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MxMo Monday: Curacao Punch

Nov 21, ’10 12:57 AM

Mixology Monday this month, brought to us by Dennis at Rock and Rye, highlights “forgotten cocktails.”

I suppose everyone has a different threshold for when a cocktail recipe is “forgotten”…the average person who doesn’t frequent “serious” cocktail bars wouldn’t recognize a Japanese, for example, but if you’ve hung out at Rob Roy or Vessel in Seattle regularly, you’ve probably had one in the last year.  Again, if you’d read Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, then you’d probably say that Curacao Punch was no longer “forgotten.”

But try to walk into a bar, even most of the serious ones we tend to frequent, and Curacao Punch isn’t easy to find.  Murray Stenson looked at my blankly, and so have a number of other serious bartenders in several cities.  So I’m going to claim that Curacao Punch still fits this month’s theme.

Frankly, the recipe in Ted Haigh’s book is something I find damned near undrinkable.  He uses 2 full ounces of Curacao, compared to 1 ounce each of cognac and rum.  Let that sink in, in its sticky orange glory.  This might be historically accurate, but unless you’re looking for an adult orange snowcone, dial back on ratios here.  My own favorite was posted by Adam Elmegirab, of Boker’s Bitters in Scotland fame, and I’ve tinkered with it a bit here.

In particular, I find that I prefer a mix of overproof aged Jamaican rum, aged agricole rhum, and cognac.  The nice thing here is you can tailor this to local conditions and ingredients, so if all you get is Appleton V/X, you’re still gonna be seriously happy.  The Curacao should not be Cointreau, this demands richness rather than the drier crisper Cointreau.  Clement Creole Shrubb or the original Senior of Senior Curacao are optimal here.

2 oz  cognac (here:  Remy VS)

1 oz aged Jamaican rum (here:  Smith and Cross Navy Strength)

1 oz aged Martinique agricole rhum (here:  Saint James Ambre)

1/2 oz curacao (here:  Clement Creole Shrubb)

1/2 oz lemon juice

1 oz water (not soda water, just cold filtered water)

1 heaping barspoon cane syrup (3:1 in this case)

Shake and strain onto cracked and shaved ice, garnish with berries or whatever you have.

The effect here is a subtle mix of brandy and rum flavors, with a bit of orange on the finish.  The overproof Jamaican rum  adds a decent but mellow burn, so you’re not going to mistake this for a soft drink.  (Don’t use white Wray and Nephew here, by the way, you want aged flavors, so sacrifice overproof for aged.  Appleton 12 is amazing here too, the Reserve is great, and the V/X is perfectly sufficient)  The sweetness stays in the background, and I find this much more balanced than the recipe from Ted Haigh’s book (sorry, Ted).

Not complicated, but a classic which deserves to be much more well-known in the bars of the West Coast.

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MxMo: Vieux Caribeño

Sep 21, ’10 1:40 AM

This month’s Mixology Monday theme was fun, especially since I’ve been working with rum recipes lately, learning the history, and focusing especially on agricole.  Lime and rum have been paired flavors for centuries, probably since the rum ration under Admiral Vernon (“Old Grog”) included limes and citrus and was found to ward off scurvy.

Early in my cocktailing days, back in college, friends and I drank an unnamed cocktail from Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, lovingly described as gin, green coconut water, lime, and bitters, served tall in a glass wrapped in wet paper towels to keep it cool in the tropical heat.  The drink was unnamed by Hemingway, and in the late 80′s the resources simply weren’t easy to find to do good historical research.  We added tonic water and simply called it the “Hemingway” and still sip them to this day.

Something like this is made by Mr. Martin Cate down at Smuggler’s Cove, under the name Caribeño, and since I just finished a batch of barrel-aged gin (in a former Tuthilltown rye whiskey barrel), I thought I’d go with the following:

Vieux Caribeño

1.5 oz barrel-aged gin

3 oz young coconut water (fresh is best, some of the asian canned varieties with pulp are fine)

3/4 oz lime juice

1/2 oz cane sugar syrup (for fun, use Lyle’s Golden)

1 dash Angostura

Shake the ingredients and pour over fresh rocks in a collins glass with lime shells.  In the pictured presentation I’ve added a sugar cane stir-stick rolled in powdered lime zest mixed with a small amount of cane sugar.

This works, but my barrel-aged gin is pretty vanilla-forward right now since it’s the first batch through this particular barrel.  The next one I’ll probably cut the straight barrel-aged gin 2:1 with london dry to mellow out the vanillin a bit.  Otherwise tasty!

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Followup on Solid Waste

Sep 16, ’10 12:28 AM

To follow up on my previous comments, I want to note and celebrate the leadership of Bob Myhr (Council District #6, Lopez) on this issue.  Not only is he speaking out about the impact that the $5 gate fee will have on the willingness to recycle, but he is strongly opposed to the “Zero Station” plan and will continue to oppose it.   Bob’s position is that we need 3 transfer stations (which may not be full “tipping floors”) on the three biggest islands for garbage and recycling.  How it gets funded, and how it moves from those facilities to leave the county, are open issues.

I strongly agree and support Bob in this line of reasoning, and I urge other islanders to consider supporting this and demanding a real plan we can consider and, if needed, vote upon.

A friend just wrote and said that I should also note that the unintended consequences of a “zero” or “one” policy need to be thoroughly discussed.  On islands with no transfer station, we will see a rise in illegal roadside dumping, attempts to dump trash and recycling in the dumpsters of local businesses, and so on.  We will see a drastic drop in our recycling.

And regardless of how much San Juan Sanitation increases their service level, we all have the occasional garage clean-out, or old refrigerator, or construction debris to deal with.  Where will this material go when we have no transfer station on our island?

The Council seems to suggest that this material will end up in our pickups, on the ferry, off to some other island or the mainland.  I suspect much of it won’t, and our islands will become thinly veiled dumpsites, but badly policed and uncontrolled dump sites.

Perhaps someone from the Visitor’s Bureau, the real estate profession, and other aspects of the tourism industry ought to weigh in on the issue and explain the importance of a clean, beautiful county to our local economy….

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The Solid Waste Debacle in San Juan County

Sep 15, ’10 11:58 PM

(Sent to the County Council and Island newspapers today)

After reading today’s article in the San Juan Islander entitled “SW budget based on OI Facility Only,” I am compelled to comment.  I will attempt to keep my comments respectful and civil, but the ludicrousness of the options being presented here makes that somewhat difficult.

While I understand that we face difficult budget choices, and apparently are going to pay dearly for our past choices in this policy area, the idea that an island county should live with zero or just one point for solid waste removal is alarming.

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The importance of sugar: Smith and Cross and Lyle

Sep 7, ’10 4:16 AM

Smith and Cross and Lyle

When making cocktails at home, I’ve noticed that a lot of folks don’t pay close attention to the sweetener they’re using.  A good simple syrup, hopefully.  But it turns out that the kind, and form, of the sweetening agent you use matters a great deal.

One of my favorite rums is Smith and Cross Navy Strength Jamaican rum, imported by Haus Alpenz, and constructed of pot still rums in combining the lighter Plummer and heavier Wedderburn styles, it weighs in at 114 proof.  It’s not necessarily easy to mix with given the strength, but one of my favorite ways to use S&C is very simple punch or a variant on Navy Grog.

My usual starting point is a recipe from Cocktail Virgin Slut, a group of folks on the east coast who drink great cocktails, get seriously nerdy about their ingredients, and only write about one thing:  recipes, and how well they worked.  Their Smith and Cross punch is excellent, if a trifle….stiff.  Usually I tend to mellow it by using a bit of Trader Tiki’s superb Orgeat with it, which if you’ll notice essentially means I’m a mint leaf and some proportions away from having a Trader Vic’s Mai Tai made with Smith and Cross.

But I’ve been researching Navy Grog a bit lately, and the tradition of the Royal Navy’s rum ration lately, in preparation for a possible chance to taste Black Tot Rum later this year, so tonight I decided to stick to the basics.

Which means keeping the proportions the same (final recipe below), but perhaps playing with the way it’s sweetened, to match the boldness and burn of the Smith and Cross with a sweetener with enough body.  Molasses came to mind, but that’s too heavy.  I don’t keep Karo syrup in the house, and agave nectar seemed like the wrong flavor profile.  The answer is….Lyle’s Golden Syrup.  You may never have bought it, but I’ll bet you’ve seen the can on the shelf or the newish squeeze bottle in the specialty baking/dessert section of a good market.

Turns out, Lyle’s Golden Syrup is essentially old school pure cane syrup, partially inverted sugars and a rich, caramel flavor without the bitterness of molasses or Lyle’s Black Treacle.  Dear lord, I’m not one for sweet things, don’t put sugar in coffee or iced tea, and prefer salty snacks to sweets any day.  But if I ever slide into a diabetic coma, there will be a pile of Lyle’s tins somewhere nearby.

Historically, many of the rum drinks actually consumed by islanders in the Caribbean were fairly simple punch-like, or grog-like.  Ti’ punch, for example, mixes rhum agricole with a squeeze of lime and cane syrup.   This punch mixes aged Jamaican pot-stil rum with the same, and smoothes the harshness of the rum, allowing it to really express its funky self:

Smith and Cross and Lyle

2 oz Smith and Cross Navy Strength Jamaican rum

1/2 oz lime juice

1/2 oz Lyle’s Golden Syrup

3 dashes Angostura bitters

Construct by squeezing the lime into the shaker tin, then adding the Lyle’s.  It will require a lot of scraping to get the sticky mass into the tin, keep at it.  Then use the lime to thin out the Lyle’s before adding any cold ingredients.  Once cold liquids or ice hit the Lyle’s, it will turn into a sticky and solid mass like hard candy.

Once thin, add the other ingredients, ice, and shake like hell until your fingers stick to the shaker.  Really mix that gooey syrup in there.

Strain over rocks and garnish with lime and shaved nutmeg.

 

Sugar matters because ingredients matter.  If a recipe doesn’t seem quite right, tinker until it is.  Enjoy.

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AT&T and the iPhone 4 Pre-Order Debacle

Jun 16, ’10 10:16 PM

Yesterday, we’re told, the crush of fanatical fanboys pre-ordering iPhones brought AT&T’s servers to their knees.  Apple and AT&T pre-sold 600K iPhones, and we’re told they processed 13 million eligibility requests during the day, as people tried over and over to get through.  Random reports surfaced about how the crushing load “crippled” AT&T’s internal network, and caused security glitches and the exposure of private customer data (again).

We’re supposed to believe that this overwhelming traffic load was unprecedented and brought their systems to a screeching halt.  Well, at least AT&T’s systems — Apple’s systems seemed fine if you weren’t going through the eligibility portion of the check.

Here’s the problem, though — if you run the numbers, and know something about web/database applications, it just doesn’t add up.

13 million database queries sounds like a lot.  But let’s say that all of these queries largely happened in the first 12 hours of the day yesterday, instead of spreading them out over the full 24 hour cycle.  That’s 1.08MM queries per hour, or 300 queries per second, on average.

I don’t know if it sounds like a lot to you, but it’s really not.  Here’s a Google query on “mysql queries per second” just to get a general idea of what people are doing out there.  Many of the results range from 2003 through the present, and folks are doing a LOT more than this.  With clustering and various attempts to scale out, folks are doing 10-20K per second.  Oracle, properly tuned, can do thousands to tens of thousands of transactions (operations that change data, not just read it) per second.

I’m not a database expert, but I’ve worked around and with them for years, and I’ll say that 300 queries per second on average is not something that should cause one of the largest (and oldest, if one considers them the heir of the Bell System) telecom companies in the world to crumple under the load.

But traffic is bursty, not uniformly distributed.  So even if they saw periods with 10-50x greater load than average, we’re still in the ballpark for reasonable performance on a pure database query.  Note that I’m assuming that eligibility is a somewhat simple database query; we gave three items of data which obviously form a compound primary key, and AT&T is supposed to return some information about eligibility for upgrade:  perhaps date, perhaps a few other bits of info.

Let’s be generous and assume that 1K of data per eligibility request is returned (i.e., there’s little concern for efficiency).  That’s still only about 300K bytes per second of query results flowing back to Apple from AT&T, or about 2.4Mbps.  Again, perhaps bursting to 20-100Mbps for very brief periods of time.  In other words, a couple of DS3s or a fast ethernet cross-connect are sufficient to carry the data back and forth.  One imagines this shouldn’t strain AT&T’s internal network too much, despite random claims yesterday.

Of course, maybe the problem here isn’t database performance or bandwidth, but that AT&T did the eligibility checks as API calls through a large enterprise system where a single check builds and then tears down many EJBs or other enterprise objects. This might be closer to the truth for a performance bottleneck here.  Maybe the system was built to handle tens, but not hundreds or thousands, of requests per second.  That’s plausible, but kind of stupid for a large engineering company used to having millions of subscribers and doing business globally.  But I could buy it.

But you’d imagine that they’d have learned something from three previous “major” iPhone releases, and the iPad 3G release, and figured out an easier way to quickly respond to eligibility requests.  After all, my eligibility isn’t a rapidly changing variable — I’m eligible on a certain day, and they know what that day is.  Which means that the eligibility of every iPhone owner on the planet could have been precalculated easily just before the iPhone4 launch, and cached.  It’s not that much data, frankly.  You could have cached a table with the user’s phone number, last 4 SSN, and zip (the keys they ask you to enter) hashed, and a eligibility “price code”, in a few gigs of memory on all the app servers, and just statically responded to queries for the first 24 hours, if you were worried that your enterprise systems wouldn’t handle “first day” load.

Anyhow, these are just ballpark figures, and they could be wildly wrong about the instantaneous loads experienced, etc.  But the general point is, 13MM eligibility checks and 600K preorders isn’t really a lot of load and traffic.  Ask Amazon or eBay what “a lot” of transactions looks like.

Or better yet, AT&T, before the next launch, hire some of their ex-employees to take a look at your databases and systems.  Please.

 

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