Grey Goose Taste By Appointment

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A cocktail class in which you learn how to make a cocktail that’s perfectly tailored to your tastes

I am delighted to see that Grey Goose is running its ‘Taste By Appointment’ event series again this year. I was fortunate enough to enjoy a ‘Taste By Appointment’ session last June and looking back I have to say it was one of the defining cocktail experiences of my summer.

Without divulging so much that I actually spoil the experience for anyone hoping to attend for the first time, here is a brief overview of what you can expect from a Taste By Appointment session and some factors you might consider in deciding whether you’d like to go or not.

Taste By Appointment is an opportunity to go to one of London’s nicer cocktail bars and to be educated by Grey Goose’s own brand ambassador, Joe McCanta, on your perception of flavour and discover your personal tastes. You get fed nice drinks, you do some interesting taste experiments and, provided you’re not university educated in the science of flavour, you’ll probably learn a thing or two. Towards the end of your session you’ll get the opportunity to have Joe give you a one-on-one cocktail making session whereby he asks you some questions and figures out a drink that suits your palette perfectly. You’ll be pleased to know that you later get emailed the cocktail that’s created for you so that you can make and enjoy it at home at your pleasure.

An impressive view from the top floor of Centre Point, where  ’Taste  By Appointment’ took place

Flavour experimentations

Joe McCanta creating a personally tailored cocktail

In favour of this experience, it is something different, you’ll almost certainly learn something, it involves a reasonable amount of booze included in the ticket price and Joe McCanta does know what he’s doing when it comes to making a cracking drink.

In criticism of this experience, you are essentially paying to be brand marketed at (a little bit) and, when I went, there were some pretty lengthy videos to sit through. Also, if like me you find vodka a bit of a benign spirit that doesn’t particularly challenge the taste buds when mixed (compared to gin lets say), you’re out of luck – everything you drink on this experience is going to be vodka-based. That said, and credit to him, the cocktail that Joe made for me was delicious. And, I should probably add here, I do now keep a bottle of Grey Goose in stock at all times.

In terms of price, as far as I can tell the experience is going to cost you £75 a person. If you’re used to drinking in expensive cocktail bars, this probably doesn’t sound too bad and, when the education you get and the drinks you’ll consume are factored in, probably represents reasonable value for money. It does rather place this experience up against some of the better cocktail classes you can go on, however, and I suppose that would have to be considered. The other thing I’d add here is that when I attended last year the tickets were £15 each. This did seem bizarrely good value at the time but, even when factoring in a year of high inflation, this price increase is a bit of a shocker. All the same, I wouldn’t have bothered writing about Taste By Appointment if I hadn’t enjoyed it or got something valuable out of it so count this as a cautious recommendation.

Last and by no means least, here is the recipe for the delicious cocktail that Joe McCanta created for me:

Filthy martini:

  • 4 basil leaves
  • 50 ml Grey Goose vodka
  • 15 ml La Gitana dry sherry
  • Italian olive juice (quantity not indicated but would recommend just a dash as per dirty martini)
  • Pitch of smoked salt
  • 10 ml extra dry Martini
  • Basil leaf and green olive for garnish

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into chilled coupette glass. Garnish with a basil leaf and olive.

And here’s the one Joe made for me…

Choosing your first cocktail glasses

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Starting a home cocktail bar part 3: The glassware every home cocktail bar should have

Glassware is yet another aspect to your fledgling home cocktail bar that really does not need to cost all that much. You don’t actually need a huge variety of glassware – you can probably get by quite comfortably three different types of glass. And you certainly don’t need to shop at the expensive end of the market. There are glassmakers out there that insist their scientifically engineered vessels offer a better nose and therefore a more pleasurable drinking experience. In reality these types of glasses are far from necessary, despite being undeniably desirable (and expensive).

The most important thing about the glasses you use is their size. The size of a glass is so important because the glass you serve your drink in needs to ideally fit the cocktail served in it. Fill a too large glass and you end up with far too much alcohol to comfortably consume. A too small glass equally has it own quite obvious drawbacks.

Pretty much all the cocktails I drink could quite happily be served in the following three types of glass:

Cocktail glasses

This is the classic V-shaped glass that has become the international symbol for cocktails. Cocktails typically served in this glass include: Martinis, Manhattans, Cosmopolitans and a great many other very popular straight up (shaken or stirred with ice and then strained into glass) cocktails. In terms of Cocktail glasses, there is a great variety of choice available and in most shops there seems to be a tendency toward extremely large variants. The only thing the larger Cocktail glasses are good for are the kinds of cocktails people make when they don’t actually like cocktails – possibly blue in colour with lurid garnishes hanging of them and largely comprised of fruit juice. With a straight up cocktail you’ll typically be dealing with strong liquor, which will be diluted only to a relatively small extent by melted ice. As such, the average straight up cocktail drinker will not need or want a large glass. The other issue with using a larger Cocktail glass is that drinks served in them will tend to be more voluminous, thereby taking longer to drink, and so will become warm before they are finished. No one likes the taste of a warm Martini.

In terms of specific volumes, there are no hard and fast rules but I would not recommend going any larger than 6 ounces.

Old-Fashioned glasses

This is just a standard low and wide glass with straight sides. They range in size greatly and at the very large end of the scale are known as Double Old-Fashioned glasses. For the purposes of starting a home cocktail bar, I would recommend going for a medium to large sized standard Old Fashioned glass of around 7 to 9 ounces. Such a glass can be used to serve Old-Fashioneds, Caipirinhas, Mai Tais and is more than adequate for a great many other drinks served with ice or crushed ice. If I was left on a desert island with a fully stocked cocktail bar and just one glass, I would definitely take an Old-Fashioned. At a push, it’s difficult to think of many cocktails that couldn’t conceivably be served in this glass.

Collins glasses

This is a tall and slim glass quite similar in shape and size to a Highball glass. It can be used to serve Mojitos, Singapore Slings, Tom Collins and pretty much anything else that’s made with juice, soda or another mixer. I generally prefer to use a Collins glass over a Highball, despite the two being quite similar, because the Collins glass can easily be filled to the brim with a relatively modest amount of ice. Size is not quite so important with Collins glasses but something around the 10 – 12 ounce mark would be ideal.

Where to buy

In terms of getting a home cocktail bar started, price and functionality are the main considerations when it comes to glassware. And if these are your only real considerations, I would recommend going to a trade supplier if possible. I personally use Nisbets because they have a shop near to where I work but there are plenty of other places to go, particularly if you’re buying online. The only challenge you might have is finding anywhere that sells glassware in small enough qualities – you’re not going to want 48 Cocktail glasses even if they are only £1 each. I did notice that a trade supplier called Arcoroc has many of its glassware products available on Amazon in boxes of six. I did a quick search for a set of glasses approximating my above recommendations and found that by only buying Arcoroc, I could get six Cocktail, six Double Old-Fashioned and six Collins glasses for a total of £39.69 (excluding postage and packaging). Not a bad price at all.

Starting a home cocktail bar blog posts

The Essential Cocktail by Dale DeGroff, 2008

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This is one of my favourite books on cocktails. This is mainly because all of the recipes from the book that I have tried taste absolutely delicious. I’m yet to try one I don’t like. Added to this the recipes are all relatively accessible and call for sensible ingredients that one might conceivably have in a home bar. This is without compromising on or simplifying the recipes in any way. The book only very occasionally calls for a particular brand of spirit in a cocktail and where it does, one would presume, this is out of necessity.

Cocktail recipes are in most cases presented one per page, with good quality photography, ingredient notes and a brief history on each cocktail. This means that you get a real appreciation for what you’re making and ultimately drinking. You can also start to sound quite knowledgeable on your drinks pretty quickly if that’s something you’d like to do.

Instructions are simple and straight forward as one would expect – combine, shake strain etc; the book assumes a basic understanding of these instructions. Detailed explanations are provided for more complex aspects to various cocktails such as flamed orange peel, horse neck garnishes and foams. There are also detailed sections at the back on the book on garnishes, glassware, tools, syrups and more. This makes it an excellent book for anyone looking to gain a relatively well informed basic understanding of cocktail essentials.

The cocktails in the book are presented in chapters including ‘Essential Classics’, ‘Essential Modern Classics’, ‘The Essential Martinis’ and so on. It even has a section on beach cocktails: ‘The Essential Tropics’. I particularly like this because its assumes no pretentions in what one assumes to be a proper cocktail – there’s no snobbery. The book quite simply enables you to make a great breadth of cocktails really well. There’s nothing in that not to like.

The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks by David Embury, 1948

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With prices starting at around £50 for a relatively recent reprint, this book is clearly something unusual. Its price and limited availability would almost suggest that it’s an obscure publication that holds little practical relevance today – a collector’s item. But nothing could be further from the truth. Numerous cocktail bars insist that all of their bartenders read this book, it’s constantly referenced in more recent cocktail books and the information contained within it practically underpin the ways in which cocktails are made and understood today.

In my mind there are two ways of learning how to make cocktails. One way is from the top-down – learning one recipe at a time and eventually building up a decent repertoire and a fairly basic appreciation of the rudimentary elements of a cocktail. The other way is bottom-up – learning the building blocks that almost every cocktail has and then adding complexity once you’ve mastered the basics. Embury, without a shadow of a doubt, takes you through the bottom-up approach.

While the book contains what I’d estimate to be quite a few hundred cocktail recipes, these are really only used as examples of the various spirit and flavour combinations Embury considers appropriate. It’s the kind of book you may well read cover to cover and then forever return to in order to refresh your memory on a particular point of detail.

The book was written in 1948 so, while many of the cocktails in the book are still easily recognisable and even popular today, they are in the most part pretty strong – what you’d call ‘classics’. If you like dry martinis and Manhattan’s then there’ll be plenty in the book for you to enjoy. If it’s recipes for more modern cocktails you’re after – Singapore Sling, Cosmopolitan, Negroni and the such like – this is not the book for you. For enjoyable, accessible and easily explained cocktail recipes, there really are many better choices out there.

As well as offering a very solid grounding in the basics of making cocktails, ‘The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks’ is an enjoyable read that captures a moment in history perfectly. Some of the views and comments expressed in the book would not be what you’d call acceptable in most social settings today but, given the context and the times they were written, they are both highly entertaining and enlightening.

Choosing your first book on cocktails

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Starting a home cocktail bar part 2: The best cocktail books for beginners

As I mentioned in my previous post ‘Before starting a home cocktail bar‘, I tackled creating my own cocktail bar by attempting to buy everything you could possibly need before actually having a clear idea of the drinks I wanted to mix. I spent a lot of money and didn’t have a great many drinks to show for it.

The approach I would recommend, particularly if you’re on a budget, is to build the bar one cocktail at a time. As such, I would suggest the first step on the road to setting up your home cocktail bar is choosing a good cocktail book that will provide both recipes and a healthy level of guidance on technique. This way you can master cocktails one recipe at a time, learning as you go and enjoying the process from day one.

When I first started making cocktails, I initially resorted to the internet to find recipes. I found some were good but in the most part they were confusing, contradictory and failed to deliver the level of technical guidance I required. In short, I found using the internet as a starting point disheartening. I purchased a number of cocktail books and things did improve – at least there was consistency in the way the recipes were delivered. I did, however, still lack understanding on cocktail making technique and theory.

The solution arrived for me when I discovered a book called ‘The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks by David A. Embury (1948). This was a thoroughly good read and ever since reading the book cover to cover, my mixing skills and basic understanding of the construction of every cocktail I have ever encountered has improved immeasurably. You can see a more detailed overview of the book here.

With such a glowing recommendation you may expect the simple matter of deciding on a good cocktail book to start out with is decided. Not so for a couple of quite practical reasons however. For one, we are discussing starting a home cocktail bar on a budget. Search Amazon for ‘The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks’ and you will find used prices ranging from around £50 to £175. Don’t get me wrong, the book is a thoroughly worthwhile purchase – I’d actually go as far as saying essential if you plan to take your cocktail hobby at all seriously – but there is an argument for an alternative, especially if you’re just starting out and dabbling with cocktails and just want to mix up a few tasty concoctions.

If this is the case, my recommendation is a book called ‘The Essential Cocktail’ by Dale DeGroff (2008). The book is beautifully presented and contains hundreds of popular recipes together with a good deal of interesting information on the origins of each of the cocktails and the ingredients contained within them. At the time of writing ‘The Essential Cocktail’ is priced at £12.99 on Amazon, which is a bargain. If you buy this book and follow its dead simple instructions, use the right ingredients and something approximating the right equipment, you will be guaranteed to be knocking out absolutely delicious drinks. You can see a more detailed overview of the book here.

If you want to forego buying a cocktail book for the time being and intend to use the internet as your source of recipes and advice, you will find some sites are considerably better than others. One of the best I have found is called ‘Drink Boy: Adventures in Cocktails’. It contains recipes, advice, discussion and links to quite a few other good websites. The site is published by Robert Hess, a very well known US cocktail expert.

Starting a home cocktail bar blog posts

Starting a home cocktail bar

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How to start a home cocktail bar part 1: Introduction

 

If you are thinking of taking cocktail making at home up as a hobby, I’d thoroughly recommend it. There are many pleasures associated with making cocktails at home aside from drinking them that will keep you entertained for hours. A spirits collection, no matter how large, never seems to be complete, so you will always have plenty of new drinks to research and buy. Equipment and glassware is much the same – going all the way from very affordable to absurdly expensive, there are no end of styles of glassware, tools of the bar trade and gizmos and gadgets to treat yourself to. And then of course, there is the most obvious pleasure of having your very own home cocktail bar and that is making, improving, inventing, sharing and drinking your own concoctions. It’s a great hobby that both you and your guests will thoroughly enjoy.

That’s the pleasures of having a home cocktail bar. Before you’re at the stage of being able to rustle up anything from a dry martini to a Singapore sling however, you do have the thorny and rather expensive issue of buying in the stock and kit to create even the most mediocre of cocktail bars. There is no doubt that for the average budget, purchasing just one semi-decent bottle of each of your base spirits, including gin, vodka, rum, bourbon and brandy, is not cheap. And even once you’ve got those stashed in the cabinet, to start making even the simplest of cocktails you’re going to need plenty more ingredients and equipment at plenty more expense.

That’s exactly what I found when I started my cocktail collection – it seemed to be a bottomless pit of expense and even once I had what looked to be a relatively well stocked cabinet, the range of cocktails I could produce (that I actually liked) was pitifully small. In addition to this, most the drinks on my cocktail repertoire were violently potent – drinks such as the dry martini, the old fashioned, the daiquiri and the Manhattan were really all I had a complete set of ingredients for. Whilst these drinks are a great place to start – being simple on the ingredients side, highly pleasurable to the connoisseur and requiring a great deal of practice to master – they’re not really what you’d call crowd pleasers. Your average guest, who probably won’t have quite the same level of interest in cocktails as you, is probably going to be thinking of a cosmopolitan or something similar when you offer them a cocktail – not a massive glass of whiskey you’ve spent three minutes stirring with ice. My poor friends – how politely they’ve suffered for the sake of my hobby.

And then there is the question of how you actually learn to make your cocktails. The internet is awash with recipes – all different even when going by the same name. There are iPhone apps and books on cocktails. Cocktail recipes are even published in newspapers and magazines. These various sources of recipes are all well and good for the experienced mixologist who has a well stocked bar but they’re not so much help for someone who might need a little more instruction, direction, and explanation when starting out in the world of mixed drinks.

Facing these challenges isn’t, I’ve discovered, how venturing into cocktails has to be. It is possible to get away with just a few spirits and liqueurs that will yield a fair variety of delicious cocktails that even your friends will like. There are many pieces of glassware and bar equipment you can definitely do without, at least initially. There are also some excellent books and websites out there that will teach you how to make cocktails rather than just throwing you in at the deep end with a list of ingredients followed by the word ‘shake’.

In my following blog posts I shall explain how I wish I’d gone about setting up a home cocktail bar. As I do this I’ll be tallying up costs so you can see it doesn’t have to be at all expensive.

Starting a home cocktail bar blog posts