Sauced

Locavore Makeover: The Bloody Mary

A morning cocktail that comes with bragging rights.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Apr 14, 2011 at 10:27AM 3 Comments

Give Linda’s Tavern—this is a picture of the bar’s bloody—a run for its money with homemade marys featuring local vodka and spicy pickled garnishes.

Next time you’re serving up brunch made from eggs laid in your backyard chicken coop and bread baked from organic Washington wheat and preserves preserved from local berries, remember that you can drink local too.

Here are four easy ways—okay three easy ways, and one more way that requires buying up half the grocery store—to localize your bloody marys.

1. Use local vodka
Truth be told, a bloody mary masks a spirit—rather than showcasing it—by design. So you could, theoretically, pour in cheap mass-produced vodka, but where is the fun in that?

Local artisanal vodkas include: Ebb and Flow from Sound Spirits in Interbay and Peabody Jones from Woodinville Whiskey, Bainbridge Organic Distillers makes one too as does Woodinville’s Soft Tail Spirits and Dry Fly in Spokane. All are listed in state liquor stores.

2. Rim the glass with all-natural sea salts
There are three or four sea salts from locally based Secret Stash that could work well in a bloody mary, but the obvious place to start is with its bloody mary sea salt, an additive-free mixture of sea salt, organic sun-dried tomatoes, paprika, cayenne pepper, wasabi powder, and celery salt.

3. Make your own Worcestershire sauce
This is a little hardcore, but once you go homemade Worcestershire, you never go back to the bottle. Okay, you might go back to the bottle because there are so many freaking ingredients involved. (Here is a recipe). But if you do have the bandwidth to make your own, and can source some of the ingredients from local purveyors, you are very impressive indeed.

4. Pickle your liver and your garnish.
Even if you aren’t into drinking local, you should consider ditching the celery stalk garnish. There is nothing exciting about a celery stalk. Woodring Orchards has a stand in Pike Place Market where you can sample all of its spicy pickles (called Parker Pickles). There’s pickled asparagus, pickled green beans, super-spicy wasabi pickles. They are all fantastic; they will all do wonders for your bloody mary.

Of course, you can always pickle your own veggies too. If that’s what you’re into, consider investing in this book.

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Tags: Local Spirits, Vodka, Bloody Marys

Senate Approves Samples in Washington State Liquor Stores

A pilot program is planned for 30 stores.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Mar 31, 2011 at 08:19AM 0 Comments

Quarter ounce samples (much smaller than these guys) are okayed for state liquor stores.

Photo courtesy: Bartendingbasics.com

Washington’s state senate passed a bill on Wednesday, March 30 allowing samples in state liquor stores, according to the Seattle Times.

As when wine and beer samples were okayed for grocery and specialty stores in 2009, the liquor control board is now tasked with running a pilot program. The plan is to try out samples in 30 stores state-wide.

“Samples would be allowed no more than once a week at each store,” reports the Times’ Queenie Wong, “and each sample would not exceed a quarter ounce. Customers under the age of 21 years old and those intoxicated would not be allowed to sample spirits. The board would report on the pilot program to the Legislature by December 2012.”

This February, state reps passed a similar bill allowing beer and wine samples in farmers markets. All of these measures are obviously positive steps for those trying to sell alcoholic products, but what’s particularly promising about the liquor sample measure is that it acknowledges spirits as products to be appreciated and evaluated rather than simply controlled. We don’t see that a lot with the hard stuff.

Read the full article here.

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Tags: Local Spirits, Liquor Laws, Seattle Spirits

The Gulpable Gift Guide #4: Local Spirits

Easy-to-love bottles from around these parts.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Dec 08, 2010 at 11:15AM 3 Comments

Give them local boozes to mix into holiday cocktails.

I spent some time thinking about all the local booze that has started to show up since the distillery laws changed.

There is some good stuff out there, and local spirits make for fun presents, but for the gift guide I wanted to choose bottles that would be well received by all kinds of home bartenders. Because let’s face it: If you offer Aunt Betty a bottle of white dog whiskey, she’s going to think she got punked. (That said, if you are shopping for a moonshine fan, you can buy some from Woodinville Whiskey.)

Here are the crowd-pleasers:

CACHACA Cachaca is a Brazilian liquor made from fermented sugarcane that you may have tried in a caipirinha cocktail. Novo Fogo cachaca is made in Brazil, as you might expect, but the company is based here in Seattle. Does that qualify it as a local spirit? Not exactly, but I still think it makes a good gift.

There’s the novelty factor of course, cachaca is not all that well known in the states. But I also find both products from Novo Fogo are very drinkable; everyone seems to like them. I suggest picking up the unaged Silver ($27.50) for rum fans, and the aged Gold ($34.95) for whiskey sippers.

GIN What I like most about Voyager, a London dry-style gin from Pacific Distillery in Woodinville, is that it’s very versatile in cocktails, so it will earn its keep as a true workhorse of the home bar. Voyager is $25.90 at state stores.

VODKA Interbay distillery Sound Spirits has received high marks for its Ebb and Flow vodka, converting even vodka snobs with its distinct barley character. Ebb and Flow retails for $24 $31 at the liquor store, or you can also buy it at the distillery. Hours vary, so call ahead.

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Tags: Local Spirits, Gin, Vodka, The Sauced Gulpable Gift Guide

Cachaça, Easy on the C

A local couple would like to make the Brazilian sugar-cane spirit a household name in Seattle. First they have to teach us how to pronounce it.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jul 27, 2010 at 09:33AM 5 Comments

The caipirinha: easy to love, not super easy to perfect.

Recently Seattle Met editor Eric Scigliano told me a disturbing little anecdote.

Apparently, a Brazilian friend of his was at a Seattle bar and he heard the bartender refer to cachaça, the sugar cane–based distilled beverage from Brazil, as “cachaka.” The bargoer corrected the bartender, explaining that the “c” at the end of the word is pronounced with as “s” sound. But the ‘tender insisted, going so far as to tell the guest, "You don’t know anything."

Oy, vey. Clearly, cachaça has a ways to go before it secures its place among well-known spirits in our city (also clear: that bartender has a ways to go before he understands how to bartend). But interestingly, here in Seattle we do have a cachaça company in our midst. Dragos Axinte and Emily LaCroix-Axinte are the owners of Novo Fogo, a distillery in the Atlantic Rainforest in Brazil, but they base the business here in Seattle. There are two cachaças under the Novo Fogo label—the Silver is aged in stainless steel; Gold soaks up color and flavor from small oak barrels.

Novo Fogo’s challenge is, of course, to make you want to buy cachaça. In the publicity materials the company plays up the environmental and “one-world” charms of the spirit. Images of emerald jungle and fruity cocktails garnished with plump tropical whatnot are meant to make you associate cachaça with a humid and verdant paradise in which there is nothing to do but sit back and enjoy a citric cocktail while exotic and endangered birds light gently upon your shoulders, offering up appreciative nuzzles now and again—avian thanks for supporting a product that, it is suggested, might somehow be involved in the survival of their species. “Celebrate the simpler life” reads the slogan.

In this way, Novo Fogo is recasting cachaça. Historically, it has been the Brazilian equivalent of moonshine, a coarse and cheap spirit drunk mostly by the poor. (Cocktail historian David Wondrich describes it as tasting “like it was aged in old truck tires.”) But Novo Fogo would like to see cachaça become a supporting pillar of the affluent American home bar; where the buxom contours of its hand-blown glass bottle brush up against scarlet, slim Campari, stout Hendricks, and Angostura bitters, that lovingly rumpled-up little guy.

One sign that they are succeeding: last week I spied Novo Fogo front and center at French 75, the famed New Orleans cocktail lounge. I asked the bartender about it; he told me he was quite amped to start experimenting with the stuff. A random anecdote, but promising—good bartenders are so often the uncompensated salesmen for new boozes.

But if they are really going to make Americans buy cachaça for their home bars, the Axintes need a vehicle—something to do with it. And that vehicle, I should think, is the caipirinha cocktail.

A caipirinha is a simple drink in theory. Two ounces of cachaça, a lime, 1.5 tablespoons of sugar…or something like that. But sometimes with drinks, simple means trickier. If you’ve ever had a caipirinha with overmuddled limes or unincorporated sugar, you know how bad they can be. (A cachaça I unwisely ordered from a Capitol Hill bar is definitely on the list of the top 10 worst cocktails I’ve had in the last two years; it is only a few notches down from the batch of homemade Bellinis my friends and I came to refer to as the “barflinis.”)

Still, when a caiprinha is right, it’s very right—refreshing, sweet in all the right ways, citrusy, uncomplicated. And warm summer days are the right time to start trying to perfect your own. Here’s David Wondrich’s recipe.
Just remember what we’ve learned about limes.

Novo Fogo Silver is currently on sale at the University Village liquor store for $27.50.

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Tags: Local Spirits, Cocktail Recipes

Distillery Report: The Latest Numbers

Here’s a snapshot of the Washington craft distillery scene as it stands.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on May 14, 2010 at 03:12PM 0 Comments

As of last count, there are 14 approved craft distilleries in Washington State.

Three of those are in operation: Dry Fly in Spokane, Ellensburg Distillery in Ellensburg, and Soft Tail Spirits in Woodinville.

Of the 11 approved projects that have yet to open for business, three are in Seattle. Sound Spirits will likely be the first to open shop in Seattle. Other distillers hope to welcome visitors to tastings rooms in places like Bainbridge Island, Chehalis, and Concrete. Here’s an unrelated piece of information: Concrete is also the setting of This Boys Life by Tobias Wolff, one of the great American coming-of-age memoirs.

There are 18 pending craft distilling applications, with new ones filed with the LCB almost daily, or at least it seems. I call the applicants all the time to learn their plans, and I should mention that not all the applications are to be taken entirely seriously. But when you think about the fact that two years ago there were exactly zero distilleries in Washington State, and that it had been that way since prohibition, it’s all pretty remarkable.

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Tags: Local Spirits, Locaboozers, Microdistilleries, Distillery Report

Chocolate, Meet Beer.

Now in its second year, Pike Brewing’s Chocofest plays matchmaker to local chocolates and their boozy counterparts.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Feb 08, 2010 at 02:56PM 1 Comments

That’s going to make you thirsty, lady. Chocofest pairs artisan chocolates with local beverages.

Best Valentine’s-related event so far: Thursday, February 11 is Chocofest at Pike Brewing Company from 6-9pm. As such, there will be more than two dozen kinds of chocolate paired with over twenty beers, barley wines, meads, and spirits.

Vendors and products to get excited about include: Clear Creek Distillers from Oregon—they make grappas, eaux de vie, and wine brandies. Claudio Corallo, whose chocolates everyone is always freaking out over, Mount Baker Vineyards (I’m hoping they’ll be pouring some of their very food-friendly late-harvest viognier), absinthe from Pacific Distillery, and typically sold-only-at-farmers-markets Trevani Truffles.

RSVP with Michael St Clair at the brewery by calling 206-812-6613, tickets are $25 at the door.

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Tags: Local Spirits, Beer, Valentine's Day, Desserts, Pike Place Market

Cocktail Classes at Serafina

Learn all about exotic brandies, Manhattans, and bitters. Plus: snacks!

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jan 13, 2010 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

When Chris Bollenbacher was in college he applied for a job at a local wine store. The owner asked him: “if you could have lunch with one person alive or dead, who would it be?” “Galileo,” Bollenbacher replied.

I think that says a lot about the bar manager at Serafina. He’s a chemist, a teacher, a distiller, a historian…lots of stuff. Like Galileo. And he can tell you, in his gentle and deliberate way, about the historical significance of any spirit that you might point to behind the bar.

Like the Drinking Lessons series that Michael Hebb is running over at the Sorrento, Bollenbacher’s Cocktail Tastings are well-worth your hard-earned cash. Plus they include snacks.

All classes cost $45. The next one takes place on Saturday, January 30th at 3pm and explores exotic brandies. On Saturday, February 27th, also at 3pm, learn the history and technique behind the Manhattan. Finally, on March 27th at 3pm, Bollenbacher—who has partnered with Miles Thomas (Tavern Law, Toulouse Petit) in a line of bitters called Scrappy’s —will teach students how to make and use bitters for better cocktails. Call 206.323.0807 for reservations.

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Tags: Tastings and Classes, Eastlake, Local Spirits