Depending on how geeked out you like to get about the topic of cocktails, you may or may not have been aware of the anti-vodka backlash (seriously!) that’s been going on for several years now. If you’ve been happily purchasing "little water," as the Russians call it, in stores or at bars, blissfully unaware of the ire such innocent behavior might raise to a certain set of mixers and shakers, let me attempt to explain the reason behind it in jigger’s worth of words, and with some help from the astute historical research done by my fellow Imbibe magazine writer Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh.
In his excellent, excellent book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, Haigh gives an astute, and often funny, timeline on American cocktail and spirits history. Basically, he says, there were all kinds of wonderful, creative libations being concocted in the mid to late 19th century by worldly, clever bartenders like Jerry Thomas—author of the very first bartending book ever (and about whom the wonderful David Wondrich wrote the incredible, James Beard Award-winning Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar). Then came Temperance, and quick on the heels of that, the 13 years of ridiculousness known as Prohibition (can you imagine??). Then came a couple of World Wars and the accordant resource rationing. By the 50s, a lot of those great recipes (and, more importantly, ingredients) were all but lost and people were forgetting how to make a good drink. A few clever marketing geniuses realized that easy-and-quick was the name of the game, and so…enter vodka.
It was seemingly neutral! It was easy to mix! All you had to do was add some fruit juice, offers Haigh, and voila. An easy-peezy drink could be had with a mere two ingredients. And so it continued for decades on end, not to mention the rise of icky, prefabricated, so-called mixers that made people utterly forget how to make a good a sour or a simple margarita with fresh citrus, for Pete’s sake. All this is to explain that in the slow crawl back to—and now downright celebratory, fully embraced mood of—a distinguished, interesting, complex, delicious cocktail culture celebrating all kinds of lost and lovely ingredients has turned vodka into a unwitting enemy of sorts. And maybe has given it—as opposed to placing the blame instead on some of the dopey things that it was used for—a bad rep.
Yesterday, I was at what amounts to an 8-hour long vodka tasting (I'm not even exagerrating a little bit—8 hours!) put on by the Swedish brand Absolut in an attempt to win bartenders and a few cocktail writers back to the vodka camp. The first few hours were devoted to a lecture on taste and smell by the Director of Sensory Analysis for Pernod-Ricard, Dr. Per Hermansson, who made us do kooky but cool things like clip our noses shut, swallow a mysterious capsule full of white and brown granules, and describe what we tasted (sweet) and then remove the nose-pincher only to get the strong scent of cinnamon rushing through our nostrils—an exercise to prove just how vital smell is to your sense of taste. Then we blind-tasted 12 different vodkas. And you know what? Vodka isn’t just bland and flavorless and tasteless. It’s subtle, sure; certainly a whole lot more subtle than, say, whiskey, but not without personality. Some were earthy and funky (Belvedere); some were fruity and smooth (Stoli); some kind of smelled a little like bread, with a faint taste of chocolate (the boutique-y Uluvka); one smelled like hideously bad drugstore perfume (a bison-grass version from Poland); and one was like a lovely breath of fresh herbs (the new Absolut 100). Really, it was pretty eye (and nose and palate) opening.
And then came dinner. To further demonstrate and celebrate all this keen focus on sensory perception, the mad-genius grand pooba of molecular gastronomy, chef Grant Achatz from
Alinea fame had flown in from Chicago to make a 10 course, mind-blowing, Willy Wonka-esque dinner that forced us to make use of all our senses—edible cocktails that added the aspect of texture to drink; ingredients like brioche, dill, onion, eggs, and a few others distilled down to a gel so that when you dipped a spoon into this seemingly innocent, creamy little pile and raised it to your lips you tasted each distinct ingredient's flavor in one little lick; beets made into bacon; ravioli filled with the essence of parmesan and truffle broth that you put into your mouth whole, allowing the liquid to gently burst filling your taste buds with the intense, earthy flavor of that fantabulous mushroom; a bowl of striped bass and saffron Tapioca nestled into a larger bowl filled with loose chamomile, then filled with hot water so the aromatics of it rose into the air and become an important olfactory part of your main course. And I don’t even know how to talk about the dessert, except to say that after making us all stand and wipe down the long, glass dining table to sparkling cleanliness, a battery of at least 8 assistant chefs came out and painted our dessert onto the table a la Jackson Pollock, presented us with spoons, and told us to have at it. I feel like I dreamt the entire thing.
But I didn’t, and now it’s Saturday and while I don’t know that I’m going to attempt to make butterscotch and apple-leather wrapped bacon a la Achatz, I do think I’m going to crack open Haigh’s book and rediscover a few mixable forgottens.
Poll: Is vodka worthy of a good, respectable tipple, or just a boring, blank cocktail canvas?
The Moscow Mule
Says Haigh, the Moscow Mule was concocted in post-Prohibition Los Angeles as a way to make use of a bunch of copper mugs, a glut of ginger beer, and some Smirnoff that wasn’t really selling off the shelves. Necessity is the mother of invention—and tasty drinks, too.
Jule of 1/2 a lime
2 oz. vodka
Ginger beer
Squeeze the lime juice into a Moscow Mule mug. Drop the spent lime shell into the mug. Add ice cubes and the vodka, then fill with ginger beer.
