhere should be breaking out wallets right about…now.

The book covers distilling basics, including simple recipes for creating vodka, whiskeys, brandies, rum, and other spirits from primary ingredients. Purists may balk at plain white sugar in some recipes or additives for emulating peat or barrel aging, but recall that the recipes are for home enthusiasts who may not have access to expensive professional equipment. If those bother you, skip them. There’s plenty enough here worth digging into.















The meat of Cordial Waters—the reason you want to buy this book—is 260 recipes Wal gives for flavored spirits; cordials, liqueurs, flower waters, crèmes, gins, flavored whiskeys and brandies, citrus infusions, bitters, kümmel, pastis, absinthes, monastic liqueurs, genevers, vodkas (flavored with bison grass, tormentil, tobacco, birch buds, spruce, and more), spiced rums, cream liqueurs, spirits spiked with beans and nuts, shrubbs, and—for you tiki fans—Hawaiian okolehao. Hell, he’s even got mesquite mash. And mastic liqueur. Laudanum. Crazy shit with alkermes, cochineal, and ants. So many more culled from sources spanning centuries and continents.

The recipes have been scaled to standardized 1- or 4-liter batches. Many readers—perhaps especially those with little experience, or patience with, interpreting older recipes—will find this a great convenience since such recipes often call for outdated or uncertain measurements [hands, drachms, “enough,” two bottles (what size?), until it becomes a stiff paste, etc.]. By presenting the recipes in liters and grams, Wal skillfully works around the uncertainties a novice might encounter.

Readers with a tenacious historical or bibliographic bent, however, will regret that the book does not present original recipes alongside the adaptations nor does it cite each recipe’s source. This redaction—understandable given the book’s space restrictions—nevertheless is frustrating because original recipes contain valuable clues about techniques, procedures, purposes, and sometimes even reasons why mixtures were made at certain times and not others.

An 1890 falernum recipe, for instance, calls for milk, presumably cow’s. Milk? Really? See, that’s interesting in and of itself. I trust Wal, but want to learn about its role from the original. Was it a fining, maybe? Combined with lime juice, allowed to settle, then racked and strained, that may just work, but modern versions from the cocktail crowd and rum enthusiasts don’t use it. A citation would give enough information to start a library hunt in earnest. Ah, well. Second edition perhaps.

Regardless, Cordial Waters is a delight. Those who want to learn more no doubt will latch onto innumerable nuggets of insight larding the book. Buried in notes for a rosa-solis recipe, for example, is mention of a 1609 recipe that calls for Brasilwood boiled in rosewater to create a red color. What New York or San Francisco bartender is doing that? Also noted is that drying celandine (Chelidonium majus) reduces its toxicity and that adding 0.1 gram of silver nitrate/liter prior to redistilling causes hydrogen cyanide in stone fruit spirits to precipitate as insoluble silver cyanide. These are good things to know.

It’s not all fancy, outrageous, or outré concoctions. There are plenty of recipes that can be made with little more than store-bought vodka and fresh herbs or spices. Knowing something about cocktails and liquor, though, would be a great help in understanding procedures and, occasionally, when to veer from directions.

Of particular use is an appendix explaining the Pearson Square. Homebrewers and winemakers are familiar with this handy diagram that allows mixers to calculate quickly the amounts of two liquids required to fortify or dilute alcoholic beverages. Several examples (including one suggesting that Pavliuchuk likes his martinis 7:1) show in clear detail how to make simple calculations using the square.

Who should buy it? Every hobbyist distiller. Who else? Bartenders, cocktail enthusiasts, drinks historians, botanists, ethnopharmacologists—anyone who enjoys making cordials and liqueurs. Certainly anyone with a still will find inspiration here. In these tight times, and with the long-overdue ascendancy of cocktail culture, that’s a lot of people.

Who else should buy it? You.

Do so here.

Goes well with:

• Moonshine! ~ my own novice's guide to distilling. Publisher's Weekly calls it "the last book one will ever need on the art of in-house hooch." Perfect for Father's Day.
  
• The Compleat Distiller ~ Mike Nixon and Mike McCaw's treatise on the science of making spirits, a classic among modern hobbyist distillers.
  
• Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails ~ Ted Haigh's erudite profile of cocktails fallen into obscurity and now enjoying a renaissance. Second edition is forthcoming.

Volodimir Pavliuchuk (2008)
Cordial Waters: A Compleat Guide to Ardent Spirits of the World
152 pages, paperback.
Published by The Amphora Society
Pakuranga, New Zealand
$25


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The Smakatoa Cocktail

Wow. You’re old, but you’re built like a brick shithouse. That’s hot.

~ spectacularly unsuccessful Long Beach suitor

A story in which Rowley, weights, and rum come together. Rum wins.

Yesterday was the first real day back at the gym in a month. May’s trip to New Orleans got me out of a habit that used to find me there five days a week, usually before dawn. Oh, I’ve gone and hit the treadmill, desultorily moved some weights around a few days a week, but not really dug in like I meant it.

Yesterday afternoon, I very nearly dropped to my knees and hurled right there next to the pec deck. Maybe it’s the unusually hot weather we’ve been having, or the cold water I was drinking, but I was liking the gym a whole lot less than usual.














Now I don’t work out so I can have some fancy sculpted physique. Far from it. No, I go because I love to eat and drink. If gluttony were searching for a poster boy, I’d definitely get a callback. See, I go to work off the calories I consume from gumbo, roast pork, biscuits, duck confit, bacon, sausages, pancakes, carne asada, guisados from my favorite Mexican lunchateria, chicken-fried steak, and buckets of cocktails…why, if I didn’t, I’d be big as and noxious a FEMA trailer.

So it was with particular delight that I whipped up a tiki-inspired cocktail when I got home. To settle my stomach, you understand. After all, it was hot as blazes, a perfect day for a refreshing rum cocktail, and I’d just burned through a mess of calories. Time to tank up on more.

Why rum? About two months back, I’d visited the Puka Bar in Long Beach, California. Didn’t even know it existed and ended up having a fantastic time. Live rockabilly music, fun crowd, and—as my photographer buddy Jim Ezell put it—“authentic” tiki cocktails.

Now, we’ll set aside for the time being notions of authenticity and tiki. They did have some standards (scorpions, mai tais, zombies) along with newer concoctions such as the snow monkey (Cazadores tequila, banana liqueur, pineapple juice, and coconut snow) to catch the eye (and assault the liver).

It was a serendipitous dovetail with the tiki mulling I’d been having for the past several months—reading Jeff "Beachbum" Berry’s great books on tiki cocktails (see below), attending Paul Tuennerman's birthday party at Celebration Distillation (home of Old New Orleans Rum), drinking much rum at home, having an ancient mariner cocktail up at Dr. Cocktail’s (the Beachbum's recipe), and thinking tiki thoughts in general, so when I saw a half-gallon jug of mango puree at Costco a few weeks ago, I bought it and began adding rums in controlled experiments.

Named after the Indonesian island Krakatoa, but with an ability to smack your ass off the porch for its size if you indulge in more than one, I’ve dubbed this

The Smakatoa

4 oz Pyrat XO Reserve rum (Bacardi 8 or Appleton's are also nice)
4 oz Naked mango puree
½ oz falernum*
3 dashes Angostura bitters
1 oz seltzer

Mix the first four ingredients in a pint glass. Add ice cubes to within an inch of the brim, stir with a bar spoon, top with seltzer, give it a quick swirl with a spoon, and serve immediately.

I’m not a big fan of seltzer in cocktails, but this helps to lighten the thick mango puree admirably, making it better suited to leisurely summertime drinking.

* Falernum is a West Indies syrup that finds its way into many, many mid-century cocktails, but which is a little tricky to find today. Fee Brothers makes a non-alcoholic version, and there’s the 11% abv Bajan Velvet Falernum you can find in some liquor stores. But a lot of cocktail enthusiasts are making their own versions with infusions of lime, almonds, ginger, and other ingredients in overproof rum. Older cookbooks also include it under alternate spellings such as valernum and falerium. It pays to scan carefully.

Goes well with:

• Paul Clark’s falernum discussion over at the Cocktail Chronicles
• The ongoing falernum discussion at eGullet
• Jeff Berry’s tiki-themed books; The Grog Log, Sippin Safari, and Intoxica in particular
  

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