Monday, September 20, 2010

emerson cocktail

Juice of 1/2 Lime (1/2 oz)
3 dash Maraschino Liqueur (1/4 oz Luxardo)
1/2 oz Sweet Vermouth (Bonal)
3/4 oz Old Tom Gin (Hayman's)

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Last Tuesday, we had some left over lime juice after making the McMenomy Cocktails for the Mixology Monday event. To find a good use of it, I opened up Jacques Straub's 1914 book Drinks. When I spotted the Emerson Cocktail and showed it to Andrea, she mentioned that it is on the Clio menu. While I was not sure of how Clio's proportions compare to Straub's, the menu does list that they use Punt e Mes as the vermouth. To match that level of bitter complexity, I selected our bottle of Bonal over the Carpano Antica to add some extra intrigue to the drink.
The aroma of the Emerson was dominated by the Maraschino liqueur. In fact, to some degree the sip was as well so perhaps reducing the volume to a barspoon or switching to a less robustly flavored one like Maraska would have been preferable. The slightly sweet sip began with the lime and Maraschino flavors followed by Bonal and gin notes drying the balance out on the swallow. Overall, the Emerson Cocktail was very much like a Martinez with the added flavor and bite of the lime juice.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've found that the Emerson is great with Dubonnet, which makes it a great place to slip in some Bonal. I'll have to give this one a try.

Nicole said...

Is that supposed to be 0.75 or 1.75 oz of gin? I made it up with the higher amount to make a 3oz cocktail and the flavours seemed to balance out nicely.

frederic said...

3/4 oz. It was from an old drink book and drinks were rather small back then (as were the cocktail glasses they served them in).

The recipe as stated is a 2 oz pre-melt volume. The one on Cocktaildb is a 2.5 oz one. The one in the 1947 Trader Vic was around this volume depending on how you measured the lime juice volume.

Increasing the gin is fair (Embury would approve) as is making multiples (1.5x or 2x) of the recipe to fill today's drink size expectation.