Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Rapid Cocktail Mixing Kit

Yesterday I had an awesome idea for a box.

A box that'll contain lots of little boxes of different botanticals and flavours. Also a cream whipper and a bottle of gomme syrup to adjust sweetness. This little kit would be able to roughly replicate various dominate flavours in cocktails... it wouldn't be exactly the same as having a wall of different flavoured liqueur bottles but it'd be customisable.

This fits in with my love of Wunderkammer and "stuff in jars" as I fondly refer to it as. The museum in my hometown, The Woodman Institute, was very much a wunderkammer full of stuff in jars and randomness. You walk in and there's a 9ft high standing polar bear that just fits under the stairs. Four-legged baby chickens, stuffed alligators, the saddle that President Lincoln rode into town on, hardtack from the US civil war (which looks maggot-eaten, decaying on a piece of paper), whalebones, everything.

Also, somehow, it reminds me of something in one of my favourite movies, Stealing Beauty. There was a character dying of some terminal illness and he was befriending this beautiful young woman who had come to Italy to rekindle an old flame from her childhood. They were discussing how the grapes in wine absorb all the surrounding smells. First a sip of the wine and try to describe it... it's difficult to describe. It's just wine. Now, a small box of various bottles of things is brought out and they go through smelling a few of the bottles. Then taste the wine again. Suddenly you're able to describe all these more subtle notes and flavours that you couldn't place before.

Getting back to the box idea, the gomme syrup would be used to adjust sweetness, since many liqueurs are quite sickly sweet compared to pure vodka/rum/gin etc. The cream whipper is used for rapid infusion of the ingredients. Possibly would be good to include something like a small jelly bag to strain out botanicals. A sort of desert island cocktail bar kit...

No comments:

Post a Comment