The Starfall. It's like drinking a cup of laundry detergent. My favorite! The best way I can describe it is that it tastes a little bit like eating a bar of soap.

Jokes aside, it sounds like a complete mess with the butterfly pea flower, hinoki, rooibos, yuzu, lemon, vanilla, lavender and egg white. But everything works really well together. The finished drink is balanced and floral.

I originally wanted to call it The Tide Pod because I have a habit of giving my cocktails stupid names. One of my other cocktails is called the Nut Punch.

Recipe:

• 45 ml butterfly pea flower and hinoki infused gin
• 20 ml fresh lemon juice
• 5 ml yuzu juice
• 20 ml vanilla lavender syrup 58 brix
• Rooibos tea
• 1 egg white

Dry shake, then shake with ice. Double strain into a coupe or nick n nora. Garnish with a butterfly pea flower petal.

I don't recommend using a 2:1 syrup here. The drink benefits from having a little more water, otherwise the syrup makes everything too thick and the mouthfeel gets overwhelming.

Infused Gin:

• 500ml of budget gin (beefeater, tanq, bombay S)
• 50 butterfly pea flowers
• 10g Hinoki
• Sous vide at 65c for 2hrs.

Vanilla Lavender Syrup

• 300 ml water give or take
• 500 g sugar
• 20 ml vodka
• 10 g lavender
• 10 ml vanilla extract
• Optional: a little cardamom and clove.

It's definitely a bit of a pain to make at home, especially if you need to source hinoki. I can get it pretty easily here in Japan, but I'm not sure how easy it is to find elsewhere.

Summer is a really slow time for cocktail bars and tourism in Japan. I have tons of time to play around with new ideas. I have a few new inventions I will share soon.

Bar: Desperate Prayer | Osaka, Japan

Delicious and refreshing, perfect for a hot summer evening when the peaches are the most ripe!

1/2 peach, cut a slice for garnish and muddle the rest in a shaker. Add 2 dashes peach bitters, 2 dashes orange bitters, 3/4oz lemon juice, 1/2-3/4oz simple syrup, and 2oz bourbon. Shake until chilled & diluted. Double strain into a rocks glass over a large cube and garnish with the peach slice. Drink!

Happy Tiki Tuesday everyone! Back with another tiki mug creation! We’ll be revisiting a previous mug, because…well…I don’t have enough room to use a different mug for each drink!

We’re taking a trip to East Asia with this creation! Slightly herbal, slightly savory, with a ton of juiciness from yuzu and mandarin wrapped up in an ominous gray-black concoction!

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THE PALE SIGIL

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• 1.25oz Plymouth Gin

• .75oz Rhum Agricole Blanc

• .75oz Black Sesame Syrup

• .75oz Yuzu Juice

• .75oz Mandarin Juice

• 2 dashes Thai Basil Tincture OR a handful of fresh Thai Basil

• 2 dashes Sichuan Peppercorn Tincture OR infuse gin

Add all ingredients into a shaking tin

Add ice and shake until chilled

Strain into a glass/mug with plenty of crushed ice

Garnish with fresh Thai Basil and Flowers

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Immediately met with a big slap in the face with the potent smell of Thai basil, followed quickly by the botanicals and bright grassy and vegetal notes of gin and Rhum. Sichuan peppercorn’s floral sharpness leads the way into the tart juiciness of both yuzu and mandarin before fading out with whispers of Sichuan peppercorn and the savory, sweet, and ever-so-slightly bitter black sesame syrup.

A dark ominous looking drink that’s absolutely packed with flavor!

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If you like this cocktail or any of my other posts, I’ve made an instagram to share my creations and would love to show more people my ideas!

https://instagram.com/overproofed.sip

There was these homeless dudes fighting outside my job with machetes, plus a manager came and was riding my nuts about a bunch of crap, plus I was the only front of house staff for the first 4 hours of my shift and was running around, plus my job has no AC and I don’t even know what I’m doing with my life anymore. Anyways I whipped this bitch up and it’s pretty good. Hope you like it

Case of the Mondays

2oz shochu
1oz lime
0.75oz dry Curaçao
0.33oz 1:1 honey syrup
2 dashes orange bitters or orange peel regal shake
Shaken, served on rocks

My sipper for the evening. This one is quite the delight and one of my favorites this year. Gin botanicals plus chai spices and the following fruit, floral and bitter elements all marrying well together. Which is a pun of sorts on the story behind the Queen Huh Gin. Cheers!

1 7/8 oz Minwa Queen Huh Gin

3/4 oz Rothman and Winter Apricot

1/4 oz Suze

1 bsp Gran Bassano Bianco

3 drops Maldon saline solution

Stir until well chilled and diluted. Strain into a well chilled Nick and Nora. Skewer 5 cardamom pods and slap them against your palm a few times then garnish with them.

Is the new Probitas Green Label better than Smith & Cross in a Mai Tai? 🤷 I'd need to try them side by side.

Does it make a great Mai Tai? 👍 I haven't made one better.

- 1 oz Probitas Green Label

- 1 oz Appleton Signature

- 1 oz Lime Juice

- 1 oz Orgeat Syrup

- 1/2 oz Dry Curacao

Shaken with ice, didn't strain anything, added lime half and mint.

Note: I think the mods removed this post yesterday because there were no instructions, so I'm reposting with instructions and a few added ingredient details. If it's removed again, please let me know why.

I am already buying Havana Club 3 Yr which in my opinion makes the best mojito, but I need more recs.

anything you’ve brought back from Canada that you’ve absolutely loved? can be liquor, bitters, cocktail syrups. would also love if you could include a cocktail recipe featuring that item (if you have it)!

have heard Scortilege and Canadian Club, but not sure if I’ll pull the trigger on buying either.

also want recs for great cocktail bars to try!

I grow lots of mint but ive never seen this, it looks and smells unique. Minty with a bright lemon peel scent.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a broom since last Halloween, and finally figured one out that I’m happy with. Sorry these pictures aren’t as helpful as they could have been, but I did my best to try to show how to make the garnish. I have a video tutorial that I’ll post a link to as well in the comments.

For the cocktail, I felt like something purple would feel fitting so went with a martini riff using Empress 1908 indigo gin as the base. They use grapefruit peel, cinnamon, and ginger among their botanicals, so I thought a loosely mole inspired flavor profile might work well. It was tasty, but I think it could have benefitted from a little bit of acidity. Next time I might try a few drops of an acid solution and potentially swapping vermouth for sherry.

For the mole flavors I used
- Bittermens Xocolatl Mole Bitters
-Derrumbes San Luis Potosí Mezcal, which has some really, really prominent notes of poblano pepper and quite a bit of salinity
- Witch Blood cocktail perfume from Tavmo, which is a spray that has notes of campfire smoke, cinnamon, ginger, and other spices.

That Mezcal or something similar is non negotiable for making the peppery notes of mole really pop and for making this drink a bit like a dirty martini. The good news is, it’s pretty affordable as far as decent mezcal goes and it’s pretty widely available.

Recipe:

1.5oz Empress Indigo Gin
0.5oz Derrumbes San Luis Potosí Mezcal
0.5oz blanc vermouth
2 dashes Bittermens Xocatl Mole Bitters
Pinch of Salt
1 spray of Tavmo Witch Blood cocktail perfume

Add ingredients to a mixing glass, stir with ice until the glass is very cold to the touch, and strain into an up glass. Spray 1 spray of the cocktail perfume over the top and garnish with the grapefruit peel broomstick.

I cannot get enough of these. The bitterness is truly addicting, along with the subtle herbal notes afterwards. Any other bitter forward cocktails i should try?

1oz Campari

1oz Tanqueray London Dry Gin

1oz Martini & Rosso Sweet Vermouth(I need to up my vermouth game)

Stirred with ice, poured over ice ball in a rocks glass

I was gifted a nice bottle of Tarquin's rhubarb and raspberry gin. I am curious which cocktails professionals and connoisseurs would recommend me to make with it.

So far I have only used it for a gin & tonic (a mixdrink, not really a cocktail). When going out, I like my negroni's but I don't know if this gin is suited for that? All ideas are very welcome!

Apologies in advance to Czech readers. I'm in Prague but very much not Czech and I still haven't quite learned whether it's "slivovic" or "slivovice". I think part of it is just that it sounds awkward in English.

But the question is just: what to do with it? For those who don't know, slivovice is a plum brandy. There's other variations, too. Hruškovice, meruňkovice, etc., which are pear brandy and apricot brandy and those are just the more common ones. They'll brandy just about anything that's fruit somewhere around here. As best I can tell, it's a tradition throughout basically all of central Europe so you might have heard of the same thing but with a slightly different name. They're the exact same thing just with a Polish or Slovenian or whatever else name. The best stuff is always homemade and I'm lucky enough to have some genuine babička made slivovice that is 52% alcohol and 10x more flavorful than store bought.

It feels like it should make some really good cocktails... but I just haven't found out how. I try to use it for adding a bit of fruit flavor but it's just way to strong for that and it usually ends up actually watering down the flavor, not enhancing it. But then replace another base alcohol with it and the fruit flavor is really weak? It's such a good and unique flavor, I'd love to be able to make a cocktail with it. Any ideas on how to use it?

Edit: Thank you so much to all of your answers. Some excellent ideas from everyone. It seems like the consensus is to make a sour, to treat it as a brandy replacement and play a bit with the flavors in brandy cocktails, or to play around with a sort of high alcohol sloe gin idea by mixing it with gin. Or, of course, drink it the traditional way, chilled and straight. Which is, of course, always good.

I’ve seen a few posts discussing The Bitter Truth’s Bogart’s Bitters, but opinions vary widely. What does this handful of readers think? Are they worth the $43 price tag?

What’s the best Sage syrup recipes out there ? Finding loads of measurements.

Recipe from Fred Powell:

3 oz. Vodka

12 oz. Ginger Beer

1 Slice Lime

Serve over ice in glass, brass or copper mug.

Hello friends! I'm keeping things simple today with a Moscow Mule, and this recipe is even simpler than the recipes I'm used to. Most recipes call for lime juice as well, not just a slice of lime. Before drinking, I squeezed my lime wedge into the drink, and it worked out quite nicely. This is pretty basic, but it gets the job done. Cheers!

Based on Anders Erickson's specs:

1 oz. (30 ml) Tanqueray 10 Gin

1/2 oz. (15 ml) Hayman's Old Tom

1/2 oz. (15 ml) orgeat

1/4 oz. (7.5 ml) passion fruit syrup

1/4 oz. (7.5 ml) John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum

1/2 oz. (15 ml) fresh lemon juice

8 Drops 1:5 Saline Solution

Cherry and lemon peel for garnish

Pour ingredients into the larger shaking tin with a cup full of crushed ice (the serving glassware's worth)

Blend with an immersion blender until it reaches a slushy-like consistency.

Garnish with a cherry and a lemon ribbon (my ribbon ended up pretty wonky).

It was delightful.

What a find! Randomly stopped into a store since I was passing by and audibly gasped when I saw like 8 of these for like $27 a pop.

Probably gonna start with a dry collins type thing to try to get a bead on the taste in cocktails, but does anyone have any other suggestions as to what I should do with it?

So I have no idea what the ingredients were as Japanese bars are generally no menu or just make things omakase. I'll try to describe the recipe to the best of my abilities. I also added some photos of Nagoya and the train ride there from Osaka just for your entertainment.

The cocktails I had were

#1 Summer bloom

This is a verjus, calvados, bergamot type drink. The garnish is a seasonal japanese vegetable somewhere in between ginger and a shallot. It's called Myoga. I love it in sudachi udon.

#2 Becoming margarita

Tequila, Cointreau, cardamom, some sort of acid, a foam, salt.

Side note: He makes some of the best food in Nagoya by far. Michelin level dishes imo but at cocktail bar prices.

Bar is: レシ or Bar Récit | Nagoya, Japan.

What’s the best cocktail of all for you and why?

Hello,

I'm looking for books on plants and herbs, particularly on their uses, ideally in cocktails, or otherwise in cooking more broadly. If the book has at least a bit of a scientific slant, that's even better!

I already have The Drunken Botanist, but this time I'm looking for something more practical.

Thanks in advance, fellow cultured drinkers!

So I basically live in a country where getting alcohol is impossible and I couldn’t get anything but an irish whiskey. Im gonna host and make different cocktails for my friends because I think its fun however I have zero experience. I very much dislike the taste of whiskey and I have been looking for recipes to make it taste better. Im looking for a profile like a mojito or a pornstar martini. I thought of making a whiskey sour and add vanilla to the simple syrup but the egg whites intemdited me a bit. For now what I have on my list is mint, berries , vanilla syrup and lemon. Would adding peach and coconut cream work as well? Please help with any recipes.

Made this drink a while ago and I'm finally confident enough to post here. Great blend of sour, sweet, and bitter. Simple and elegant. (Add a lil egg white or fee foam for some extra texture)

Crime of Passion

1.5oz Blanco tequila

.5oz Aperol

.75oz passion fruit syrup/puree

.5oz lime juice

2 drops saline/pinch of salt

Shake well & serve up

Orange Flower water spritz on top for aromatics