Monday, February 18, 2013

Cocktail!







































On Friday night Bar Made went back to school with the Institute of Domestic Technology to study cocktail making*. We mixed up bottles of bitters and limoncello, then used our newfound cocktail knowledge and an assortment of homemade liqueurs and extractions to craft a unique drink. 

Our class was taught by the Institute's founderJoseph Shuldiner, and Plow & Gun coffee co-founder Daniel Kent. Joseph and Daniel walked us through how to make extractions using herbs, dried fruit, and Everclear before letting the class loose on a table filled with extractions grouped into floral, earthy, bitter, and fruity categories. Students were encouraged to taste the pure extractions before adding them to our bottles. Our favorites were the lemongrass, peppercorn, and wormwood. #bitterparty

From there we moved on to making liqueurs using citrus rinds, simple syrup, and more Everclear. Samples of a batch of limoncello that Joseph made were passed around, and the flavor was far superior to many of the bottled varieties available at liquor stores. Once you realize how easy it is to make a bottle of bitters or a liqueur using whatever you have on hand, it seems weirder to not make this stuff yourself. 

Joseph and Daniel were funny, knowledgeable, and eager to make you as excited about cocktails as they are. One of our unique cocktails tasted like ab-so-lutely nothing, and the instructors were there to taste and offer suggestions how to improve the final product. One half of Bar Made has taken a class at the Institute before and we see many more classes in our future.

*The setting was Greystone Mansion, a historic, much-used filming location. Specifically the setting was the speakeasy in the billard room in the basement bowling alley of Greystone Mansion. More specifically, this

No comments:

Post a Comment