American Beauty Cocktail

...I'm just way behind on my drinking. No matter, time to hit it, and hit it hard. One drink here, one drink there, and I'll be out of the "A"s.

American Beauty Cocktail:

• 1/2 oz. Orange juice
• 1/2 oz. French (dry) Vermouth
• 1/2 oz. brandy
• 1/2 oz. Grenadine
• 1/4 tsp. Creme de Menthe

Shake well and strain into 3 oz. Cocktail glass. Float port.

There's, to use the parlance of our times, a pant-load going on in this cocktail. Two different wines (very prominent on the nose), brandy (which is distilled from wine), then some orangey-grenadine notes, with just a hint of mint at the finish. Quite sweet, but not unpleasantly so. Everything plays well together, with the mint definitely featuring itself quite prominently, which just goes to show you how potent creme de menthe is. 1/4 tsp. is barely more than a dash, and especially in 3 oz. of other stuff, you'd expect a milder ingredient to get lost.

This also gave me a chance to try out my new grenadine. I made it using a pretty simple process, one I would think would be a "standard" of sorts; basically, I boiled the seeds from a pomegranate for about half an hour, strained them out, took the left over stuff and added twice as much sugar (I think there was about two cups of liquid, so I added four cups of sugar, also at a bit of a boil to get things to dissolve) and bottled it. In all honestly, I should have put in a bit of neutral alcohol (vodka), but the simple act of boiling everything, as well as that proportion of sugar or greater, act as a good enough preservative to keep things shelf-stable. I've got a Rose's bottle filled with stuff out, then another huge bottle in the fridge to refill from.

I'd done the same thing before, but I think this one turned out a bit better; the pomegranate I found was huge, so there's a lot of flavor going on. I didn't even need to add any food coloring to this one, which I did to my previous batch, because there was just a great color right out of the pot.

Anyway, back to the cocktail. It's good. I'm not sure it will make the rotation, but there's a lot of very interesting stuff going on here, and it stays interesting the entire drink through. It's surprising how well everything plays together, given the completely even proportions (which I find rarely works) and the plethora of ingredients, but yeah. Good drink.