Reverse Engineering a Cocktail
As cocktails are one of my hobbies, you get tasked to recreate a cocktail that someone had somewhere. The "easy" solution is normally to ask the bar what they are doing exactly. In my experience there is a good chance that they just give you the spec, though many of the cocktail bars that I really like, have recipes that are just infeasible to recreate at home. This and the atmosphere are the main reasons to go to a bar for me. In this case asking was no real possibility, as the bar has been closed down, and I don't have any direct connections that I could ask. So there reverse engineering story begins. First let us define what the end goal of this effort is. Exactly recreating the drink? No. Creating the memory of the evening? Yes.
Now what information do we have?
- Bar name: Liberty or Death Turku
- Cocktail name: Late Bloomer
- Listed ingredients: choy sake, St. Germain, Lavender, Regal Rogue Wild Rose
- A picture where it's served on the rocks, with a violet flower on top
- I have tasted it, and remember to be on the sweeter side and had basically no acidity
From that we can begin to work. First searching for the cocktail name itself. This was a dead end, as this was probably their own creation and nothing really well known. Now the thing left is to get the ingredients listed and hope that they are mostly complete, which I suspected in this this case. Only issue choy sake which doesn't seem to exists. Maybe they used choya sake? I replaced it with a ZAO Junmai ginjo sake which I had on hand. The most unsure part I am about the lavender. In the end I decided just to add some dust for the aroma on top. This worked quite well. Now I started to experiment with the proportions. It took around three iterations to land on a working recipe.
Late Bloomer - Reverse Engineered
- 35ml Sake
- 15ml Regal Rogue Wild Rose
- 5-10ml St. Germain (I prefer it closer to 5ml the original is probably closer to 10ml)
- 2 sprays of lavender dust (6 drops of lavender oil dissolved in 40% vol ethanol)
- garnished with a violet in a rocks glass and a clear ice block or served in a chilled coupe
This hopefully tastes close to the original and worked perfectly to recreate the memory.
Jos sulla on resepti, lähetä se mulle :)