The Cocktail Lab - Part 1

The Cocktail Lab is a mini-series presenting the world of extraordinary, weird cocktails and invites you to try them out yourself. As the name says, one of the needed equipment for these recipes are a shaker and a professional lab. Just kidding. Enjoy.

Marco is a guy who stands behind the bar and talks about his cocktails, like juices from the supermarket. “Nothing crazy”. Even though finding coriander and tomato on a cocktail menu is nothing crazy nowadays, Marcos's menu felt different. His views towards cocktails intrigue and are worth sharing to get a glimpse of today's way of handling cocktails. He started young, mainly because he needed the money. Hustling his way through his studies, Marco began to waiter. And I was terrible at it, he said. I couldn't serve girls because I was too intimidated by them. I hardly knew how to hold a tray. Eventually, his hands became steady, and he went further into the industry, working in all kinds of bars all over Germany, where he’s originally from. The bar life became his life, and after his studies, he moved to Paris to work in a Tiki bar. And what a time that was. He spent nights standing beside friends and serving colourful cocktails that spit fire or make funny faces. Tropical rhum-flavoured cocktails ran the menu there. Every night after work, the team went out, often until morning. One day, beginning to bow under the exhaustion of the night bar life, he took a job at a high-end Japanese restaurant. It was a complete change of scenery, but he could still shake his hands and serve great cocktails without the side effect of partying every night. And that’s where I met Marco for the first time. At the restaurant's bar, pouring wasabi and rhubarb butter drinks while talking to customers. 

I asked him how he came up with such cocktails. But like any barmen I met, the answer was always the same: I don't know; they just happen. This is not a satisfying answer when writing about cocktails and trying to make people understand the beauty of creating cocktails. It is comparable to an artist who sees a flower and decides to draw it, but in this case, he sees anchovies and decides to drink it. Here are my personal favourites from his long list of creative cocktails:

CORIANDER SOUR - TWO WAYS

This cocktail is Marco’s baby; he presents it proudly and tells its story like a fairy tale from far away. The Coriander Sour has been created back in Germany for a guest shift. It originated as a coriander sour with calvados, lemon and an apple cake as garnish. Yes, you heard right. Apple cake as a garnish, because why not? Even though the cocktail was a huge success, Marco felt something was missing. Three years later, while working at the Tiki Bar in Paris, he needed a good cocktail recipe and swung out his old coriander sour. This time, he wanted to do it differently. Since it was a Tiki Bar, there had to be Rum instead of Calvados. He also added pineapple juice for the tropic flair the bar had. But something was still missing. So he added IPA (a more bitter kind of beer). The result was a Tiki Coriander sour with rum, pineapple, coriander, honey and beer. The whole thing was served with a spring roll topped with peanut butter sauce. This really got me. I’ve never considered using a spring roll as a garnish, but here we are.

5cl Calvados

1 cl Pommeau de Normandie

2,5cl Lemon Juice

1 cl Simple Syrup

1 cl Honey

Cilantro

Mix the Calvados with the Cilantro and let it infuse for 24 hours in the fridge.
In a shaker, mix the Calvados, Pommeau, Lemon juice, Honey and Simple Syrup together, shake and strain over ice. Serve in a tumbler and finish with the spring roll. For the revisited version, replace the Pommeau with Rum and add pineapple-, and maracuja juice. Top up with an IPA beer.

Coriander Sour with a springroll as garnish

BLUE CHEESE DIRTY MARTINI

This is for the blue cheese fans. A blue cheese Dirty Martini. An idea came into his mind during an ordinary day, and it stuck in his head until he arrived at his work lab. At first, he fat-washed the gin with blue cheese. The flavour was interesting, but something was missing. He added dry vermouth, sherry for its nutty flavour, sake, crème de poire and Madeira wine. Quite a list of ingredients, but each component was to be further found in the cocktail and indispensable for the flavour experience.  Marco compares all of his cocktails to a playlist. Each song is different and has its character and emotion. That doesn't mean that every song has to be an eight-minute symphony. It's essential to keep it simple to balance out the crazy. It's something you can bob along with and not always an all-day earworm.

3cl Blue Cheese infused Gin

2cl Sake

0,5cl Fino Sherry

0,5cl Creme de Poire

0,5cl Madeira Wine

0,5cl Dry Vermouth

Fatwash the Gin with the blue cheese and freeze for 24 hours. Mix all the ingredients together in a stirring glass, then strain over a cooled Martini glass.

Blue Cheese Dirty Martini (Credits: Ambitious Studio Rick Barrett)

Anchovy Strawberry Martini

As most cocktails, this one was created by pure accident. Like pizza, the best things are not intentional. For one of his cocktails, he uses strawberry oil. Each time, he was left with sad-looking candied strawberries, so he had to come up with a recipe to prevent them from going to waste. He added anchovy oil to the mix out of curiosity, which turned out unexpectedly good. He then fat-washed vodka with the sardine oil and mixed it with strawberries. Working in a Japanese Restaurant at the time, he decided to add Sake and Shochu (a Japanese spirit made out of rice barley). The cocktail turned out incredible.

3 cl Anchovy Fatwashed Vodka

1 cl Natural Sake

1 cl Cacao Butter infused Shochu

1 cl Prunelle Sauvage

1,5 cl Dry Vermouth

3 drops Strawberry Oil

Fatwash the Vodka with anchovy oil and let it infuse in a vacuum bag for 7 hours at 54 degrees and then 24 hours in the freezer. With the same method fatwash the Shochu with the cacao butter in a vacuum bag and let it infuse for 4 hours at 54 degrees then 24 hours in the freezer. Pour the vodka, shochu, prunelle and dry vermouth into a stirring glass, mix, then pour into a cooled martini glass. Top up with three drops of strawberry oil.

Anchovy Strawberry Martini (Credits: Ion Robertson)