Last week, I was lucky enough to participate in and actually win the Western Europe final of this year’s Angostura competition. While I’m still struggling to believe it, I’m also quite forgetful, and that’s why I’m writing this post mainly to remember my recipes.
The competition had two parts: For the first part, participants had to send in their twist of a Queen’s Park Swizzle, tying it to their home country. Extra points were given for sustainability, even though one may wonder how much flying in half a marketing team and five bartenders to talk about all the lime peels that they’re not throwing away is doing for the planet. Anyway, my creatively named recipe follows below:
| Swissle | |
| 40 ml | Angostura 1787 |
| 35 ml | apple verjus |
| 10 ml | 4:1 Champagne reduction |
| 10 ml | apricot eau-de-vie (like Morand’s Cœur d’Abricot) |
| 15 ml | apricot kernel orgeat |
| 15 ml | Angostura chocolate bitters |
The drink is a fruity, light number that revolves around the pairing of the rum and the apricotine; a pairing, in my opinion, if there ever was one. This informed the idea to make an apricot kernel orgeat, which is a fantastic discovery in itself. However, make sure you get the sweet apricot kernels; since the more frequently sold bitter ones are lethal even in small doses. The result is a fruitier orgeat that might even be the solution to the annoyingly hard to get right Japanese Cocktail!
To garnish, I used a traditional Swiss sweet fashioned to look like a peach (or apricot, in my case) kernel, and some mint. For my presentation, I spoke about Switzerland at the end of the century, where its Grand Hotels were all the rage, inspired by an essay from Stefan Zweig.
I also troubled the venue to freeze some mineral water with a medium-high mineralisation for me (in Switzerland, I would’ve used Adelbodener Still). In a drink like this, where the dilution is extreme, I think this actually makes a difference; and also, I appreciated being able to put my water sommelier certificate finally to some use.
Black Box Round
The drink I came up with in the second round I’m almost prouder of than my Swissle: For this round, we were shown three mystery ingredients and given 30 minutes time to develop a drink that used all three ingredients. In our case, those were Angostura 7, an Austrian pine cone liqueur and the new 200-year edition Angostura bitter. The latter is not an aromatic bitter, but instead uses nutmeg and wormwood.
The missing link between those ingredients, so I figured, was pineapple; and since the combination of rum, bitter and pineapple screams Jungle Bird, I knew I was in avian country. A Jungle Bird with ingredients from Trinidad makes a Scarlet Iris (the national bird), but I wanted to have a more laid back stirred drink, which I reasoned thus should be called an Amber Iris.
| Amber Iris | |
| 40 ml | Angostura 7 |
| 30 ml | red vermouth (like Cocchi) |
| 20 ml | Austrian pine cone liqueur (we used Hödl Hof’s Zirberol) |
| 10 ml | pineapple syrup |
| Rinse | Angostura 200-year bitters (or just grate some nutmeg on top) |
I garnished the drink with a little bird fashioned from a lime zest, and served it in a Nick and Nora glass with a single ice cube.
