The Liquid Lab

On Monday morning I found myself crammed into a tiny room in an unmarked building in Riverdale, NY, wearing a lab coat and eating granola floating in a warm, viscous soup of Ilegal Mezcal, Kahlua, 1921 Crema de Tequila, Mexican chocolate, and coconut milk, topped off with fresh strawberries. It is a breakfast of which I imagine Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway would approve.

This is how the day begins at The Liquid Lab. Somehow I managed to snag a coveted spot in Master Mixologist Junior Merino's 10-hour spirits seminar along with six other lucky bartenders and industry folks. Our boozy breakfast was the first of many pleasant surprises, the biggest and best being that we were his first group to participate in an aged spirits tasting, which means we sampled approximately 60 different spirits and liqueurs. Add to that the 104 cocktails (that's my best guess) that we created over the course of the day and it makes for quite an intoxicating experience.

It became immediately apparent that this would not be a leisurely day of sampling boutique tequilas and whiskeys when Junior gathered us together for the first "tasting" of the day. Aroma Architecture is a lightning-round olfactory assault where trays of fresh herbs and vials of virtually every dried spice and grain known to man are passed around in rapid succession. The theme of the day: know your ingredients.

And the ingredients were plentiful: there were bins of exotic and commonplace fruits and vegetables at our disposal, the most notable for me being coquiños, a type of mini coconut indigenous to Chile and Brazil. I'm not convinced of their usefulness in cocktails, but they were delicious...identical in appearance to a full-sized coconut and about the size of a gumball, popping the whole thing in your mouth and crunching down yields a burst of fresh, tropical goodness.

But what about the booze? Our first tasting of the day consisted of 10 clear spirits...vodka, piscos, grappa, aguardiente. The standouts for me were Chateau de Laubade Blanche Armagnac, which tasted of wet stone; Hudson White Whiskey, which was intensely corny; Schladerer Kirsch, which had a distinct note of the hard strawberry candies I used to devour as a kid; and G'Vine with its strong cardamom and floral notes.

After each tasting session we broke out to the main room to throw together two cocktails each using the spirits we just tasted...in this case it was Macchu and La Diablada Pisco. Sadly, nothing in this round was particularly memorable, at least not from me.

Tasting Two was a much more rewarding experience. 10 Armagnacs, Cognacs, Calvados, and straight apple brandies with notes of caramel, orange, vanilla, bitter chocolate, tobacco, banana, minerals, leather, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, grapes, apple cider, meringue, coffee, and butterscotch. Big, rich, and complex. Also expensive - I'll probably never taste half of these again.

We broke out again for another round of mashing and mixing (our group was a muddle-happy bunch). I came out of it with one drink I was reasonably satisfied with, all things considered. I decided to accentuate the light caramel notes in the Chateau de Laubade VSOP with a bit of sweetness from honey syrup and muddled pear. Any time I use non-citrus fruit, I like to incorporate something savory to keep it from becoming cloying; in this case, thyme was a natural pairing (ha!) for the fruit.

_______________________________________________

VSOPear
Ingredients:
1.5 oz Chateau de Laubade VSOP Bas Armagnac
.5 oz Combier
.75 oz fresh-squeezed lemon juice
.5 oz honey syrup
2 dashes Bitter Truth Jerry Thomas' Own Decanter Bitters
2 slices pear
2 thyme sprigs
1 lemon peel

Method:
Muddle pear, thyme, and honey syrup in a mixing glass. Add remaining ingredients (sans lemon), ice, and shake. Strain into chilled cocktail glass. Flame and discard lemon peel.

_______________________________________________


Next came our whisk(e)y tasting. Robin Robinson from Compass Box dropped by with a bag of peated barley (nutty, smoky, delicious) to snack on, fresh peat (earthy, probably not delicious), and a slab of oak seared to Char No. 4, with its "alligator skin" texture. Very cool.

He then led us through our tasting of 11 whiskeys, and there were four standouts for me: Gentleman Jack had a wonderful corn sweetness with butterscotch and chocolate cake; The Liquid Lab's own whiskey, made with winter wheat and aged 4 months in 3 gallon barrels, smelled unmistakably of burning paper and vanilla; Noah's Mill 15 Year Old Bourbon had one of the most complex noses of the day, with notes of sherry, caramel, salt water, chocolate, and maple syrup; but the knockout for me was Compass Box Peat Monster. The moniker couldn't be more appropriate - this Scotch is huge with firewood, ash, burning leaves, and dried chiles, and leaves everything else smoldering in its wake. It is the Balrog of Scotches.

I couldn't not use it when we got a chance to play around with the whiskeys. And while everyone else was still happily muddling away, I decided I couldn't befoul this spirit with any extraneous fruityness. I would make a stirred cocktail, and it would be intense. I was actually very happy with the way this one came out, but it's definitely a sipper.

_______________________________________________

What the hell, let's just call it
The Balrog
Ingredients:
2 oz Compass Box Peat Monster Blended Malt Scotch Whisky
.25 oz Combier
.25 oz Fernet Branca
.5 oz Pasilla Pomegranate syrup (a nice grenadine would probably suffice)
1 dash Peychaud's Bitters
1 lemon peel

Method:
Stir all ingredients (sans lemon) with ice in mixing glass. Strain into chilled cocktail glass. Twist lemon over drink, discard.

_______________________________________________


Thankfully we then broke for lunch, expertly prepared by Junior's wife Heidi and their assistants Dan and Orlando. Naturally, every dish featured a different spirit. There was grilled lobster with Leblon, mango, and pineapple salsa; king salmon with tequila; sushi rolls with sake; Kobe beef sliders with Leblon; crab cakes with lemongrass and whiskey; prosciutto-wrapped melon balls infused with Canton; elotes with a Scorpion Mezcal aioli; coctel de camarones with Ilegal Reposado Mezcal; tuna lollipops with Compass Box Scotch, peppercorns, and watermelon; and some off-the-charts-good short ribs with a Chairman's Reserve Rum-laced guava-chipotle barbecue sauce. We topped it all off with a dark chocolate shell filled with an intense Compass Box Asyla Scotch-milk chocolate mousse and fresh raspberries.

Fortified, we dove back in to Tasting Four, featuring ten cachaças and rums. Leblon had a distinct fresh milk and banana nose; Chairman's Reserve was ripe with orange, molasses, and fresh cut wood; Captain Morgan Spiced Rum was surprising - I've always dismissed it, but it had a pleasant twinge of cheap vanilla ice cream and banana; but I've always been and probably always will be a sucker for Cruzan Black Strap, with its smoothly assertive maple, bacon, coffee, roasted pecans, tobacco and bitter chocolate. Unfortunately this round was a bust when it came to my cocktails, although some of the other people in our group turned out some really tasty beverages.

At this point I think we were all feeling it a bit. The Lab is approximately 10 hours of constant standing, and the time spent creating cocktails is very small - there's simply no time for trial and error. I have to commend everyone in our group for making some good drinks on the fly and hanging in there until the end.

And what an end...the last tasting was tequila and mezcal. Having recently participated in a Del Maguey tasting, I was pretty stoked to compare and contrast some more agave goodness. Siembra Azul Añejo was complex with earthy minerality, cut grass, vanilla, burnt caramel, and coconut; Chinaco Reposado was intensely vegetal; Don Philippe Reposado smelled of sweet cream, almond, and burnt orange; Ilegal Mezcal Añejo had a nose heavy with leather, metal, and wet stone; Hacienda De Chihuahua had a low-tide funk running beneath high notes of toffee and cream and an adrenaline-like metallic tang; and Mijes Reposado was another funky number with strangely pleasant wet dog, leather, and dulce de leche tones.

Again, I had nothing of value to contribute to the mixological proceedings at this point, but that's okay, because Junior saved the big guns (and liquid nitrogen) for last. His Breakfast of Champions, another cereal for heathens and a sure precursor to bad craziness, featured Chairman's Reserve Rum, Castries Peanut Liqueur, Maple Syrup, Oat Milk, Wheaties, Bananas, and Golden Raisins. It was delicious. He followed that with an Armagnac Popsicle; popcorn dusted with a powder of dehydrated Scotch; a shot of tequila, Chambord, and lime, topped with a pear-grapefruit espuma; an Herbsaint nieve with Ilegal Mezcal and fresh lime, blasted with liquid nitro; a margarita marshmallow, tequila rose gummy, and (why not?) a capsule filled with a powdered passionfruit whiskey sour.

There's really no way to top that display of alcoholic acrobatics, and with that The Liquid Lab came to an end. I wandered out into the night drunker, fuller, and more than a little bit wiser.

I can't thank Junior, Heidi, Dan, Orlando, and the sponsors enough for all they did to make it happen. I tasted more spirits in one day than I probably would have in several years otherwise, and probably not even then, because I'm certain I could never afford many of the bottles we tried. The amazing drinks and meals provided by Junior and Heidi and the camaraderie of a few like-minded individuals are just icing on the cake. Or, if you prefer, the espuma on the tequila.

Testing...

testing...