First forrays into cocktails with POM

As I mentioned a while back, Daisy enjoys a cocktail every now and again and this has led to me enjoying them too. Taking my usual make interests into obsessive pursuits path I bought a pile of equipment and boozes as well as books to start experimenting at home. So when a PR rep from POM asked me if I'd like to try out some of their new cocktail recipes with some free juice I thought sure, why not.

POM is fairly pricey at ~£3.50 for a litre, but that's in line with other high end juices, and if you've ever tried to juice a pomegranate you'll know you need a lot of them for any useful amount of juice. Its 100% juice with no additives; so better than those diluted sugary juice drinks out there.

Without teaching people to suck eggs, a common cocktail ingredient Grenadine (Pomegranate syrup) can actually be made from pomegranate juice. It tastes better than most store bought stuff because it turns out those are often made of other red fruits, often raspberry! The syrup can be made as a simple 1:1 (by weight) mixture. The POM site recommends heating, but it'll dissolve at room temperature if you're patient.

I flicked through the recipes on www.pomcocktails.co.uk and decided to try one using just the juice and another cocktail utilising POM grenadine syrup.

POM island iced tea is a riff on the boozy long island iced tea. The spicy fruit flavours of pomegranate working well with both the herbal cola and the rich molasses flavours in dark rum.

I used Smirnoff vanilla vodka as it works well with coke, Hendricks Gin as its what I had to hand, Cointreau (which is basically a branded triple sec) and an own brand dark rum.

POM island iced tea

Very easy to follow the directions and no specialist equipment required. It makes a change to the regular iced tea which can sometimes be overly carbonated and cloying. There's also a mango version, but I couldn't get that variety of juice in Northern Ireland!

Purple Lady

The other recipe I decided to try was the Purple Lady. I must have been feeling brave as I usually avoid cocktails with egg white in! If you're worried about it there's no issue as long as you are using fresh eggs and shake well! As for the yolk, you can make a richer omelette/ scrambled egg or push the boat out and make crème brulee whilst you're in a making stuff and doing things mood.

A word of warning, the recipe doesn't go into as much detail as the video, which is well worth a watch if you're not sure about what order to use the ingredients in and mentions the all important "dry shake" which the written instructions omit. Beware the difference in measures between the video and the website, I followed the website but either should work, just don't mix and match!

I've also been given some extra coupons for a competition. So if one of you lucky readers fancies trying proper pomegranate juice and have a bash at home made grenadine or any of the other  recipes on the website, leave a comment below with why you should get the vouchers and what you would use the POM for and I'll pick my favourite on July 15th. There's also a competition on the webpage to win a home cocktail set.

Thanks to Esther at Escapade PR for sending the coupons and choosing my blog to help put the word out about POM.

Botany

Ugly Betty

Although primarily a whisky distillery, its not the only trick the Bruichladdich team have up their sleeve. The beauty pictured to the left is a gin still, which to date has been used to produce a single batch. Its a great additional revenue stream to pay for the whisky in the stores which will typically take 12 years or more until maturity.

After installation the still was charged with a tonne of juniper berries and various other botanicals (see below). Aside from a half-hour of foreshots the still kicked out a good 15 hours of spirit, which has given the distillery a good cash injection for refurbishment and experimentation.

The spirit safe

The spirit run is controlled via a spirit safe in the same way as whisky. As you can  tell from its sheen, this one is brand spanking new, whereas "Ugly Betty" was rescued from Innerleven distillery, alreadya venerable 50 years old. The team love her, despite her slowness.

The botanicals "basket"

The bulge on the lyne arm is where the botanicals sit, infusing the refluxing spirit with those volatile flavour compounds. Most mass-market gins only contain 4-10 botanicals whereas "The Botanist" contains a fantastic 31, 22 of which have been gathered from the wild on Islay!

They include: Elderflower, apple mint, wood sage, bog myrtle, sweet cicely, creeping thistle, peppermint leaf, heather flowers, meadowsweet, water mint, tansy, hawthorn flower, lemon balm, mugwort, thyme, gorse, white clover, red clover, birch leaf, sweet chamomile and lady's bedstraw. To maintain a tenuous link to beer, many of these were used in the past as gruit to flavour unhopped ales; so to revive their use in gin is to reconnect to the past of the island.

Gin!

But enough about how its made, the big question is how it tastes, no? Its all very well using all of these fantastic flavourings but does it make any difference? In a word - yes! I'd always been averse to gin suggesting it ruined the taste of tonic water. It would appear I'm averse to crap gin, and this is far from crap! A small measure in the distillery shop led me to purchase a whole bottle. I decided to go for that classic of cocktails - the martini a.k.a the botini, which i've attempted to write about below (you can tell the world of gin is new to me!)

It pours clear with no discernible colour and has an enticing freshly squeezed oranges and lemons aroma with a touch of coconut and juniper in the background. In goes the vermouth and a touch of lime zest and that coconut jumps out stronger alongside mint and other herbal smells, a veritable apothecary! The gin climbs the sides of the glass and eddies around the lime. Its extraordinarily smooth drinking, sweet and buttery up front, with a good citrus burst, warming the throat on the swallow with a pithy but sweet finish. A lovely drop.

I'm also tempted by the "skelped boti" which includes chambord and fresh ginger juice, but will save that to try another day. Here's what the Bruichladdich team think of the gin.

So thank you to the Bruichladdich team for opening my eyes to a whole new spirit! Look out for it in the shops and on the bars as i recommend trying it.