Search Results for: SODA

A Wheat Beer Americano

Beer can do a lot of things to a cocktail. It can add effervescence, bitterness, or body. You can add it to a flat drink to fizz it up, or substitute the beer in for another ingredient to give it some extra oomph. That’s what we did with this week’s beer cocktail: we took the classic Italian aperitif drink, the Americano, and jazzed it up a bit with some German wheat beer. –Andrew

Beer Cocktail Recipes / A Wheat Beer Americano by Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Wheat Beer Americano

1 oz Campari
1 oz Sweet Vermouth
Hefeweizen

Add the Campari and vermouth to a highball glass filled with ice, then top with the wheat beer. Give it a stir and enjoy!

Beer Cocktail Recipes / A Wheat Beer Americano by Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

The Americano – which we’ve featured here before – is a straightforward drink, matching bitter Campari and herbaceous vermouth and mellowing out those intense flavors with some soda water. It’s a wonderful, and wonderfully Italian, low-proof cocktail, the sort of thing you’d sip while sitting in a piazza in Trastevere while watching the beautiful people stroll by.

Beer Cocktail Recipes / A Wheat Beer Americano by Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

But sometimes you want to play with the classics, and substituting a German wheat beer for the soda water adds an extra layer of fruity, spicy flavor, along with a chewy mouthfeel that you don’t get with the original.

Beer Cocktail Recipes / A Wheat Beer Americano by Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

We went with a Bavarian Hefeweizen here, one of my all-time favorites, Paulaner. Since the Campari is so bitter and the Americano so herbaceous, we didn’t want to go with a hoppier beer, like an IPA, which could overwhelm this drink with bitterness. Instead, the wheat beer adds fruity notes, especially banana, and lots of spice like cloves. It comes across as sweet in contrast with the rest of the drink. I like to give drinks like this only a gentle stir, incorporating but still leaving all the flavors a little layered. So as you drink this down, it starts out fruity and mellow, and then gets progressively darker and more intense towards the bottom.

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Glassware by Liquorary

Photo Credits: Nole Garey for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Peach-Basil Shrub Cocktail and Mocktail

Shrubs are pretty great summer drinks. They’re bracingly sweet-tart, a combination that helps quench thirst on the hottest days. This is something people figured out centuries ago – these sweetened vinegar drinks used to be the energy drinks of Colonial America. Let’s do it again, using two terrific summer ingredients: peach and basil. Bonus: Once you make the shrub syrup, shrubs are super easy to turn into mocktails, so we included a bonus mocktail recipe below. It’s a special 2-in-1 cocktail post: a Peach-Basil Shrub Cocktail and Mocktail. –Andrew

Peach-Basil Shrub Cocktail and Mocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Peach-Basil Shrub Cocktail and Mocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Peach-Basil Shrub Cocktail

  • 2 oz Whiskey*
  • 1 oz Peach-Basil Shrub
  • 1/2 oz Lemon Oleo Saccharum
  • 1/2 oz Lime Juice
  • 1/2 oz Sweet Vermouth
  • 1/4 oz Campari

Peach-Basil Shrub Cocktail and Mocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Peach-Basil Shrub Mocktail

  • 3 oz Peach-Basil Shrub
  • Soda Water

To make the peach-basil shrub: combine a cup of sugar and a cup of apple cider vinegar in a saucepan over low heat, stirring frequently until the sugar is fully dissolved into the vinegar. While the vinegar is heating, combine a cup of diced peach – about one large peach’s worth – and a handful of fresh basil leaves in a blender. Once the sugar has dissolved into the vinegar, remove the saucepan from the heat and let it cool to room temperature. Then add the sweetened vinegar to the blender and blend the peach, basil, and vinegar to a pulp. Strain the mixture through a few layers of cheese cloth or a coffee filter, then bottle and refrigerate the shrub.

Peach-Basil Shrub Cocktail and Mocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

To make the cocktail: combine all the ingredients in a shaker filled two-thirds with ice and shake well. Strain into a lowball glass filled with fresh ice and garnish with a slice of peach or fresh basil. Enjoy!

There are a couple of traditional ways of making shrubs, each of which has some drawbacks. You can simmer equal parts of vinegar, sugar, and fruit together over low heat. This is a quick way to make a shrub, but the resulting shrub will taste of cooked fruit. Or you can infuse the fruit into the vinegar, letting vinegar and sugar and fruit sit together in the fridge, which will give you cleaner, clearer fruit flavors but also takes days to infuse. This version is the best of both worlds, a quick process that preserves those clear fruit flavors. It saves all the heating for the vinegar alone, which has no effect on the flavor, but also speeds up the process dramatically, using the blender to infuse quickly.

Peach-Basil Shrub Cocktail and Mocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

The resulting cocktail is tart and savory, with lots of fruit and basil and vinegary tart notes up front, with a solid whiskey backing. Sweet vermouth and Campari are here both to take the edge off the shrub’s acidity, which can be a bit sharp when not rounded out, and to add some more Italian flavors to complement the shrub’s classic Italian pairing of peaches and basil.

This shrub is just as delicious as a mocktail. Just put three ounces of the shrub into a highball glass filled with ice and top with soda water to taste, giving it a stir to incorporate. Tasty, bright, refreshing, and totally booze free!

*We used Heritage Cask Whiskey by one of our favorite distilleries, Stonecutter Spirits in Vermont. Their whiskey is aged in bourbon and wine barrels and tastes like a rich, robust Irish whiskey.

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Glassware by Liquorary

Photo Credits: Nole Garey for Oh So Beautiful Paper

A Ramos Aviation Fizz

Okay, so technically it’s July, but we couldn’t resist closing out our month of fizzy drinks with a real doozy. The Ramos Gin Fizz is a classic drink that hearkens back to the 1880s, a relic of a time when you could reasonably field an assembly line of bartenders to shake this labor-intensive drink. But it’s sublime and, it turns out, a fantastic template for cocktail mash-ups. So we took two of our favorites, the Ramos Gin Fizz and the Aviation, and jammed them together, and made something wonderful: a Ramos Aviation Fizz. Plus, it’s a wonderful shade of lavender. –Andrew

Ramos Aviation Fizz Cocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Ramos Aviation Fizz

2 oz Dry Gin
1 oz Lemon Juice
1 oz Heavy Cream
3/4 oz Creme de Violette
1/2 oz Orgeat
1 Egg White
1/2 tsp Orange Blossom Water
Soda Water

Combine everything except the soda water in a cocktail shaker and add one or two big ice cubes – the bigger the better. Shake until the ice cubes have completely melted, a minute or two, and then keep shaking for another minute. Strain into a highball glass and add the soda water until the foam pops out of the glass a bit. Drop in a straw and enjoy!

Ramos Aviation Fizz Cocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Ok, so that’s a bit of work. It’s a lot of ingredients and quite a bit of shaking, but it’s worth it. All that shaking helps emulsify the acidic lemon juice and heavy cream (and only heavy cream will work here), whipping up a foam that should be stiff and merengue-like. It’s a drink that’s at once floral, silky and rich, gently sweet-tart, and zippy with carbonation.

Ramos Aviation Fizz Cocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

The Ramos Fizz is really like no other drink out there, a throw back to a sepia toned era of American drinking. The Aviation is another pre-Prohibition drink, but much more modern than the Ramos Fizz – it only dates back to the 1920s. It’s a floral, crisp gin sour featuring nutty Maraschino liqueur (which we swapped for orgeat for extra creaminess) and purple, flora Creme de Violette. This version mashes them up into an extra-floral, extra-creamy drink that feels like something a Mississippi steamboat bartender might have come up with in 1882.

Ramos Aviation Fizz Cocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Just make sure to drink it quickly. Fizzes like this, without ice, are meant to be consumed before they warm up. That way, you can get started on your next one that much faster.

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Glassware by Liquorary

Photo Credits: Nole Garey for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Fourth of July Cocktail Recipes!

We’ve made countless summer cocktails over the years (you can find all of our cocktail recipes here!), but with the Fourth of July coming up on Monday I thought I’d share a few of my very favorite recipes. It was hard to pick just a few favorites. Summer cocktails are full of wonderful, refreshing things like fresh fruit, mint and basil, and soda water. And then there are Tiki drinks with big tropical flavors! Well, it’s good to have options, right?? Consider this your menu for Fourth of July cocktail recipes and pretty much every weekend for the rest of the summer.

Fourth of July Cocktail Recipes / Oh So Beautiful Paper

1. Summer was made for smashes (aka cocktails with lots of muddled fruit), so there are several making an appearance on this list. The first one – a Blackberry Tequila Smash – tastes like a fun and fruity spin on a margarita.

2. You can’t go wrong with a Classic Mojito during the summer. Mint, rum, lime juice, and soda water = perfection on a hot and sunny day.

3. I’m kind of obsessed with turning cocktails into snow cones – especially for parties! Tiki drinks are perfect for cocktail snow cones, like this Zombie Snow Cone with like twelve different kinds of rum.

4. This Sage-Lime Tequila Smash is a light and refreshing cocktail – and a nice alternative to mint!

5. The Classic Mai Tai is a favorite in our household. Did you know that yesterday was National Mai Tai Day? There’s still time for a belated celebration this weekend!

6. We’ve only done one milkshake cocktail so far – this Boozy Piña Colada Milkshake – but this one was so good, I feel like we need to do a few more, STAT!

7. One of our all time FAVORITE cocktail recipes: the Orange-Vanilla Bean Scotch Smash. It doesn’t have your typical summer flavor profile, but this recipe is so good you’ll want to drink it all year long.

8. For any whiskey fans, here’s a Basil-Mint Peach Bourbon Smash that mixes oaky Bourbon with peaches and refreshing basil and mint leaves!

p.s. Even more Summer (and Fourth of July) cocktail recipes from last year’s round up right here!

A Sparkling Strawberry Daiquiri

This is a month for sparkling cocktails, which we usually make the old-fashioned way: adding something already bubbly, like soda water or beer or ginger beer or sparkling wine or…you get the idea. But we decided this week to skip that step and go straight to the source, using science! We made our own Sparkling Strawberry Daiquiri cocktail recipe, and it’s easier than it sounds. –Andrew

Sparkling Strawberry Daiquiri Cocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Sparkling Strawberry Daiquri

2 oz Silver Rum
1 oz Strawberry Syrup
3/4 oz Lime Juice

To make the strawberry syrup: combine a cup each of demerara or raw sugar, water, and strawberries, hulled and quartered, in a sauce pan. Heat gently, stirring frequently, until the strawberries have softened into a pulp. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve or cheesecloth to remove all the solids, then bottle and refrigerate.

To make the Daiquiri: combine the rum, syrup, and lime in a cocktail shaker filled two-thirds with ice and shake well. Strain into a hand-held carbonator – we used this one by Hamilton Beach – and, following the carbonator’s instructions, pump some CO2 into that Daiquiri until it’s sparkling. Strain into a chilled flute glass and enjoy!

Sparkling Strawberry Daiquiri Cocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

When we decided to try carbonating our own cocktails, we did a bit of research. Turns out that you can build your own rig to finely control the carbonation process, if you’re willing to shell out a couple hundred bucks and set up CO2 tanks, regulators, the whole works. We figured out pretty quickly that this was not for us. But there are plenty of relatively inexpensive, hand-held carbonators designed to make small batches of soda water. Since these are designed for water, and not for cocktails – with all their sticky sugars – there’s a risk of gumming up these carbonators and, you know, explosions. What with using gas under pressure and all. But we decided to go for it and give it at least one shot. It was even easier than I expected it to be. (Ed Note: I shared a little behind the scenes peek at the process over on Snapchat if you’re interested – I’m @beautifulpaper over there! –Nole)

Sparkling Strawberry Daiquiri Cocktail Recipe / Liquorary for Oh So Beautiful Paper

The result is a wonderfully peppy version of a Daiquri, bright and effervescent. Carbonating a drink this way gives you all that fun fizziness without any of the dilution that you’d normally get by adding in a carbonated ingredient, like soda water. Just remember: carbon dioxide interacts with water to produce carbonic acid, so carbonating a drink makes a drink a bit more acidic. We used just a bit less lime juice than normal to balance out the effect.

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Glassware by Liquorary

Photo Credits: Nole Garey for Oh So Beautiful Paper