Astro-Punch: Holiday Party 2020

*peep* 🐭

Hi there. It's been awhile hasn't it? Is there even a need to indicate why, this year?

Anyways, I've hope you and yours have been well. Like you, I'm very glad to see the end of this year. It won't be the end of all our troubles, but some element of closure tying a knot on a period of interminable uncertainty may prove fortifying (for the next period of interminable uncertainty). So let's take a moment to salute the current heavens with a couple rounds of Astro-Punch, mixed special for the Astrological Society of Princeton's holiday Zoom party.

There's plenty of background on the development of Astro-Punch, but all you really need to know is:

1 of Sharp, 2 of Sweet, 3 of Strong, 4 of Weak, and Spice!

Align according to the zodiac signs in the chart and get creative!

The heavens for the day, December 13th, featured a balsamic Sagittarius Moon quickly approaching the (Sag) Sun for an eclipse the next day, with Mercury a few degrees behind, Venus in Scorpio and Mars in Aries. We're looking for spirits, aromatics and dilution elements which reflect a contemplative, far-traveling, or religious/monastic quality. Then a rhythm section of sweet/sour which is bold, red and perhaps tart.



Stargazers' Punch
1/2 oz white grapefruit juice
1 oz crème de cassis
1 1/2 oz brandy (Remy Martin or similar centaur or ♐-themed spirit)
2 oz Arctic Fire tea (substitute violet black tea or other thematically-comparable tea)
food-grade frankincense

To make:

Prepare your serving glass with frankincense smoke. Take a tin pie plate and add a few granules of food-grade frankincense, placing this on your stove's burner on lowest setting. Hold your serving glass above the frankincense, letting the smoke/vapor fill the glass for roughly 30 seconds. The frankincense should bubble and liquefy; avoid charring. You may not see much smoke, but you should be able to smell the incense.

Combine sharp, sweet, strong, weak in a shaker. Give a brief shake to combine and aerate, then strain into your serving glass.

If making a punchbowl of the stuff, you could infuse the frankincense into water for a block of ice to rest in the punchbowl: this chills the punch without overdoing the dilution. Gently heat frankincense and water on the stove like making a tea, and pour into a suitable tupperware-type container (lid not required) or bundt pan whose size works with your punchbowl. Freeze, and perhaps run some warm water over the container's surface to help release the ice block when ready.

Tasting notes:

When originally testing this recipe with lime juice, Venus in Scorpio's Sweet element announced itself with mouth-puckering tartness. Of the two classic citruses typically used for punch (and can be used in a pinch for Astro-Punch if other options fail), lime juice normally brings out fruitier flavors than lemon, which is a plus when working with the red fruit liqueurs favored by Venus in Mars signs. However, be it grenadine (pomegranate liqueur — think Persephone), sloe gin or the racy crème de cassis, these liqueurs also come with a hefty dose of Martian acidity! Venus in detriment veers from serving in a purely Venusian fashion, that is, providing a balancing sweetness to unite disparate ingredients and creating a pleasing mouthfeel.

To solve this problem, white grapefruit juice comes to the rescue. The lower acidity, clean flavor and color of white grapefruit evokes Aries' lamb rather than ram (think racy bold lime juice) side, and harmonizes with the cassis. Cognac adds vanilla notes and an element of slow-sipping contemplation to pair with cassis' brooding quality, while the tea provides a low-tannin slightly-herbal vista on which the other ingredients might expand. Starry frankincense on the nose finds flavor affinity with the white grapefruit, and orients one to a spiritual frame of mind.



Oh Dear, There's a Total Solar Eclipse in Sag Tomorrow Punch
1/4 oz lime juice
1/4 oz lime oleo saccharum syrup
3/4 oz Batavia Arrack
2 oz ruby port
2 oz Ommegang Three Philosophers beer
nutmeg

To make:

Oleo saccharum syrup:
Zest one lime and add to a sealable container with 1/4 cup demerara sugar (turbinado or white sugars can also work). Muddle, cover, shake and let macerate on the countertop overnight. The next day add 1/4 cup hot water and shake to dissolve the sugar. Strain off lime zest and store syrup in the refrigerator.

ALSO: oleo saccharum (for any citrus fruit) makes a great base for a lemonade or limeade-style non-alcoholic beverage — just mix in the citrus juice and more water, to taste.

Cocktail:
Add lime juice, syrup, Arrack and port to your serving cup. Stir gently. Add beer and stir gently. Grate nutmeg over top. Enjoy!

Tasting notes:

This is more of a recipe "inspired by" the transits, and provides an alternative way of working with desired ingredients while not strictly following the regular Punch ratio. With an eclipse the day after the party, a little holiday season opulence, in the spirit of Ford Prefect persuading Arthur Dent to down 6 pints immediately prior to getting beamed on-board a Vogon spacecraft to avoid Earth's destruction, seemed apropos.

Here, the acidity issues of Venus in Scorpio and Mars in Aries are solved reverse-King Solomon-style: combine them into one ingredient, ruby port*! As a digestif, ruby port's nature as an after-dinner sipper combines a dense blend of sugar and acid in a red fruity, Martian and festive delight. Yet the port could use some stiffening via our Sagittarian ingredients. Prominently, the quadruppel-ale-and-kriek Three Philosophers, another festive element one could imagine happily resting in the hand of a friar, real or erstwhile, at a pub bull session.

Wine and beer in the same cocktail, you ask? Believe! I say.

The bready, malty (dare I say laconic) ale with notes of dark chocolate, coffee, and yes, cherry, balances quite well with the young ebullient port. To this we add Batavia Arrack, the rum progenitor first encountered by westerners traveling the East Indies during the early days of punch and global circumnavigation (you'll have to write me if you want to know how this relates to the gods of the Piscean Age and Homer's Odyssey). In a word, the arrack adds an element of funk to this otherwise smooth and too-easy-drinking quaff. And to this already-heady brew, we add in a ceremonial amount of lime juice and lime oleo saccharum, bowing in the direction of Right and True punch, because the arrack would feel out of sorts without the Tiki undershadings. Another classical punch element, nutmeg, finishes the cocktail with that spicy-yet-creamy thing nutmeg does, and sets the imagination on untamed possibilities.

Careful: too much nutmeg and you go from Sag to Pisces terrain. Granted, this is a recipe which could very easily set you down for a long winter's nap, but whether you want to encounter Lord Kinbote is entirely your choice.

*I would avoid LBV or aged port if possible, because it diminishes the sweetness and would throw off the punch's balance.


Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy and have a warm holiday season and winter ahead with friends and family as close as our present moment allows.


For my latest astrological musings, please check out my blog Kastalia Astrology. It's a bit quiet at the moment due to an ever-expanding-in-scope research project, but stay tuned: I've had too many "holy $#!^" moments so far to not share what I'm finding.

Grandeur of the Season

Herald trumpets,
Holly berries,
Pine needles,
Spice cake,
Bright Christmas oranges,
And glass jewels for the tree.

Grandeur of the Season

1 oz cognac

1 oz pear eau-de-vie

1 oz ruby port

1 tsp Solerno blood orange liqueur

1 tsp Campari

1 tsp crème de cassis

1 dash Pernod

2 dashes pimento bitters

festive aromatic ice sphere

Rolling ribbons and great globes of grape and orange and berry.

Anise accents.

Gentle emerging pine and spice.

Opulence for jubilant jovial occasions.

Step 1: Festive aromatic ice sphere.

Add water to an ice sphere mold.

Arrange ginger coins, cloves and rosemary sprig (a bit of orange zest and red currants also welcome).

Add top and freeze.

Step 2: Mix the cocktail

Three spirits, three liqueurs, three accents.

Batch and bottle in the fridge days ahead for parties and something even smoother.

Measure 3 1/2 ounces per serving (1/2 cup minus 1 tablespoon).

Pour over ice sphere in large balloon glass.

Swirl, take in the aromas and let dilute for 5-10 minutes.

Sip!

Step 3: ???

There's still some left in the bottle. What's next? New Year's!

Gloaming

A bit of fortuitous happenstance - not only is today the last day of November, in that muddy interval between Thanksgiving and December holiday season proper (and a lazy Sunday to boot), it's also St. Andrew's Day! So have a lovely whisky tipple for an otherwise blah day. It may exactly fit the mood.

Gloaming

1 1/2 oz smoky blended scotch (Chivas 12)

3/4 oz SAGE

3/4 oz dry vermouth

6 drops walnut orgeat

6 drops coffee-bourbon tincture

1 bsp crème de cassis (sink)

dried, withered sprig sage

Stir, strain over ice sphere in rocks glass, sink cassis, garnish with sprig sage.

Depending on your orgeat, add only enough drops to create a louche effect and match with coffee-bourbon tincture. Over-dilution takes it out on the scotch, so beware.

Oooovercaaast...

This is an odd one to write about. My intent was to somehow evoke that gray overcast feel of November, away from any food-ular celebrations -- the vermouth's herbs, SAGE's tang and sharp herbs and scotch's mire-ly smoke all combine to do just that. The orgeat itself is meant to add a binding sweetness while also providing a faint louche/overcast quality (walnut being a more fitting flavor for the other ingredients than almond). The coffee-bourbon tincture helps modulate the sweetness while also providing a tad more flavor body to enunciate the scotch's smoke. And the cassis? That faint sink means twilight, which, thanks to its wonderful density, shifts as the glass is tilted -- nebulous shadows lingering on the outskirts, with a hit of berry right at the end.

If you don't have SAGE, Plymouth gin might do, though you'll lose that odd tang/flavor intensity, that weird disorientation of cold gray overcast days.


Coffee-bourbon tincture: 1/2 tablespoon of ground coffee in an ounce of bourbon. Stir and let soak 10 minutes. Coffee-filter away the grounds, bottle, store. Bourbon used to match the coffee's richness - that and it's what was ready at hand.

Mixology Monday, October 2014: Perfect Symmetry

Good evening, lords and ladies. This month's Mixology Monday is upon us once again, and, before it gets any later, I'll turn things over to our host of the month, my Twitter bestie, the ever-dapper birthday gentleman Joel of Southern Ash blog (go visit and wish him well! And try the cassoulet!). He's back leading the charge for a month with the elegant theme Perfect Symmetry.

Perfect symmetry is your theme this month!  A “perfect” drink splits the liquor or liqueur evenly between two related ingredients.  The most common “perfect” drink is a Perfect Manhattan where the vermouth is split between sweet and dry to create an altogether different experience.  A perfect Old Fashioned splits the bourbon and rye are both used to create a singularly distinct experience. When done well, splitting the liquor lets each of the unique flavors and components of the shine through.  Because they share a background, they don’t war with each other but instead you get both the mellow sweetness of the bourbon with the spicy backbone of the rye in that Old Fashioned.  The dry vermouth can accentuate flavors in the Manhattan you might have missed. Why make a choice when you can have it all?!

To see what fearful symmetries (it is October after all!) the other cocktailers have divined, please click here when this link is active.


No matter how simple and straightforward a MxMo theme, there's always a kink to it. Sometimes you run out and get your ingredients only to taste your intended recipe crumble and muddle into fruit punch in your mouth, a victim of too much fruit juice, no matter how tart. Then there are those back-up recipes you kick around: oh what if you split the sloe gin with equally-tart cassis in this apple brandy or scotch duo cocktail? Only those ideas just don't wow and the ingredients seem dangerously close to not highlighting a real distinction, leaving you again back at square one.

But in spite of that, this month's theme has inspired gorgeous visuals, perhaps due to the Symmetry, and you start digging through the ol' cabinet, checking out the bottles you haven't touched in ages and could stand to use up before they go bad, realizing "hey, there's another bottle of red liqueur, and another, and that one's reddish too, oh and that one!". Then you realize you have too many bottles to do a proper BoozeNerds-style round robin investigation into the combinatorics and it's all the papers up in the air again!

But the visuals keep lingering, dancing, twinkling jewel-toned gimlets in the mind's eye, tempting, tantalizing until you jump out over the abyss Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade-like 'cause you just have to know, theme or no theme. Would this recipe WORK?! Why make a choice when I really CAN have it all?!

(later this week I'll share with you one of my other non-perfect non-symmetrical recipes I generated in the process of finding this month's answer to the MxMo challenge)

Now you might look at all the ingredients, and perhaps before your head explodes you might wonder if it references anything. With the amari it's not too far off from a Negroni, for instance, or gin and sloe or gin and Yvette are natural pairings. More than that, it's somewhat of a riff on the classic Parisian cocktail, special to me because it was my first-ever gin cocktail....maybe not the best intro, but I got over that bump in the road. However, besides the two linked Parisian recipes, the cassis does tend to get downplayed in a lot of internet versions of the recipe to a mere few dashes. So this recipe aims to invert, nay explode, that sensibility.


Rubies
1 oz gin
1 oz dry vermouth
1/4 oz Campari
1/4 oz Nonino
1/4 oz sloe gin (the good stuff)
1/4 oz crème de cassis (the good stuff)
1/4 oz grenadine (the good stuff)
1/4 oz Sorel
1/4 oz Crème Yvette
pomegranate arils or a cocktail cherry* to garnish

Stir. Strain. Up. Garnish.

**


*consider an unflavored or herbal-seasoned cocktail cherry rather than the regular baking spice notes. I used a cachaça, lime zest, ginger, and peppermint cherry here.

**I know, I know. No sweet vermouth? No ruby port?! Dryness is your friend, cacao-and-menthe little one.

I think the ratios above are probably the break-even point for the drink. With all the liqueurs (yes, nearly 2 ounces), there's inevitably a sugar-in-body sweetness. Whether it's too much for you or not over-the-top enough, that's up to you. My take is it could be a bit more over-the-top. Just say the hell with it, already, and drop down the gin and vermouth so the liqueurs can be explored in all their glory (in which case, shrink the size of the cocktail and do 1/2 oz each gin and vermouth and 1 tsp of each of the liqueurs). If you think it's too much, perhaps hold the gin and vermouth steady while diminishing the liqueurs to 1 tsp or 1 bsp each.

But consider something: apart from the grenadine (which, natch, in this case is pomegranate homemade with hibiscus and orange blossom water thrown in - I just happened to have a very convenient empty bottle) or perhaps the Yvette, none of the liqueurs are really all that sickly-sweet as the catch-phrase tends to get wantonly thrown around. Consider the bitter, sharp, herbal, dry and floral characteristics each brings to the party, and then further how the gin and vermouth act on them. Campari's a big gun, and its bitter lingers on the tongue after each sip, enhanced by the sloe which develops a flinty red berry note through earthy cassis to bold pomegranate-exotic grenadine. Nonino's soft herbs provide a structure on the nose and as the first drops reach your palate. Sorel's spices bring a soft zing on the underside of your tongue and the front roof of your mouth, a respite from the intensity of the other liqueurs. Yvette ties a bow to the proceedings, a bouncy just-so attitude on grenadine's springboard (while nowhere near eclipsing the bitterness).

Aside from all those details, without even having all that much time to play around with the components, to me it somehow matches my concept of what rubies should taste like, just from their visual aspect and perhaps even their smell. And it seems only fitting to keep the jewel theme going after Aquamarine this year, with a similar list of ingredients too!

As for the perfect symmetry? Call it an original recipe, with one really big 1 3/4 oz part split radially into a mystical seven.

Thanks to Joel for hosting a delicious theme - I can't wait to read what everyone else came up with as this one seems like it'll bring out the deep-noodling. Thanks also to cat-herder-in-chief Fred Yarm of cocktail virgin - way to keep coordinating the mojo month after month! It's real joy and honor to be part of this community. 'Night all!

Impromptu: Falling Sun Manhattan

I might as well face it: I'll always be trying to remake the Manhattan.

The Manhattan itself a dark seasons classic, I wanted to add some autumnal/festive-seasons richness with a brooding quality to the mix. The cassis and nocino had been calling out to me, so I chanced it:

Falling Sun Manhattan
2 oz Buffalo Trace bourbon
1/4 oz crème de cassis
1/4 oz nocino
1/4 oz sweet vermouth (Vya)
1 dash Bittercube Bolivar bitters
1 dash Regan's orange bitters
orange twist

Stir, strain, large ice cube, rocks.
Express and garnish.

It's a bit sweet, but it rises to blog-worthy status based on its well-illuminated complexity; the tart and bitter turns of each liqueur opens up the cocktail well beyond the standard Manhattan. (oddly enough, I tried subbing in Rittenhouse rye for half the bourbon for balance only to find the flavors collapsed) Buffalo Trace's structure and....I wanna say flavor clarity, it interweaves so well...does some heavy lifting, bringing not only its own wood notes as a foundation but enunciating the cassis and the bitter herbs underneath. Not every bourbon will be as successful, either; I know of several in my cabinet which would just be too blunt and inarticulate here. 

Also, keep the orange away from the cassis, lest you find them on honeymoon in your mouth! As if it weren't bad enough already with the bitters adding a degree of spice...

This would be perfect to drink while enjoying a Sagittarian sunset (which, come to think, start today). The dark hours grow earlier and the landscapes bleaker, but those sunsets... Royal blue and shaded gold melded into a full jewel-toned rainbow. The weariness in body and soul comes easier now, but the world and the year show us they are still pregnant as currant berries with unspent meaning. And that satisfies.