Equal parts Brandy, White Creme de Menthe and Feret Branca.

From an earlier post, you might remember how I had run into an old bartender friend – Tathagata – in Westin hotel in Kolkata last month. If you carefully notice the picture in that post, you will see a small jar of some black stuff on the right bottom corner.

That is one of the tricks I learnt from Tathagata that day. Those are butterfly pea flowers. He infuses them into gins which renders the gin a dark blue color. Here is the cool thing… as you pour tonic water into the gin, it changes its color to pink!!

Instead of getting butterfly pea flowers, I found a gin – Empress 1908 – made in Canada that actually uses these flowers in the latter stages of the distillation process. The result is a dark blue gin. Since gins usually do not have color, you might mistakenly think that the bottle is blue in color.

I was making the usual gin and tonic for Sharmila last evening when I decided to try out the trick. You can see how the bright blue gin slowly becomes lavender in color and then becomes bright pink. Pretty awesome!

Incidentally, it is a great gin too!!

BTW, I should have used white background for these pictures and not black.

Blackberry Liqueur, Dry Vermouth, Vodka, Angostura Bitters and Lemon juice.

Unlike most other cocktails, the bitters is not put in before shaking with ice but floated on the top after pouring it into the martini glass.

Yesterday, Sharmila and I had gone to one of the very few bars open on Christmas day (Taffer’s Tavern). I had asked for a Sazerac. The cocktail was served without any ice on it. Which I found to be strange. This evening I made one the traditional way – with the ice and all that.

I have to admit I liked the non-ice version!! This might go against the traditionalist in mixology but the consistency stayed much better without the ice and I preferred that. I will have to try one with a King ice to see if slower melting helps in keeping the drink cold while maintaining the consistency…