welcome friends welcome back to cocktails after dark where I am
exploring different cocktails through the ages and trying to find out which
ones work for me and maybe this will help you find out which ones work for
you now today we're going to do something from 1937 called the amber
dream cocktail and the reason I wanted to do this is because it has chartreuse
in it and chartreuse is one of those liqueurs that I think doesn't get a
whole lot of love or maybe not as much love as possible
a lot of people don't know what it is and so they steer away from it because
they don't know what to do with it I really like chartreuse and so this is a
cocktail made with gin and I've got two different gins here with completely
different flavor profiles so we're going to make a cocktail with each of them and
then kind of see which one works best with this flavor profile there's also
vermouth chartreuse and orange bitters and I'm using orange bitters that are
made locally from kinship Angostura orange bitters perfectly fine if that's
the one that you get where you live so first up is the gin so it calls for one
ounce of dry gin and the first one we're going to use is from Dylan's it's
locally sourced from Niagara and it uses rye as the base spirit next is red
vermouth and again this is from Dylan's locally sourced same amount of
chartreuse a couple dashes of orange bitters
ice in the tin and give it a shake okay take the ice out of the glass and this
gets a double strain into a Nick and Nora now some people have asked in the
comments why you would double strain there are tiny little shards of ice that
end up in this smaller strainer sorry in this smaller strainer that make it
through this strainer the Hawthorne strainer and so you don't want those in
your drink because it'll just water it down as they melt the whole idea of the
shake with the ice is to chill the drink first of course but the second reason is
also to dilute the drink you want a certain amount of dilution or water in
your drink just to balance it out and of course that's going to change for every
person what I think is the perfect amount of dilution may not be perfect
for you and so that's one of the things you need to explore as you work through
cocktails is how much to shake how much ice that you want to melt into your
cocktail so many things to consider so next up is the Ungava gin now the Ungava
gin is a Canadian gin made from botanicals found in the Canadian High
Arctic and so it has this crazy sort of yellow color a lot of people find the
color off-putting I know for the first little while I found it fairly
off-putting but the flavor makes up for it and then we're just going to follow
the exact same recipe so vermouth chartreuse and orange bitters I did
three dashes last time I start in I will give it a shake
okay same as last time we'll get rid of the ice
and double strain into a Nick and Nora glass okay the amber dream cocktail
first published in 1937 I think near as I can tell two versions one with the
Dylan's gin and one with the Ungava gin the Dylan's gin is Rui based very spicy
and the Ungava is I don't know how to explain it it uses a lot of things that
you wouldn't normally find in gin that are found on the northern Tundra a lot
of lab tea very unique flavor and I'm wondering how well it's gonna work with
the chartreuse because the chartreuse has this amazing herbal botanical flavor
right off the bat the Ungava is more of a yellow more of an amber color than the
Dylan's the Dylan's has more of a greeny tinge I don't know if the cameras
picking that up so I don't try the Ungava first definitely a gin cocktail
right off the top you can smell the gin
wonderful wonderful chartreuse really does work exceptionally well with gins
they seem to mesh perfectly that is an incredibly well-balanced cocktail the
botanicals from the Ungava gin are working really well and the botanical
sweetness from the chartreuse chartreuse is quite sweet and it's got this woody
over note that it's just amazing just amazing and this is a great cocktail so
let's try the dillons I'm expecting a different flavor profile I'm expecting
it to be spicier a little bit sharper because of the gin right off the top it
smells different I'm getting more of the orange bitter coming through the from
those orange bitters and not as much of a gin smell and this one the gin is more
pronounced than in this one
yeah definitely a sharper flavor definitely more pronounced in that RINO
t' if you've if you're familiar with rai whiskies you know that spicy note that
comes out in a rye whiskey you really get that in this gin and it cuts through
and you can tell that they're the same cocktail but they are completely
different I think I prefer this one I think the sweetness comes through a
little bit better in this one this is something that I would sip in the
afternoon sitting on a patio and I would really enjoy that this one is a little
bit more challenging but I don't think that's a bad thing I think that I think
that challenge would make me think as I was drinking it and I'm wondering what's
going on in here you definitely lose the sweetness of the chartreuse the woody
flavor of the chartreuse is changed a little bit I think these are both great
cocktails I think then this is one of those things again like many of the
cocktails we've done where you have to try a bunch of different gins figure out
which one works for you I've got five or six gins on the shelf I thought these
two are gonna be the best they are great but who knows what the other ones would
would taste like you could spend entire afternoons just tasting through the same
cocktail with different based spirits and always come up with something a
little bit different but you could tell that there's that flavors there that
they're all part of the same cocktail family so in conclusion I think this is
a great gin cocktail it's one of those cocktails that if you like gin you're
probably going to like this and it's another place where if you've never
tried chartreuse you can try chartreuse and know that
these flavors are going to come together really well if I had to pick a favorite
it would be the Ungava it would be this one I think this one is just that much
more pleasant to me thanks for stopping
by see you again soon
you