one hundred cocktails

drinking with a purpose

The Avenue

21 Feb 2011

I’ve made quite a few Avenue cocktails, probably more than any other cocktail in the book thus far. There are a few reasons for this, but I will share the most notable. I finally got around to purchasing edible flowers to garnish the cocktail (as described by the book), intending to make the presentation just perfect. I took some spectacular photographs, marveled at my masterpiece, and then proceeded to consume the thing with abandon. In the end, all that got abandoned, however, were the photographs, which I somehow deleted without importing into aperture. Having performed a low-level format of the SD card as well, none of my attempts at data recovery had any success.

So, instead, I brought the whole batch of ingredients along to a party and made another five of the things (two were gone before I remembered to take a picture).

Finished Aveneues at a party.

It’s a weird cocktail. Bourbon, Calvados, orange flower water, grenadine, and passion fruit nectar. It’s not quite the mess that is an Alamagoozlum, but there’s a lot of things going into the shaker with this one.

Stuff that goes in an Avenue.

The end result was pretty surprising. There are a lot of flavors that dance around in the mouth with this one, but it’s a surprisingly mild and pleasant drink. It comes with a hint of sweetness from the juice and grenadine, but it’s not overpowering. The grenadine also provides a bit of bite and crispness, but I’m pleased its flavors don’t really assert themselves in a distracting way. One can tell the bourbon is there if they think about it, but it’s very smooth and nuanced; the calvados has a similar effect, providing an ephemeral whiff of apple in the mid-finish.

This cocktail has been a hit with everybody that’s tried it; those that like sweet cocktails and those that like dry still seem to find something of interest here, which is a rarity. Unlike a lot of mixed drinks, you seem to get hit with discrete flavors from the drink at different stages – all of the constituents show up in a taste as hints of their former selves, but none of them combine per se.

As an aside, I made my own grenadine for this, and like how it turned out; I combined equal parts by weight of pomegranate juice and sugar, and added half an ounce of grain alcohol as a preservative. I also tried the simmer and reduce approach, but didn’t care for the toasty baked flavors that developed, at least in this sort of cocktail. It might be better suited to other things, though I have no idea what they would be. Either way, it tastes nothing like Rose’s nasty red stuff, and that’s a good thing.

Give this one a try; I don’t promise you’ll love it and want to make it all the time, but I think you’ll be glad for the unique experience.