AngryAussie's Cocktail Bar

My cocktail book is for adding recipes of the best cocktails I’ve tasted so it sounds more than a little bit vain when I say I’m adding a recipe I created myself. I am notoriously shy. retiring and modest but I can overcome all of that to proudly say I created a cocktail that kicks arse.

I started with the pretty simple idea of “what if an Old Fashioned – but Chartreuse?” You might say that isn’t much of a ground breaking idea – but why would you be like that? That’s quite mean. From that simple start I did a bit of workshopping to refine the recipe. My first big decision was that although I started with Green Chartreuse, I ended up preferring the drink with Yellow Chartreuse. I also went with a split base of whisky and brandy, the same way I like my Sazeracs.

Like a Sazerac, my cocktail is a relatively small deviation from a standard Old Fashioned but it has a distinctly different flavour profile. I honestly thought someone would have published a cocktail with this recipe but I did a bit of searching and nothing came up so I get to claim this as an original. If you’ve seen a cocktail with this recipe let me know.

Actually, keep it to yourself – don’t tell me I’m not a special snowflake.

The closest recipe I found was whisky and Green Chartreuse and it was called a Broadmoor. That cocktail takes its name from the “infamous” British mental institution and I used that as an inspiration when naming my cocktail. I searched the term “infamous Australian mental institution” and the top result was a place that’s not too far away from me – the Ararat Lunatic Asylum which housed the “criminally insane” until 1993.

Of course, that language belongs to a different time and the institution had changed its name to something softer by the end. But in case you think “woke” which is to say, being vaguely decent to people, particularly marginalised people, is something recent, there’s a quote from 1908 on their website attributed to the Inspector General of the Insane – and I want to take a moment to appreciate that truly awesome job title – he said:

“Its continuance as an adjunct to a mental hospital in this, the 20th century, is more barbaric than barbarism.”

It only took another 90 years to shut the place down. These days it’s a tourist attraction and you can take a tour of J Ward, where the most extreme cases were housed. Or just go on their website and have a virtual look around. I thought about calling the cocktail The Ararat but I ended up going with J Ward.

That’s enough of the background, let’s talk about the ingredients. Because it’s named after an Australian landmark, I wanted to feature Australian spirits. I mentioned it’s a whisky/brandy split – for the whisky part I’m using a small batch release from one of my favourite local distillers, Starward. The Brandy is from St Agnes, one of Australia’s oldest distilleries with the original St Agnes distillery being more than 100 years old. Then of course there’s the Yellow Chartreuse providing a nice herbal contrast to the spirits and I’m rounding things out with some Peychaud’s bitters.

In terms of serving it, I was surprised when I saw the recommendation to serve the Broadmoor up given that it’s so close to an old fashioned. Anyone who knows me would guess I’m not going to miss a chance to serve a cocktail over some sexy clear ice so that’s what I’ll be doing. Here’s how we make it:

30ml whisky
30ml brandy
10 ml Yellow Chartreuse
10ml sugar syrup
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

Another favourite cocktail is going in The Book this week, this one built around white rum and sake. This one was a pleasant surprise because going into it, I certainly wasn’t expecting it to become one of my favourites. The reason I tried this cocktail in the first place was a friend had gifted me a bottle of sake and I was searching for ways to use it. I found a few recipes online but this was my favourite, an original creation by Simon Difford on his Difford’s Guide website.

He actually calls this out as perhaps the best cocktail he’s crafted. For someone who has published around 1,000 recipes that’s a pretty big call. You might think the rather unusual name is inspired by the original series of Star Trek because of the amount of times Bones said to Kirk “Damn it, Jim”. It isn’t that and it also has nothing to do with any of the ingredients, it comes from some music he was listening to while trying to come up with a name for his new creation. It’s a largely instrumental track called Another Day from the band The Album Leaf and it ends with one band member exclaiming “Damn it, Jimmy”.

Cocktail names can come from weird places.

To make the cocktail you need to pull together the following: First up is sake, I don’t know anything about sake so I’m trusting my friend knows it’s good. For the rum element I’m using an Australian white rum. The original recipe called for fino sherry but I don’t drink enough sherry to have two dry sherries on hand so I’m using Amontillado. The vermouth I’m using is another Australian product, Regal Rogue’s Daring Dry.

This lineup of ingredients honestly doesn’t look like anything special to me but it comes together really well. The recipe broadly follows the Martini template, incorporating the fortified and aromatised wines. It’s an all booze cocktail so depending on what sake and what rum you choose, it can be quite a strong cocktail, almost certainly over two standard drinks. So if you like boozy cocktails that aren’t too sweet, try this:

In a mixing glass, add:

45ml sake
45ml white rum
7.5ml dry sherry
7.5ml dry vermouth
5 ml sugar syrup

Stir on ice for 20-25 seconds then strain into a chilled Martini glass. The recommended garnish is three green olives stuffed with blue cheese but I don’t like those so obviously I’m not adding them. If that sounds like a good garnish to you, knock yourself out.