Captain Marvel: The HFF (Higher, Further, Faster) Cocktail

Post by Matt

As is tradition around here, when I’m really excited about an upcoming super hero movie, I tend to celebrate by creating a cocktail to celebrate the character. I think my most successful cocktails have been for Wonder Woman and Doctor Strange, but I had the most fun trying to figure out a worthy cocktail for Black Panther.

We’ve had our tickets to Captain Marvel since January 7, so to say I’m excited for the movie is a bit of an understatement. When I asked the Clockwatching Tart about what cocktail she thought we should make to celebrate Ms. Danvers, I told her her main colours were red, blue and gold and that the movie’s tagline was “Higher, Further, Faster”. Her immediate response was “Champagne and Cognac” because “it has a nice gold colour and is strong as heck, straight forward, and classy”. Who am I to argue against that logic?

To make things interesting, we decided to try three variations of a French 75, which is Champagne and Cognac with simple syrup and lemon juice. For the first version, we went with the classic and just added a cherry for a splash of red in honour of Captain Marvel.

Add the following into a cocktail shaker with ice:

¼ ounce (1 ½ teaspoons) lemon juice

¼ ounce (1 ½ teaspoons) simple syrup

1 ounce (30 ml / two tablespoons) Cognac (we used Remy Martin VSOP)

Shake and then pour the liquid into a chilled Champagne flute and top with:

4 ounces of Champagne (we substituted French sparkling wine from just outside the Champagne region, because… money)

Garnish with a lemon twist and a cherry and enjoy! The Clockwatching Tart and I found the cocktail dangerously easy to enjoy with a nice balance between the brighter notes of the lemon and the depth and complexity of the cognac. We agreed that if you ordered it at a fancy cocktail bar, you wouldn’t be disappointed.

The Clockwatching Tart loves cider and recently came across a beautiful bottle of Calvados, which is French Apple Brandy. My favourite Ontario winery is Cave Springs from the Jordan area near Niagara. Their Dolomite has a beautiful limestone minerality to it that I absolutely love, so we decided to see if they would make a successful variation of a French 75. We prepared it the exact same way, but substituted Calvados for Cognac and Cave Springs for the previous Brut. While it would be great on a summer day and was nicely aromatic, it lacked the depth of the original and wasn’t quite as good.

Our final variation substituted Dillon’s cherry gin for both the lemon juice and the simple syrup. While it was a valiant effort, there was just too much going on with everything the gin brought to the table and it wasn’t worthy of Captain Marvel (or our palettes).

In the end, there was only one drink worthy of the Higher, Further, Faster name (and inclusion in our regular cocktail rotation): the original French 75 with a cherry. Cheers to Brie Larson and her fight for underrepresented voices and to Captain Marvel laying waste to the box office and all the trolls.

 

Movie Cocktails - Wakandan Aviator

This post is by Matt, the Beer Baron. He loves to make cocktails based on superhero movies. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @geekcanuck

Special movies call for special cocktails. Just as we did for Wonder Woman with Themyscira Wonder Punch, now it is time for Black Panther with our newly created Wakandan Aviator -- although I made the process of putting it together more difficult due to my stubbornness.

How do you create a cocktail to celebrate Black Panther? For me, I immediately thought of creating a purple cocktail to acknowledge his regal status as King. The fact that the Black Panther premiere in Los Angeles was on a purple carpet and that the character’s suit glows purple in the movie sealed the deal.

A purple cocktail is easy, right? They are a dime a dozen if you Google them. Alas, that is where my stubbornness played its part. I didn’t want to use food colouring, digitally alter the photos or use Blue Curaçao (which I haven’t had since I was a teenager). That meant our starting point was a classic cocktail called an Aviation, which uses Creme de Violette to imbue a purple tint.  

We made a standard Aviation (2 oz gin, ½ oz lemon juice, ¼ oz Luxardo maraschino liqueur, ¼ oz Creme De Violette) first, using a recipe I found here. It was nicely aromatic but fairly weak and hardly worthy of a King.

Thankfully, we had help in the form of both an awesome book (Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail by Dave Arnold) and an awesome friend (who happens to certified cicerone and experienced mixologist). The variation above used ¼ oz more lemon juice balanced out by a ¼ oz more maraschino liqueur to bring the total to 2 oz gin, ¾ oz lemon juice, ½ oz Luxardo maraschino liqueur and ¼ oz Creme de Violette. We also swapped out the pretty neutral London dry gin we used in the first version for The Botanist, which is a more herbaceous and flowery gin.

Things were getting better. There was more body and complexity but we weren’t just there to make a good Aviation. To start creating our own variation worthy of the name Wakandan Aviator, we started with the Liquid Intelligence recipe, but this time added pineapple simple syrup and Ms. Better’s Pineapple Star Anise Bitters and used an egg white to soften the edges and give it a pleasingly smooth mouth feel. Alas, the end result was too sweet.

I tried a version with crème de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur) for added vibrancy but then tried to balance out the added sweetness with even more lemon juice and the whole thing was a train wreck. (Not a train wreck I didn’t happily drink, but a train wreck nonetheless.)

This is when panic (and possibly drunkenness) started to set in. My go-to booze is bourbon but I was thankfully overruled before we went down that particular rabbit hole. Instead, we ditched the entire concept of the Aviation and decided to try muddling blueberries to make a purple Gin Fizz. As you can see above, it was certainly pretty and verging on purple, but not something any of us would seek out, let alone serve to a King.

In the end, the Gin Fizz did give us an element we all liked in the muddled blueberries. Now, we just needed to combine it with the other things we liked best from our previous attempts to come up with our Wakandan Aviator, which turned out alluringly aromatic, nicely balanced between sweet and sour, pleasingly smooth, and more-or-less purple:

2 ounces gin (in this case, The Botanist)
¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
½ ounce Luxardo maraschino liqueur
¼ ounce Creme De Violette
Handful of muddled blueberries
1 egg white

Shaken over ice
Poured into a martini glass and garnished with a frozen red star

Why garnished with a frozen red star (made with cranberry and pineapple juice), you ask? Well, that is because I am a super geek. At the end of Captain America: Civil War, Bucky (aka The Winter Soldier) is taken to Wakanda and placed into cryostasis until Wakandan scientists can figure out how to reverse his brainwashing. The frozen red star represents Bucky and how technologically advanced Wakanda is. Duh.

So, what did we learn through the process of making our Wakandan Aviator?

• Use good gin
• Egg whites in cocktails (as in bourbon sours) are wonderful
• It’s always good to have friends that kick ass
• Never set out to make a vibrant purple cocktail unless you are willing to be vaguely disappointed in the colour or just break down and cheat
• Buy lots of lemons

Obviously, many lemons were hurt in the making of this cocktail.

Cheers and have fun at Black Panther. Wakanda Forever!

Happy Hour: Themyscira Wonder Punch

This post comes from Matt, the Beer Baron, who likes craft beer and creating superhero-themed cocktails.  Follow him on Twitter or Instagram @geekcanuck

Even before we went to see Wonder Woman, I was toying with the idea of coming up with a cocktail to celebrate her big screen solo debut (and director Patty Jenkins becoming the first woman to direct a superhero blockbuster). I’d had some fun ideas about rimming the glass with sugar to represent a tiara and using lemon curls as the Golden Lasso of Truth but I hadn’t quite cracked the concept for the actual cocktail -- until a quick trip to Toronto before the movie.

The Clockwatching Tart and I were meeting an old friend for lunch and enjoyed some truly fantastic D.O.P. (Denominazione di Origine Protetta) pizza, whose ingredients all come from specific regions of Italy. While the food and service at Pizzeria Libretto were wonderful, my eureka moment came when I spotted Dillon’s Small Batch Distillers Cherry Gin in a cocktail on the menu.

I’d been toying with the idea of starting off with a base similar to an Aperol Spritz, which is something the Clockwatching Tart had recently tried and enjoyed. An Aperol Spritz combines brut (dry) prosecco with bitter-sweet Aperol and club soda. To even come close to doing Wonder Woman justice, I decided to do away with the club soda entirely and add in the Dillon’s Cherry Gin.

                                           

Between my original garnish ideas, the addition of blueberries to match the colour scheme of her outfit, and the Dillon’s Cherry Gin to make the whole thing fittingly stronger and more powerful, the ingredients are as follows:

• 4 ounces dry sparkling wine
• 3/4 ounce Aperol or Luxardo Aperitivo
• 3/4 ounce Dillon’s Cherry Gin
• Yellow sanding sugar
• Lemon curl
• Blueberries

We used Canadian brut from Nova Scotia but any dry sparkling wine would do.

Add the Aperol or Aperitivo and gin and give it a good stir.

Garnish to bring out the Wonder Woman in your drink and then enjoy! We felt the Themyscira Wonder Punch turned out wonderfully well. It was herbaceous, lightly floral and not overly sweet, while also being alluring, balanced, approachable and strong but not overbearing, all of which seemed fitting for Wonder Woman.

As for the movie, [spoiler alert] it was awesome and unabashedly positive and inspiring. It was one of my favourite theatrical experiences of the year and I loved that there were women dressed up as Wonder Woman there and that the movie seemed to live up to their expectations. Go enjoy the movie and then follow it up with a Themyscira Wonder Punch!

Happy Hour: The Sherman / Doctor Strange Cocktail

This post comes from Matt, the Beer Baron.  Follow him on Twitter or Instagram @geekcanuck

We seem to be living in the Golden Age of geekdom, where even lesser known characters from the comic books of my youth are being given the full-on blockbuster treatment. Case in point: Doctor Strange, the Marvel Universe’s own sorcerer supreme, created in 1963 by artist Steve Ditko, whose brilliant, creative and often trippy style of art was a perfect fit for both the time and the good doctor’s strange, interdimensional adventures.

Flash forward to 2016 and the Doctor Strange movie boasts a cast (Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Mads Mikkelsen, etc.) that betters that of most Oscar-bait movies and stunning visuals that still honour Ditko’s awesomeness. Clearly, it is a good time to be a geek. To celebrate, I wanted to find a cocktail that would be worthy of Doctor Strange.

Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum (aka his magical residence for you non-geeks out there) is in New York, so my first idea was a Manhattan, but that didn’t quite have the flair of Doctor Strange (or Benedict Cumberbatch). However, it did lead me to a variation of a Manhattan called a Sherman, whose recipe comes by way of the Old Waldorf Astoria Hotel (opened in New York in 1893 and demolished in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building, which is suitably cool) and contains absinthe (which seemed suitably trippy).

Without further ado (and geekiness), here is our slight variation of a Sherman cocktail, rechristened The Doctor Strange cocktail, which turned out to be just as awesome as the movie:

2 ounces bourbon

1 ounce sweet vermouth 

3 dashes absinthe

3 dashes orange bitters 

3 dashes Angostura bitters

Garnished with a lemon twist

Yes, that is my normal shot glass and yes, I’ve clearly leaned in to my geekiness. 

Most Sherman cocktail recipes call for rye whiskey or leave it up to you to choose between rye and bourbon. The Clockwatching Tart and I developed a crush on bourbon during our trips to Kentucky, so this was an easy decision to make. 

One of the many wonderful benefits of living with a good cook is the fact that the cupboards often contain many different types of alcohol. My new slogan: “Booze: It’s not just for cooking anymore!”

Absinthe smells and tastes like black licorice / anise but it isn’t as overwhelming as I might have expected. That said, it is still there to round out the flavours and not dominate them, so go easy. I used a tiny little salt spoon to make sure I didn’t overdo it.

The craft beer revolution has been in full swing for quite some time now, but the craft cocktail craze is relatively more recent (and much to our delight). Our favourite craft beer bar now boasts a fantastic cocktail menu as well and a relatively local distillery, Dillon’s Small Batch Distillers of Beamsville, Ontario, has a display of different bitters at the local LCBO. Good times all around.

The lemon twist isn’t just to look cool, the actual twisting is what releases the oils, which adds both aromatics and flavour to finish off the cocktail.

In the end, both The Doctor Strange (the cocktail) and Doctor Strange (the movie) get perfect scores of 4-out-of-4, as all four people at our little cocktail-party-turned-movie night loved both. Long may the Golden Age of geekdom continue!