Home Bar Staples: Brandy

Let's talk about brandy.

It's one of the major spirits classes. Major. It should be in your regular rotation if you're serious about making cocktails at home. It's essential for the Sidecar, which David Embury rated as one of the six cocktails everyone should be able to make. It's one of the ingredients that made the grade for chapter one of The Cocktail Seminars and figures in 10% of the recipes (and the same percent in Classic Cocktails!), which is slightly less than rye whiskey and slightly more than bourbon. It's the base spirit in the Japanese, which we're fairly sure was an original recipe by Jerry Thomas, author of the very first bartender's guide; and it's half of the split base in the Vieux Carré, one of the most beloved cocktails to return to prominence in the renaissance period.

It is, however, not at the top of the list for a lot of home bartenders. Some of that is due to our collective failure to properly educate the public about the wonders of brandy cocktails – and, in all fairness, to the very effective public education that's been done by some of the other major categories – but I think another issue is price.

I wasn't shy in The Cocktail Seminars about proposing that one might want to spring for a pricey bottle, even for mixing purposes. I got that suggestion from David Wondrich, who is sound on just about everything. It also wasn’t just brandy getting special treatment: I made an analogous suggestion about Irish whiskey and, for that matter, about Chartreuse.*

When compared with ordering brandy cocktails at a bar, you still come out very far ahead financially when mixing at home with an expensive bottle. But that, of course, is only a persuasive argument if you are already inclined to consume brandy cocktails. Nobody wants to drop ninety bucks on an unfamiliar spirit just so they can a. decide whether they like it, and b. proceed to mix it into a series of drinks to see whether they like them.

That's what workhorse-priced spirits are for. My recommendation has historically been that spirits for the home bar are best priced between $30-$40. Even with recent inflation, that's still mostly true. Some categories (rum, vodka) run a little less expensive for the target quality; some run pricier, like mezcal and brandy.

A quick terminology review: “brandy” is the general term for spirits distilled from fermented fruits, although if the fruit is unspecified, it’s understood to refer to grape brandy specifically. That is, a recipe that wants you to use apple brandy will say “apple brandy,” while a recipe that wants you to use grape brandy will say “brandy.” Cognac and Armagnac are grape brandies made in France in the regions with which they share names according to distinctive local processes; these are not the only French brandies, but they are the best-known of the French brandy subcategories. Spain and California are other major brandy-producing regions. Pisco, produced in Chile and Peru, is also a grape brandy, but the vast majority of it is unaged, whereas the European and American expressions are overwhelmingly aged in oak barrels. Cocktail recipes that call for “brandy” are referring to aged brandy; if pisco is desired, the recipe will always say “pisco” rather than “brandy.”

Got all that? Let’s talk Cognac terminology for a minute, then, because Cognacs have historically been very popular in brandy cocktails. They’re generally full-bodied, but they’re also team players, where (for instance) Armangac can be more pugnacious.

Cognacs are classified by age. A VS Cognac is at least two years old, VSOP at least four, and XO at least ten. Age does not necessarily mean quality when comparing across brands – a better-made VS will taste better than a lower-quality VSOP, etc. – but within a given brand, older Cognacs do tend to be more appealing than younger ones.

A decade ago, you could reliably get Courvoisier VSOP for under $40, and it was 100% my go-to recommendation for mixing brandy cocktails at home. It had the right combination of presence and elegance, of phenols and fruits, to serve as the backbone of a brandy cocktail. These days, it’s hard to find even the younger VS expression of Courvoisier at that price point.

I’ve never found a replacement I was as confident about recommending as the Courvoisier VSOP back then.** This has nagged at me. I have a workhorse spirit brand to recommend in every other major category, and often more than one. Why not brandy?

So, I finally decided to answer this question experimentally. I bought four bottles of brandy that I could get for under $30, tasted them side-by-side, and then mixed them all into Brandy Alexanders, which I tasted fresh and again after sitting out for a little while. My findings are below, but first, let me walk through the brands I chose:

Courvoisier VS Cognac
375ml for $19.49
I trust Courvoisier’s products, based on my previous experience with the VSOP, and a full 750 of the VS can still (sometimes) be found for about $40, which is the upper end of my target price range for workhorse spirits. It seemed worth a shot to give it a try.

Courvoisier VSOP Cognac
375ml for $27.49
This was a control group to some extent, because I already know it’s good. But it’s also the case that if you don’t make brandy cocktails terribly often, a 375 of this isn’t too much of an outlay on a price-per-bottle basis, even if the price per ounce compares unfavorably to the rest of these.

St Remy VSOP Brandy
750ml for $12.99
A recommendation from various corners of the internet for a good quality but inexpensive French brandy. It’s not made in the Cognac region and doesn’t get the Cognac name, so it ends up a lot less expensive than similar-quality Cognacs with the same age statements, which it apparently often outperforms in blind tastings. At thirteen bucks a bottle, I figured it was worth finding out!

E & J Brandy XO
750ml for $11.99
When I first started drinking brandy in college, it was E&J, which is one of the cheapest brandies out there. That’s not as much of a red flag as it may sound like. The floor on brandy’s quality is higher than it is for other spirits categories – bring me the cheapest brandy and the cheapest vodka, rum, or whiskey you can find, and I will drink the brandy 100% of the time – and in any event, I have some fond feelings for the E&J brand. I had never even known they had an XO expression before, never mind tried it; I reckoned it was probably their best product, and I should give it a try if only for old times’ sake.

The words:images ratio in this post is 1150:1 – that’s good, right?

Tasting Notes: Straight

Courvoisier VS
A little hot, woodier than it is raisiny – woodier in fact than the VSOP, which makes me suspect that they're aging it in newer barrels.
Burns the tongue a little, even at only 40%.

Courvoisier VSOP
Slightly hotter than I remembered, actually, but it smooths out on the finish. Richer-tasting than its viscosity or sweetness would suggest. Raisiny.
Easily and by far the most interesting and complex finish of the four. Lingers nicely after the swallow. Finishes hotter and raisinier than the VS. Sensation on the tongue is more of a prickle than a burn.

St. Remy VSOP
Reads too hot for me. Left in too much of the heads in distillation; too terpinaceous. Something almost lemony. But, tasting it again after the Courvoisier VS, it's got more interesting flavor going on, at least.

E&J XO
Tastes almost artificial, somehow. Reminds me of fake grape (a whisper of it) and of liqueurs that come in plastic bottles – think cheap triple sec.
It's the least hot of the four, which is bizarre to me. It makes me wonder about sweeteners and additives; they're all the same damn proof.

Tasting Notes: Brandy Alexander, freshly made

As a reminder, the Brandy Alexander (as I make it, at least) consists of 1 oz. brandy, 1 oz. crème de cacao, and 1½ oz. light cream or half-and-half, shaken with ice and strained into a cocktail glass, with a sprinkle of grated nutmeg on top. All four of these were made the same way.

Courvoisier VS
A damn fine Brandy Alexander; no surprises here, good or bad. Not that far off the mark of the VSOP.

Courvoisier VSOP
Still my gold standard of what this drink should taste like. Well balanced and harmonized; more than the sum of its parts.

St. Remy VSOP
Initial thoughts: Actually pretty good! No issues with that lemony quality I noticed in the straight tasting, which surprises me a bit; I was expecting a very obvious clash between that and the chocolate and cream.
Further thoughts after tasting the other three: This makes a phenomenal Brandy Alexander. It lacks the raisininess of the Courvoisiers – not a bad thing here.

E&J XO
That fake taste punches through. Distinguishable from the others, and not in a good way.

Tasting Notes: Brandy Alexander, after sitting out for a while

Courvoisier VSOP
“That's perfect.”

Courvoisier VS
A little rougher around the edges than the VSOP.

St Remy VSOP
Ditto, but also, “This is a really [expletive]ing stellar Brandy Alexander. I could drink ten of these.”

E&J XO
That artificial note is still there! It tastes like something they would add to dried fruit to keep it tasting “fresh” longer. Don't like it.***

Overall, the Courvoisier VSOP is still *exactly* what I want a Brandy Alexander to be, tastewise, even after half an hour or so. The VS and the St. Remy are also both rock solid, they're just not quite as on point as the VSOP. Still, if you handed me any of these without the other two to try side-by-side, I'm not sure I could tell you which one was which. If anything, the St. Remy version gained on the others the longer I let them sit.

As for the E&J XO: Look, I still don't like it. But if I were served it in a Brandy Alexander at a party, I wouldn't taste it and go, “oh, they used a cheap brandy in this.” I might be able to call out the E&J by taste now, having gone through this exercise, but two days ago I couldn't have done that. I do think I would have switched to a different cocktail for my next round if one were available, but I would have finished the E&J drink (I did this time!), and I wouldn't have refused a second if that was all there was. And it wouldn't have been obvious to me that the unpalatable thing in the mixture was the brandy as opposed to one of the other ingredients.

All this is to say, if you’re just dipping your toe into the waters of mixing brandy cocktails at home, the $20 Courvoisier VS and the $13 St. Remy VSOP both seem like pretty damn good choices. The Courvoisier VSOP is better – and it’s leagues better if you’re drinking it straight – but is it worth the money for the brandy cocktail neophyte? No, probably not. It isn’t four times better than the St. Remy VSOP, even though it’s four times the price; for that matter, the Courvoisier VS isn’t three times better than the St. Remy, despite being thrice as expensive.

If I had to make a call right now, I’d say that Courvoisier VSOP is perfect for someone like me, who loves brandy cocktails, nevertheless isn’t going through the bottle all that quickly (and so can get by with a 375), and can maybe distinguish the VSOP from the VS on a good day. But for everybody else, including me on most days, the Courvoisier VS and the St. Remy VSOP are perfectly solid brandies for mixing cocktails at home, and the St. Remy is easily the best value for the money.

What I would want to do next is taste St. Remy against Courvoisier in a more brandy-forward cocktail, and see if the difference is still so slight. The Sidecar would be the obvious choice, maybe the Champs-Elysees. I am basically certain that a Japanese or a Brandy Flip would be comparably delicious with either – both of those shake the brandy with rich, viscous ingredients with lots of deep phenolic flavors, just like the Brandy Alexander does, and what worked here should work just as well there. Stay tuned for another side-by-side comparison in Part 2!

*My recommendations ran north of $60 a bottle in both of those cases at the time, and recently Chartreuse has gotten much more expensive.

** In my own bar, I’ve most recently used Gensac, which is enjoyable and appropriately priced; but I think it’s only available in Massachusetts, and even here I’ve only ever seen it at one store.

***I was making a big batch of egg nog at approximately the same time that I was doing these side-by-side tests, and I disliked this note so strongly, in fact, that I decided not to mix any of it into the egg nog, not even to use it up. I didn’t want that note anywhere near it.

Something Something "From the Ashes"

I recently discovered the below post, in more-or-less complete form, sitting in my drafts. I had written it in February 2020, and was polishing it when the world went sideways.

Obviously, things have changed a great deal since last year, in the world as a whole and also in the narrow corner of it reflected in this website. The spirits consulting business I mentioned was sidelined by the pandemic; on the other hand, I’ve gotten to write two more books, and developed an online cocktail course that is my closest approximation yet to the kind of experience I’ve been trying to offer since 2012.

I’ve also been much better about posting here than I had been in 2018 and 2019. I haven’t developed the formalized blog series I was mulling in 2020, but I’ve effectively covered the “Back to Basics” one with my posts on recipes for Classic Cocktails, and covered a good chunk of the material for “Workhorse Spirits” along the way. The other ideas you’ll see below are still in my mind, and I think I may just have to pursue them now - reviving this particular post essentially makes it the first in the “From the Archives” series, although whether that’s ironic or apt I’m not quite sure.

I’ve mostly chosen to share the below as a sort of time capsule from just before the pandemic. There is an optimism to it that made so much sense at the time, and that rings strange in retrospect, knowing what was right around the corner. But, with more and more people getting vaccinated, perhaps it’s beginning to be warranted once again. Enjoy.

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Let’s try this again.

I knew it had been a long time since last I posted an update. I was aware, in the back of my mind, that it had in fact been far too long, some might even say unconscionably long, since the last time I both started and finished recording a thought on this site.

But I had no idea it had been two years.

So much has happened in that time! I made it to the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel (of eponymous cocktail book fame), and there tasted the finest expressions I’ve ever had of not one but two different classic cocktails. I met one of the authors of the cocktail guide that has had the greatest impact upon my life, bar none, and got him to sign the weathered copy I’d been carting around for seven years. I attended the best spirits history panel I’ve ever seen, as well as a seminar on brand ambassadorship that has genuinely changed the trajectory of my professional life.

My foray into craft spirits distribution turned into three years of growth, exploration, and creative pathfinding throughout Massachusetts. And just since the start of this year, I’ve moved on from that sales role to start my own spirits consulting business.

All of which finally came to a head, persuaded me that the time had come to resume posting to this site in earnest (like my friend Randy over at Summit Sips, who’s also recently reawakened from a lengthy slumber), and having come here to write it, I find:

Two. Years.

I know better than to promise that updates are about to become frequent, per se, but I think I can confidently manage to post more than once every 730 days. Y’know, for a little while, at least.

That’s in no small part because I have a lot bottled up to share, including a lot of previously-begun material that’s already nearly ready for prime time.

So, here’s a preview of what I’d like to put on this site now that the Roaring ‘20s have finally returned. Keep an eye out for the following tags:

• Back to Basics - A series focusing on true classics done well, with history and commentary as applicable. This is my bread and butter, but it’s not represented proportionally on this website; I’m going to fix that. (Also the name of one of the remarkably few complete digital albums I own.)

• From the Archives - If every draft post I have at 70-80% readiness had been published on the day it got there, you would never have noticed a gap in the updates to this blog. Often apropos of nothing, I’m going to begin pulling those updates (plus some other, even older ones!) and posting them more or less as they are, filling in only any obvious gaps in the material.

• Workhorse Spirits - Long promised and little delivered, except in the form of a quick guide with precious little detail. But I have three of them locked and loaded in the aforementioned Archives and more in the pipeline.

• History of Boston Cocktails - Likewise teased in the past, but never fully fleshed out. The distance between here and there is the greatest for this series, but I have a lengthy list going back to 1840 and quite a lot of material to work with.

And to kick things off, a recipe that’s both thematically appropriate and one of the two fabulous above-mentioned drinks I had at the Savoy:

Corpse Reviver №1
2 oz. Cognac
1 oz. Apple Brandy
1 oz. Sweet Vermouth
Stir. Strain into a chilled coupe glass. Do not garnish.

Both grape and apple brandy are criminally underrated these days (the latter even more so) - sure, cocktail bars will stock them, but they’re not stalwarts on the menus in the way that gin, whiskey, and even mezcal are these days. And that’s at the places that know what they’re doing! The country is still full of establishments that have missed the memo on the last thirty years. In such places, you can often get a recognizable Martini or Old Fashioned, but God help you if you’re hoping for a halfway decent brandy drink. Unless you’re in Wisconsin, in which case you can drink the signature local Old Fashioned variant to your heart’s content.

In that respect, it’s perhaps fitting that the Corpse Reviver №1 languishes in the shadow of the Corpse Reviver №2, but it’s also dreadfully unfortunate, because this is a lovely drink. The recipe I’ve given follows Harry Craddock’s original from the Savoy Cocktail Book, which I’d say is just about perfect. Some people will prefer a lower proportion of vermouth; others will follow Trader Vic and garnish with a lemon twist. Both are perfectly fine variants, but as a lover of old things and brandies - including the very brandy with which vermouth is fortified - I’m content with the original.

How this particular concoction came to be called a ‘corpse reviver’ has been lost to time. Craddock was the one who established the current numbering scheme, and he famously accompanied this one with the instruction, “To be taken before 11AM, or whenever steam or energy is needed.” But while the №2, with its light color and bright, citrussy flavor, seems like a perfectly plausible brunch cocktail, the №1 is unlikely to revive any corpses until about suppertime.

Improved Quaker's Cocktail

I spent a lot of time with the Savoy Cocktail Book when working on recipes for Classic Cocktails. Playing around with the old books is particularly fun when a recipe catches your eye and makes you say, ‘wait, why haven’t I had that before?” This was the case with the Quaker’s Cocktail, an oddly-monikered concoction recorded thus by Harry Craddock:

Quaker’s Cocktail (Savoy)
1/3 Brandy
1/3 Rum
1/6 Lemon Juice
1/6 Raspberry Syrup

I’d never heard of it before, so I didn’t think I could justify including it as a ‘classic’ for the purposes of the book, but something about it struck me. It seemed like it would be good, or could be good. I marked the page for future reference, but I kept thinking about it. Weeks later, once I could begin making non-book cocktails again, I decided to take it for a spin.

Note that Harry Craddock’s measurements are fractions of the overall drink. 3 oz. is a pretty standard size for a cocktail, so you could read the above as:

Quaker’s Cocktail (U.S. Customary Units)
1 oz. Brandy
1 oz. Rum
½ oz. Lemon Juice
½ oz. Raspberry Syrup

Craddock recommends shaking, and I agree. I also feel very confident that this is a drink for an aged rum, not a white one.* I have a bottle of bourbon-barrel aged Granite Coast Rum from New Hampshire which has been my go-to during the lockdown (I had two bottles of it when this started). The Gensac Cognac I’ve been using lately joined it, along with fresh lemon juice and some of that oh-so-tasty homemade raspberry syrup I wrote about a while back.

It…wasn’t quite there. I mean, it was tasty, sure, but something was missing. The pieces didn’t harmonize the way I felt they should.

On the one hand, this meant my original question was answered: I’d never had this drink before because it was merely OK. But on the other hand, I was certain there was a really delicious drink in there somewhere. I just had to find it.

I’ll be honest, my memory of my process is a little shaky at this point. But I know that I took inspiration from Chad Arnholt’s Ward Eight recipe, which is my oft-recommended personal favorite.† To really make the raspberry pop, I dialed it up by a quarter of an ounce. And to bridge the gap between the bright, assertive sour of the fresh lemon juice and the rest of the ingredients, I worked in a bit of orange, and mixed a drink that looked something like this:

Quaker’s Cocktail Variation (Pseudo-Arnholt)
1 oz. Cognac
3/4 oz. Aged Rum
3/4 oz. Raspberry Syrup
1/2 oz. Lemon Juice
1/4 oz. Orange Juice

Shake, strain, serve up.

A couple of things to note here. First of all, people like to hate on orange juice as a cocktail ingredient these days. It’s not as sour as other citrus, it’s not as sweet as other ingredients, the flavor isn’t assertive enough so you have to use too much of it and water down the drink - yadda yadda whatever.

As has been noted by some very intelligent people, oranges today may not taste like they did early in the 20th century, when the Ward Eight and the Blood and Sand were gaining steam. It may be the case that our forebears had access to more cocktail-amenable citrus than we do. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work with what we do have, and fresh orange juice is still a wonderfully fragrant and tasty ingredient. Like any tool, you just have to understand the purpose to which it’s best suited.

In several drinks, the Arnholt Ward Eight among them, orange is a way of adding a little citrus brightness and acidity to a drink that would be overpowered by lemon or lime juice or the oil from a citrus-peel garnish. It’s a subtle addition. If lemon, syrups, and spirits are the building blocks of a drink, orange is the mortar that fills the gaps and makes the recipe work. It isn’t most of what you’ll see; if it’s well done, you may not even notice it’s there. But the role it plays is essential.

Put another way, orange juice doesn’t really work like a juice in mixed drinks. You use it the way you’d use other tricky ingredients, like maraschino, crème de violette, and kirschwasser: a quarter of an ounce at a time, unless you have a very good reason for a heavier pour.

This reasoning led me to this slight interpolation of the Ward Eight, which I doctored further as I went. Craddock was right that the brandy and rum should be equal partners in this, and I rapidly added an extra 1/4 oz of rum to balance it out; that also brought the overall ethanol more into line with the Arnholt Ward Eight, which is designed for a 100º whiskey.

It still needed a finishing touch, so as I often do in that situation, I added a dash of Peychaud’s. That’s when it really started to sing. I made a fresh batch incorporating those adjustments and confirmed its deliciousness:

Improved Quaker’s Cocktail
1 oz. Cognac
1 oz. Aged Rum
3/4 oz. Raspberry Syrup
1/2 oz. Fresh Lemon Juice
1/4 oz. Fresh Orange Juice
2 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters

Shake. Double strain into a chilled coupe.

This is the drink I was looking for when I first spotted the Quaker’s Cocktail in the Savoy. I knew it was in there somewhere.

I do think the final recipe is different enough that it should have a different name. The ingredients and 2:1:1 proportions were broadly agreed upon for the first couple of decades after it appeared in print, including by both of the Two Great Harries of Prohibition (Craddock and MacElhone). Or so I learn from the only serious treatment of the drink’s history I’ve yet found, written in German by Armin Zimmermann of Bar Vademecum and gamely translated by Google.

Armin’s article also reprints a few dozen recipes for the Quaker’s Cocktail, from books going back to 1923. Orange does show up twice, including in a 1948 recipe from Trader Vic, although in both of its appearances it’s replacing the lemon juice rather than supplementing it. I could probably get away with saying I was splitting the difference with my version and stick to the ‘Quaker’ moniker, but not one single recipe in the entire list uses bitters of any kind.

So, the question now is what to call the new one. Please feel free to comment or email me with your opinions! In the meantime, here’s my shortlist:

• Fighting Quaker - A nickname of Nathanael Greene, a Revolutionary War general from Rhode Island who was also dubbed the Savior of the South for his successes in that theater of the war. Nods at the drink’s heritage, the geographic origins of the added ingredients, and my strong affection for New England. Also feels more like the name of a cocktail than “Quaker’s Cocktail” does. I’d say this is the leading candidate right now.

• Canaveral - Did you know Richard Nixon was a Quaker? And although it was Kennedy who promised we’d get to the moon by the end of the decade, Nixon was president when we actually got there. It’s a deeper cut, but I got here by saying, “Hmm. Oranges. Florida. What’s the strongest connection I can make between Quakers and that?” And like ‘Fighting Quaker,’ it’s really not a bad name for a drink.

• Society of Friends - Too on the nose? Perhaps. It’s a version of the term Quakers use for themselves, and I like that it’s also a direct quote from George Pierson’s line about Yale. But there’s still something strange about naming a drink after a booze-skeptical religious group, particularly now that Prohibition is over. (“Fighting Quaker” does this too, but it highlights the irony and doubles down on it, which I think makes much more sense.)

Notes
(*) Erik Ellestad of Savoy Stomp went the other way on both, but he found the result underwhelming.

(†) For a refresher:

Ward Eight
1 3/4 oz. 100º Rye
3/4 oz. Grenadine
1/2 oz. Lemon Juice
1/4 oz. Orange Juice

Shake, strain, serve up.

Eagle-eyed readers may note that I also drew on this structure for the Applejack Rabbit recipe published in the last post. Arnholt hit this one out of the park.

Kona Breeze

Kona Breeze

Base - Light rum, guava juice, cranberry juice
Float - Dark rum and brandy.

First post to the new blog: first cocktail from the trip to Hawaii. The Kona Breeze is a specialty of the Sea House restaurant on Maui. Of the many cocktails that go by that name, this is by far the finest. It’s seen here in front of the most wisely-designed back bar on earth.

We don’t know the proper proportions - that’s a trade secret - but we’d guess they used a 2:1 ratio of rum to brandy in the float, and about a 3:2 ratio of guava to cranberry. That should be enough to get you started.

This’ll be our primary publication vehicle going forward, but all posts here should show up automatically on facebook. Cheers!