This one came about from a mixture of different ideas that coalesced from a bunch of leftover shit. Ha. That’s usually how it goes around here. Number one, I wanted a drink with powerful, long lasting umami flavor. Number two, I wanted to use up a bunch of larder items. The closet was beginning to overflow with all this stuff and I wanted to get rid of it before the summer because there’s going to be so much fresh produce to use when melons and grapes and all the stone fruits crank into high gear.

Funny, when I first started this journey I viewed citrus season as the best and could barely think of any drinks the whole year. Now it’s the opposite. The length and time of citrus season annoys me and I can’t wait for all the others, especially the fall which used to perplex me to no end. Maybe I’m finally getting the hang of it after four and a half years.

On that note, there is something to be said. The note of course pertaining to length of time spent doing what I do. In the beginning I really had no idea what the hell I was doing. In art the basics must be mastered before one can go forward. (I’m not saying what I do is art by the way, it will always be a craft) For instance, Picasso painted portraits before cubism took over his brain. Joyce wrote the wonderful short stories contained within Dubliners before he ever thought of writing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man, Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake.

The bartender’s basics of foundation are the classics. The original six outlined so well in Death and Co.’s Cocktail Codex. Off the top of my head they are the old fashioned, Manhattan, daiquiri, daisy, flip, and highball. Get these down, as well as the many variations, understand the why and where. Cocktails are more than beverages you drink to get drunk, they’re also historical artifacts. They tell a story if you allow them. It’s an interesting thing to think about, that at some point, someone created one of these, in some city, at some point in time, and it became so good the recipe was etched into stone. Think about the humble Moscow Mule for instance. A cocktail created in LA in 1941 where the intersection of three byways came together. Vodka, ginger beer, and copper mugs each being sold by a different person. Those three people put their heads together (they probably got real drunk too) and voila, over 80 years after its inception, we’re still enjoying it.

This new one isn’t quite so historic but it still tells a tale. The good ones do. When Chef A.D. left the restaurant to start his own wandering business he left behind two giant jars full of homemade umeshu. That is, Japanese style plum wine. After several months of wondering about it (it had been up there for almost a year collecting dust) I texted him and asked him if he wanted it. “It was always for you,” he said. Insert warm, fuzzy feeling. I have no idea how it was made but I’m pretty sure alcohol, sugar, and green plums were involved.

We sat on the umeshu for a while, wondering how the hell it would incorporate into a cocktail. It’s a little sweet a but super sour and just plain weird. The aftertaste is dry, however, so it needed something to help round it out a bit. Both the quat liquor and the sour amazake corngeat aided in a smoother mouth feel. I wrote about the corngeat a couple of posts ago, I can’t remember if I said anything about the quat liqour. It comes directly from the scraps leftover from making the sort of fermented kumquat-vanilla syrup. Instead of throwing all of it in the bin I dumped it into jars with some pisco and waited. The result was spectacular. Kumquats have a little of that powerful mouth numbing oil that grapefruit possess, albeit dialed back a bit. That, combined with a bit of sugar, vanilla, and the character of the pisco made for a great little larder item…Over two gallons of it.

Umami Issues

1.5 oz. London Dry Gin

.75 oz. Fresh Lemon Juice

.5 oz. AD’s Umeshu

.5 oz. Quat Liquor

.5 oz. Corngeat

.25 oz. Salted Plum Honey

1 Dash Shio Koji.