The Spirits #150: Scotch and Coconut
BLACK FRIDAY SPECIAL: My friends over at Socially Spirited are offering 20% off their delicious Negroni bundle with free postage. That’s enough Umbrella gin, Caelestiale Italian vermouth and Pic-Amar bitters to make no fewer than 28 Negronis for the princely sum of £64.76. It’s available until midnight Saturday. It’s a great deal. So for goodness sake hurry!
~ SCOTCH & COCONUT ~
50ml Scotch
100ml coconut water
Combine the eponymous duo in a becoming drinking vessel (a coconut shell is excellent, a glass is fine). Freeze for five to ten minutes. Garnish with an orange zest twist and sip at a leisurely pace.
Some notes:
1) Scotch & Coconut is a classic combination found across the Caribbean - notably Puerto Rico. Rum & Coconut may seem the more obvious combination but actually it’s not nearly as good. Rum can be just as elegant as Scotch of course but it seems to demand sugar, spice, acidity, other elements. Whereas the subtle creamy-dry nuttiness of coconut somehow works perfectly as a foil for Scotch. It’s usually served DIY in the Caribbean, as in, here’s a little flask of liquor, here’s a fresh coconut, use them as you see fit. So by all means find your preferred ratio. 1:1 isn’t a bad place to start. But I would suggest, for once, that you try without ice. Water breaks the spell somehow. So I simply flash-cooled the above in the freezer.
2) Any Scotch. I used Ardbeg Spectacular Limited Edition which is quite expensive (as presumably is the person who writes their copy… “lavender, vetiver, incense… almond… creosote, tar… mint chocolate… pear crumble”). And yet adding coconut did not feel disrespectful; in fact it softened those creosote crumble notes rather beautifully adding just a touch of salinity which always works well with Scotch. But you needn’t use something fancy. The combination also works marvellously with Teachers, J&B, Famous Grouse, Cutty Sark etc.
3) Coconut water wise, I used Vita-Coco which I found in my local Stop ‘N Shop, £1 for a small 250ml carton, not so bad really, as mixers go. Of course if you happen to be on a tropical island surrounded by fresh coconuts, that’s going to be better. Coconut water is also a good vermouth understudy should you find yourself making Martinis in such a place - see my recent Martiki post.
4) Naturally, there are many bartenders who have fooled around with this combination. Here are a few riffs - including one with mezcal, which echoes the smoke of Scotch.
🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
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🍒 And here is my favourite poem about maraschino cherries.
ON THE FUTURE OF NEWS
I gave a lecture to some journalism undergraduates at Bath Spa University this week. “They’re first years, so you’ll be the first actual journalist they’ll meet,” counselled the fellow who ran the course. It was I who was intimidated. Six or seven weeks into their degrees, they had already received more applied journalism training than I ever have. “Just talk about your career, how things have changed, how things are in the real world...”
Never having done this sort of thing before, I was initially flummoxed at how to do this in a way that might make sense to them. As if I live in the real world! I thought back to my first job - researcher on the Evening Standard features desk in 2003. In those days, oh TikTok youth, researching didn’t mean using the internet - barely at all. It meant climbing to the fifth floor of Northcliffe House in Kensington and using the Associated Newspapers cuttings library, which the Standard shared with the Daily Mail. Say you were researching “Leonard Cohen” or “The AK-47” or “Puddings” you’d slip the librarian the info and they would disappear muttering and return a few minutes later with some envelopes stuffed with items about Cohen/AK’s/ puddings, snipped from actual newspapers with real brass scissors. The cuttings sometimes dated back to the 1950s. Some were from obsolete newspapers. They would be framed with vintage adverts for Dubonnet and on the reverse, columnists fretting about Prussian militarism or the Irish question.
I loved the serendipity of that place. Spent a lot of time there in that first year or two. Google, you will notice, only provides results as far back as the birth of the internet, i.e. 1995 or so if you’re lucky. Even the rudimentary electronic library we used on our old “intranet” strikes me now as an incredibly rich resource in comparison. I’m not especially nostalgic for the past, I should say. There were truly terrible people in charge in the old days too. But I do like to collect these instances of the inefficient past being actually much more efficient than the present. Like there were once 13 separate physical editions of the Evening Standard each day… and five posts in central London so you could communicate at the pace of WhatsApps but with paper and ink … and you know, dance music used to involve whole orchestras of highly trained professionals as opposed to one person with a laptop.
So anyway, I was mindful of coming over like some Ancient Mariner, sharing my obsolete reminiscences about these obsolete things: “Hey kids, ever considered an exciting future as a postillion?” In the 20 years I’ve been a journalist, just about everything about the media has been disrupted, including the things that did the initial disrupting: Facebook and Twitter, Buzzfeed and Vice, etc. Google has not stayed the same either. There was a spell when it seemingly made search so efficient, nothing else was required. The Associated cuttings library was retired to a museum in Zone 6 circa 2006 and I’m pretty sure the electronic one ceased to be not longer after. The Evening Standard of course also no longer exists.
And yet meanwhile Google itself has also declined significantly as a search tool. I can rarely find what I want anymore; the more reliable stuff is now behind paywalls; and Google’s AI tools seems intent on keeping you in the hotel lobby, summarising the information for you while keeping roped-off all the corridors where once you used to roam . It’s one reason why so many articles now feel the same. Drawing from the same sources, optimised for the same algorithms - but missing the happenstance of an Evening News editorial from 1973.
But from all this, I drew a couple of hopefully useful conclusions. The first is that anyone entering the media can be fairly confident that nothing will remain the same, not the publications, not the platforms, not the politics, not the technology, probably not TikTok or Substack either - so don’t get too attached! (In fact the more recent an innovation, the less likely it is to endure; see the Lindy effect).
The second is that Google basically won. That’s where all the money from journalism went and maybe where more journalists need to focus their scrutiny. Though that tide may also be beginning to turn. So, all to play for, really.
But the third is that amid all this turmoil - the goal remains the same. Seek out the truth, where it hides. Tell people stuff they don’t know and maybe ought to know. It’s more important than ever to find the stuff that no AI summary is going to give you, that isn’t going to trend, that isn’t making passive income for someone. The added bonus is - it’s more fun to do it that way.
PLAYLIST
Still in New Orleans.
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.
WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING
Listen to me getting all self-important about journalism when my main contribution this week has been… a piece about how great Gin & Tonic is… “the most magical combination since egg and bacon, possibly egg and sperm”. (The Times)
I also uncovered, in my fit of nostalgia, this extremely old piece I wrote about the day I auditioned to play George Harrison in a West End Beatles musical which I had blocked out owing to PTSD. (The Evening Standard)
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
Samantha Harvey’s miraculous Booker-winning novel, Orbital, which is set over 24 hours on the International Space Station as it completes 16 orbits of Earth. It’s a wonderful book that quite literally shifts your perspective on everything. But it also contains this amazing drive-by description of the futility of sport fandom which I haven’t been able to get out of my head. The British astronaut Nell is assessing the American astronaut Shaun’s disappointment at missing out on the much more important mission to the moon.
“Nell thinks she know it, that look, a look men get watching sports, football, say, in support of a team that affirms them by winning and then straight away negates them, because the glory belongs to the team, not the man sitting on the sofa who will never, now, be ona team like that.“
Worth holding in reserve for the next North London Derby loss.
SHOPPING LIST: Light rum, orange liqueur, limes and lemons.
Sitting by the fire sipping this as 2:1 Coconut water:13yo Single Cask Caol Ila
A v pleasant surprise - takes the edge off the cask strength spirit and there is something about the coconut-smoothed edges of the peat that I would never have thought to try - you are right too ice/water would spoil it
This is so off the wall I just have to try it. I don’t even drink Scotch that often.