The Spirits #145: The Freezer Martini

For when you just need it to be colder

~ THE FREEZER MARTINI ~

540ml vodka
140ml water
To serve
5ml French vermouth (per person)
Olive, lemon

Construct a time machine or leave instructions to your future descendants to send one back for you. Now, set the controls for eight hours ago. Place in your freezer a bottle containing 540 vodka and 140ml water and a few Martini glasses. Return to the present. And now it’s as simple as anything. To serve, take a frozen coupe and rinse it with the French vermouth, rolling the glass so that you’re coating the surface, and then do the same with just a dash of olive brine. Pour in the sub-Arctic Martini straight from the bottle. Garnish with a lemon zest twist and an olive. I don’t see why one needs to choose.

Some Freezer Martini notes:

1) Friends - I have given the above proportions imagining you are hosting a party or at the very least that you want a bottle of this stuff close at hand at all times. Needless to say, if this is too risky, mathematics is your friend. The proportion is four parts spirit to one part water. If you want just the one, simply place 60ml vodka (or gin) and 15ml water in a jar, shake, freeze, and thank yourself (and me) later.

2) That’s correct, vodka. You can do it with gin too. Of course you can! But there’s something I rather like about vodka straight from the freezer. So cold. So clean. So viscose. So fucking to the point. Vodkas I like include Konik’s Tail (Poland), Dima’s (Ukraine) and Chase (UK). The above was made with Run of the Mill vodka from The Spirits Store.

3) When it comes to gin Martinis, I like them fairly vermouthy. Vodka Martinis, however, I feel should be dry and modern with a faint tang of chemistry. Hence the extremely scant rinse of French vermouth (Dolin Dry by preference, refrigerated) plus a dash of olive brine for salinity. I prefer adding these at the drinking stage rather than the bottling stage. My logic here is, a) this allows you to make adjustments for taste/mood when you come to drink it; and b) if the ABV of the cocktail falls below c.28% or so it will turn into an unpleasant slush in the freezer. I’ve had Freezer Martini fails in the past when I’ve made them too wet (often diligently following recipes from reputable sources!). So I find it safer to add the vermouth at the end. And actually, c) there’s something pleasingly alchemical about seeing the vermouth ooze and squirm into the velvetcold (-18°C) vodka.

4) Water is, of course, the unsung hero of the Martini. When you stir a regular Martini over ice, the melting cubes will provide just enough dilution to make the drink palatable. Here, we aren’t bothering with that. We’re using time and technology to cool the drink and actually adding water with a lot more precision. You can make it without the water. That’s what Alessandro Palazzi does with his famous Martini service at Duke’s. You should definitely try that one day. Those things are 120ml. They’re insane. But for day-to-day drinking I think dilution is in order.

5) Other Martini-type drinks will freeze in this manner including our new friend from last week, the Martiki.

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🍸 Visit the SPIRITS STORE. For the month of October you will find 10% off everything. Simply follow THIS LINK and bung the words RICHARD10 into the box when you check out.🍸

🖊️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.
🏥 And here is a list of trusted charities who are helping people in Gaza.
🍒 And here is my favourite poem about maraschino cherries.

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PLAYLIST

I haven’t done one. But here is Brian Wilson singing Surf’s Up at the piano in 1966.

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING

I’ve been in the deadline trenches this week, hopefully you’ll read soon.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Three Substacks you might enjoy.

Luca Turin is one of the world’s foremost experts on scent - and a wickedly funny writer too. His book Perfumes: A Guide is one of the great non-fiction books of the century. You can imagine how delighted I was to discover he is a) on Substack and b) has just got into cocktails. He describes the Last Word as tasting like Romeo Gigli per Uomo (wormwood, rose and citrus). (Luca Turin on Perfume etc)

Almost all newspapers have TV critics, restaurant critics, film critics, etc. Most have podcast critics now - a begrudging acknowledgment that some of their readers now live in the 21st century. But I’ve often wondered why they don’t have internet critics, reporting from the trenches of the terminally online. I mean, podcasts are really just a tiny scintilla of online content if you consider TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X, etc. Isn’t that worth telling us about too? I daresay it’s more consequential than, I don’t know, whether Giles Coren enjoyed his dinner or not. ANYWAY. This is why I love Embedded. Sharp reporting, fun interviews and a critical eye on the way we communicate now. (Embedded)

I am also an admirer of Matt Stoller’s BIG - which is a deeply reported newsletter about monopolies in our winner-takes-all-age. (See also my Google piece last week). Google has indeed been ruled to be an illegal monopoly and it is fighting back. Stoller takes the arguments down rather adeptly: “Their most powerful argument is that we need large firms to build technological supremacy, with the observation that a scientist whose company was bought by Google just won the Nobel Prize. The counterpoint seems stronger; most major technological innovations - from the creation of key forms of gasoline cracking to the transistor to the personal computer to Google itself - happened because enforcers pushed incumbents out of the way through antitrust suits.” (BIG)

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OTHER BOTTLES YOU MIGHT ENJOY

🐿️ Amaretto
🧡 Aperol
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
☕ Coffee Liqueur
🍌 Crème de Banane
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🫐 Crème de Cassis
🌷 Cynar
🌸Elderflower Liqueur
🏝️ Falernum
🦅 Fernet-Branca
🌿 Green Chartreuse
🐻 Kümmel
🍒 Maraschino
🌵 Mezcal
🦙 Pisco
🐂 Sherry
🌻 Suze

Coming soon: STREGA

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SHOPPING LIST: Gin, maraschino, green Chartreuse, lime.