The Spirits #30: The Trinidad Sour

~ Bitters-as-Base ~ Modern Chess Openings ~ Calypso War ~ The Neo-Liberal Gym ~ Enter the Green Fairy ~

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~ THE TRINIDAD SOUR ~

45ml Angostura bitters
30ml orgeat
30ml rye (or bourbon)
20ml lemon juice

Place all of the ingredients in a shaker with plenty of ice. Shake extremely enthusiastically while whistling When Father Papered the Parlour. STOP! Now fine-strain into a cold coupe. No garnish.

Couple of pointers:

1) You haven’t misread. This is a weird (weird) drink but one that tastes a good deal better than it reads.

2) Some egg white wouldn’t go amiss.

3) No orgeat? Try grenadine, ginger cordial, any other interesting sweetener you have lying around, or just basic sugar syrup. Lime for lemon is OK. Just as long as you’re drinking 45ml of Angostura in one go, I’m happy.

WELCOME TO THE COCKTAIL IMAGINARY. Some sweet calypso MUSIC… and breathe.

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You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations for a cabinet here - and this here is the full archive of weekly specials. Do please share the Spirits with anyone who might like it - and feel free to tag me with your creations on Instagram or Twitter. Also scroll to the bottom for what to get in for next week! 👇

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THE Trinidad Sour is a bit like finding a new opening in chess, or discovering that C7 can sometimes be transposed for F#7 in jazz, or learning that Russian has two separate terms for blue: light blue and dark blue. What I mean is, it slightly messes with your categories. The ingredients are in the wrong order. You would expect it to be, ooh, 50ml whiskey, 20ml lemon juice, 15ml orgeat, dash of Angostura. But it isn’t. It contains a shot and a half of bitters. And a whole shot of orgeat too. And it works. Orgeasmically. The Russian blue thing also makes sense when you realise that English has two words for red, true red (red) and light red (pink) and we think of them as separate colours too. Sometimes, the categories can be rearranged.

It was invented by the New York bartender Giuseppe Gonzalez, which is just a great name for a New York bartender, when he was working at Clover Club in 2009. His own inspiration was a drink called the Trinidad Especial, with which the Italian bartender, Valentino Bolognese (great name for an Italian bartender too) had recently won a competition overseas. The Especial also contained an Angostura base, but used pisco and lime. So how come it’s Gonzalez’s drink that became the “classic” and not Bolognese’s? Well, in cocktails, as in music, tech and most other fields, it’s not doing it first that counts so much as doing it in an accessible way and putting it in front of the right people. Gonzalez put a fair amount of work into perfecting his formula, testing it on bartender friends and taking their feedback. And the bartenders of New York c.2009 happened to be an influential bunch. They all went out and started their own bars in other cities too. The Trinidad Sour became a particular cult classic at Drink in Boston and soon captured the imagination further afield. There’s a nice interview with Gonzalez about it here in which he stresses that he never actually put it on any of his own menus.

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Why did such an odd drink catch on? Well, you are curious to try it - correct? You are wondering what it tastes like. Plus it helps that these are ingredients that all good bars (and most good homes) keep. And that it genuinely tastes quite delicious, albeit in a weird sort of way. Spicy. Creamy. Nutty. Christmassy. Also, take a closer look at that Angostura bottle. You will not only learn that Angostura is nice in jellies but that it is 45% alcohol, making it a perfectly respectable base spirit. The sweetness of the orgeat tempers its bitterness, the citrus rounds it out, the extra shot of spirit gives the thing its backbone and it comes out a really odd colour, like something has gone rusty. Careful though - it’s deceptively sweet.

It turns out that the cocktail has an even longer lineage than all that, too. In his Gentleman’s Companion of 1934, the Prohibition-era adventurer Charles H. Baker lists an Angostura Fizz (“Sometimes called the Trinidad Fizz”), which he picked up on his travels in the Caribbean:

“Take one pony of Angostura bitters, add 1tsp sugar or grenadine, the juice of 1/2 lemon or 1 lome, the white of 1 egg and tbsp of thick cream or less. Shake with cracked ice like a cocktiail, turn into a goblet and fill to suit individual taste with club soda… […] Garnish with sticks of fresh pineapple, always.

In their avant-garde pamphlet, Rogue Cocktails (2009), the New Orleans bartenders, Kirk Estopinal and Maksym Pazuniak, simplified this recipe into an Angostura Sour: 45ml Angostura, 30ml sugar syrup, 20ml lemon juice, one egg white. And they provided numerous other recipes for drinks that used inordinate amounts of bitters, including the Gunshop Fizz, which demands 60ml of Peychaud’s bitters tempered lemon, strawberries, cucumber, orange and grapefruit peels, topped up with Sanbitter, an Italian bitter soda. I made it once and it was astoundingly good in a late-00s hipster bartender-y sort of way. If kind of expensive. If bitters were sold in a regular 700ml bottle, they would be £35-£40 - so don’t go crazy, kids.

Still, if you’re in the mood, the Bitters-Sour formula is a fun thing to play with once in a while and the Trinidad is (a bit like the Rum Old Fashioned and the Gin & It) a good “base cocktail” to add other bits and bobs too. The first one I made this week was in the aftermath of last week’s Mai Tai. In a Tiki frame of mind, I lengthened it with 50ml fresh orange juice, 5ml grenadine and a dash of absinthe. It tasted like a Don the Beachcomber drink turned inside out.

No go forth and bring me back a new colour from the rainbow.

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PLAYLIST

I make no apologies for the fact that this week’s playlist is 100% vintage calypso - a much misunderstood musical genre that is (alongside Angostura Bitters, Nicky Minaj, Brian Lara, VS Naipul and Dwight York) one of the great Trinbagonian gifts to the world. Evergreen, too:

People saying it’s conspiracy
I mean, the scandal in the treasury…

— Attila the Hun

PLEASE NOTE! THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. Well, not automatically, I do it by hand, but my point is, follow the list and you will find musical refreshment. If you want to retrive an old list/song, here is an ongoing archive compiling all past songs.

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WHAT I’M READING

Popbitch! (Popbitch)

Houdini’s Picnic! A profile of the Trinidadian calypsonian Wilfmoth Houdini by the great Joseph Mitchell from 1939. (New Yorker)

Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe (Guardian)

I though this piece by Lola Seaton on exercise was excellent! (New Statesman)

Here is a fantastic deconstruction of the Deliveroo model by Jack Shenker centring on Harringay in London, my old neighbourhood - particularly good on how it extracts money from small businesses and communities for its shareholders. (Observer)

And Ferdinand Mount on how Boris Johnson keeps getting away with it (LRB)

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SHOPPING LIST

How do we feel about adding one more bottle to the cabinet? Oh come on, I have been very restrained so far! The bottle is ABSINTHE. Yes, absinthe. OR PASTIS. Pastis is actually just ersatz-absinthe and it’s almost equally good. And here’s the thing. You’re never going to need very much at a time. Think of it like a bottle of bitters. Once in a while you might do something crazy with it. But mostly, we’re going to be using it as seasoning, a dash here and there, so you only need a small bottle. For example, Master of Malt sell La Fée Absinthe in 200ml bottles for £14.95. Get that (I’m not affiliated btw). La Maison Fontaine, La Grande Absente, Pernod (who make absinthe and pastis), Ricard, Henri Bardouin and Tarquin’s Cornish Pastis are all fine choices too. A miniature will do - or you could decant some from a friend’s bottle into a vial you concealed in your handbag when they’re not looking.

Then: gin, absinthe, fresh mint leaves, lime, sugar syrup.

🧚🌿🔮