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Tag Archives: combier

The Margarita

This drink is as famous as its origins are uncertain.  Many stories are told about the invention of the Margarita, but the only hard fact we have on its early history is its first published recipe in a 1953 edition of Esquire magazine.

For this particular recipe, I’ve used the following ingredients:

  • Milagro Silver Tequila
  • Lime Juice
  • Combier Liqueur D’Orange
  • 1-to-1 simple syrup.

    Project Calcuhol's Margarita.

    Project Calcuhol’s Margarita.

 

This yields a Margarita Recipe that falls somewhere within the wide range of recipes that can be found for this drink.  The difference, of course, is that this particular recipe is custom suited to these particular products based on Project Calcuhol’s calculation.  With these choices, the resulting drink provides a very clean and bright expression of agave, orange, and lime.

A Project Calcuhol Original

This experiment takes the idea of the La Paloma cocktail (possibly Mexico’s favorite cocktail) and turns it into a more concentrated drink by replacing the grapefruit soda with grapefruit liqueur.

With a relatively simple ingredient list:

  • Herradura Reposado Tequila
  • Lime Juice
  • Combier Crème de Pamplemousse Rose,

    A Project Calcuhol Original Cocktail.

    A Project Calcuhol Original Cocktail.

 

the predicted cocktail recipe presents a focused burst of agave, lime, and grapefruit to the palate but without any roughness to it. With a fair amount of sweetness already present in the Pamplemousse and Tequila, one can execute this drink without simple syrup.

The Jasmine

Although many of today’s great cocktail discoveries come from reviving classic as well as obscure drinks from pre-Prohibition bartending literature, the Jasmine Cocktail can be traced to Paul Harrington from the mid 1990’s. For a complete discussion of this drink, I must defer to Robert Hess.

I decided to see what would happen if I fed the ingredients for this drink into my algorithm, and see what it predicted. For the ingredient list, I used:

  • Beefeater Gin
  • Campari
  • Combier Liqueur D’Orange
  • Lemon Juice
  • 1-to-1 simple syrup.

 

Project Calcuhol's Jasmine.

Project Calcuhol’s Jasmine.

This is similar to the original recipe’s ingredient list except that Combier is replacing Cointreau and simple syrup is added so that the burden of providing sweetness to the cocktail does not rest solely on the Combier (because that would require a whole lot of it).  Check out the recipe here:
Jasmine Recipe

The calculated recipe brings the lemon juice up by quite a bit compared to the original recipe, and the amounts of the gin, Campari, and orange liqueur are split more evenly, which is the algorithm’s attempt to avoid any one of them dominating the drink. This is an interesting reinterpretation of this modern classic, different from both Harrington’s and Hess’ version. To my tastes, the balance is flawless and this version retains the characteristic taste of grapefruit juice, if not even more so, of the original.