The Spirits #106: Bourbon & Black
~ Wholesome Fun ~ Stinging Nettles ~ Prime Numbers ~ The Fraud ~ Off to Normandy
~ BLACKBERRYADE ~
300g or so of blackberries
100g sugar
100ml water
One lime
Dash vanilla essence
Fizzy water
1. Find a wasteland and pick the blackberries, which should be at their best right… now. I filled an old plastic pint glass. I say “I”. What I mean is, my team of child labourers filled a plastic pint glass.
2. Rinse the blackberries under fresh water in order to eliminate as many earwigs, flies, caterpillers, etc, as possible.
3. Now place the berries in a saucepan with the water and sugar. Raw cane sugar is best here - or half-half white and brown sugar, which will make for a richer-tasting drink.
4. Apply a gentle heat and mash the blackberries with a potato masher. You want to extract as much juice as possible, while simulataneously dissolving the sugar. Don’t allow the mixture to boil!
5. Once all the sugar is dissolved and the berries crushed, sieve the mixture into a clean jug. Squeeze in a lime (a lemon will be fine) and add a dash of vanilla essence, if you fancy.
6. Now, top up with fizzy water to taste. This should give you enough for about a litre of blackberryade - delicious on its own. But, note: if you intend to use this to mix with. you may want it a touch sweeter than if you want simply to drink it neat. Let’s say:
~ BOURBON & BLACK ~
50ml bourbon
150ml blackberryade
5-10ml sugar syrup, to taste.
Fill a tall glass with ice cubes, add the ingredients and stir well. Garnish with blackberries and maybe mint and serve with a straw.
🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here.
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
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I SPENT a pleasant Sunday gardening last week - not the fiddly, nurturing kind of gardening that involves planting things, but the robust, destructive kind of gardening the involves clearing things. The best kind of gardening, in my opinion! Our backgarden is full of vinous things (a grape, a jasmine, a magnolia, a truly monstrous virginia creeper) and the combination of uninterrupted sun in June and then uninterrupted rain in July has turned all of these into mutants. Everything needed a significant haircut.
Then, behind our garden is a little patch of wasteland that I always intended to turn into a vegetable patch. After a few weeks of neglect, it was a thicket of stinging nettles, brambles and other assorted triffids - and this too needed clearing. I love this sort of work - though you need to be in the mood and have the time and space to do it. Stinging nettles (like hornets) are a satisfying opponent to do battle with; tough, nasty, but ultimately beatable. First, by shearing down the deadly stems. Then, by taking a garden fork to the tough yellow roots and pulling them up like underground cables - occasionally leading you to another thicket of stems which also need destroying.
If you do this half-heartedly you will only encourage more nettles, so this needs to be done with conviction. Thick rubber gloves and long sleeves are required but even then, the nettles find ways of exacting revenge. At one point, I was wrestling with a particulaly stubborn root, thick as a baby’s arm - and then it finally gave way, and I fell backwards onto a pile of cut nettles. My lower back was covered in stings. I swear, that root laughed at me - and then wriggled away.
Satisfying, in the end, though. All the more so as my nine-year-old Teddy and a couple of his friends from down the road were picking blackberries at the time. It felt like a wholesome scene - at least until I learned that they were actually trying to create their own version of a revolting and inexplicably expensive drink called Prime which is marketed by a pair of YouTubers whose names I can’t bring myself to look up. (I don’t actually allow Teddy to watch YouTube unsupervised - much as I would prevent him from swimming next to a raw sewage pipe - but the Prime obsession has somehow crept up on him regardless).
Prime is something I do not understand. There are 500ml bottles of the stuff on sale for £8.50 behind the counter at the shop up the road and I have no idea what differentiates these from the £2.99 bottles at the shop down the road. Part of me suspects that it is not called Prime by accident but that its marketeers read the chapter on “priming” in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which contains some valuable psychological insights into how to push someone to a higher number in any negotiation/guessing game simply by saying an extremely large number at the outset. So, guess how many tree there are in the world. Something like 50 billion, right? Experiments show that you will base your guess around 50 billion - even though this I just made that up. Experiments also show that this works EVEN WHEN the other person is aware you’re doing this. “What’s you day rate?” “A million pounds!” “Ah… haha no seriously.” “£800.” “OK…” So once you have get your head around the idea that Prime is £8.50, well, £2.99 seems fairly reasonable. Even this £2.99 is insanely expensive for 500ml of THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I HAVE EVER TASTED.
Nonethless the Prime craze has its upsides. For one, all of Teddy’s friend seem to be coming to the consensus that Prime is actually pretty gross and not worth their pocket money and actually a bit sad - and so, here is a useful lesson in hype-marketing. Perhaps they will become multimillionaires - like the Beverage King of LA whom I interviewed while living in California. And if not, well, maybe one day they will write their own cocktail newsletters.
So, this is where the blackberryade came from - child labour - and I must say, after an afternoon wrestling with stinging nettles, it really did hit the spot. I think it might just be the best use of wild blackberries, actually, which have gone crazy this year. It just tastes of the summer. And it mixes a treat, too. It tried it with gin and Scotch - perfectly OK - before settling on bourbon, whose easygoing woodsy sweetness I found much the best foil. Nothing tastes better than a cold drink after a hard day’s work.
PLAYLIST.
Another plug for last week’s Celebrity-Themed list. My three-year-old Aubrey is very taken with the BILLIE EILISH song and can now be heard rapping himself to sleep most nights.
WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING
I review Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, which I loved in spite of its flaws (Evening Standard)
I interviewed the comedian Sara Pascoe, a smart cookie, on her new novel as well as IVF, gender and the prominent sexual predator comedian who is apparenly “terrified”. (YOU)
And also, Emma Roberts, cult horror darling and niece of Julia, mostly about books. (C Magazine)
CABINET POSTS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
🌿Green Chartreuse
🍒 Maraschino
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🌷Cynar
🏝️ Falernum
🌵 Mezcal
🐂 Sherry
🧡 Aperol
🍌 Crème de Banane
🐻 Kümmel
I’m off to Normandy on Monday - not far from calvados and also Fécamp, where Bénédictine is produced. I imagine this will make it hard for me to push out another of these next week, but I have lots planned for the week after including a lengthy post on the aforementioned liqueur.