Jallumustikkatini

Jallumustikkatini

As the fourth update of the week, I present you with a good Finnish take with Jaloviina. I give you the Jalomustikkatini. I know, it's a crappy name but that's the best I could come up with in such a short notice!

Basically, what I wanted to do was to use jaloviina and make a cocktail that has a true Finnish twist to it. So when you add blueberries, can you go wrong? This cocktail is short, sweet-ish, has that cognac-y taste to it and will definitely appeal to anyone who enjoys jaloviina. I also tried to keep it simple enough so it could be made at home. Let's have a look:

• 4 bar (tea) spoons of blueberries
• 2 cl coldpressed blueberry juice
• 2 cl blueberry liqueur (dekuyper)
• 5 cl Jaloviina (*)

Muddle the blueberries in the glass. Add the rest of the ingredients, add ice and shake it baby! Definitely double strain. No garnish needed.

I loved the dark color of this cocktail. Also the strong blueberry-ish taste adds a nice flavor profile to this cocktail and with the more dominant jaloviina taste in the end...nice. Just nice.

Paranoid

PARANOID

Hello everyone! Today (actually almost a week ago) I had the pleasure to make a cocktail called Paranoid. Its history goes back to 2004 to a cocktail bar called Shaker, in Jyväskylä, Finland. I had previously seen a video of the drink being made by their staff and a BIG SHOUT OUT goes to Karl Lojander for inventing this drink! Story goes they wanted to make a kick-ass gin-based cocktail after their opening in 2003 and what do you know? They made this, which roared success on the first try! *cue slow clap right here ladies and gents*

I've personally heard of this drink before as well but now I had the opportunity to make it myself! The recipe as follows:

• 3 cl lemon juice
• 2 cl DeKuyper blueberry liqueur
• 2 cl dry gin
• 1 cl lingonberry syrup
• dash soda water

I made the lingonberry syrup myself by using 2dl frozen lingonberries, 0.5dl water, 1dl sugar and 0.5dl household syrup (for future reference that last one is option IMHO). Boil the berries with water, strain the mash, add sugar and heat to dissolve. Yeah...kinda like that :D

As for the drink, shake everything except the soda water and strain (no double straining needed here) into a glass. Top it off with soda and garnish with an orange slice. There you go!

It's a lively-colored cocktail, fresh, has that "zinggg!" to it and tastes extremely good which makes give it a 4 out of 5!

Here's a clip of it when I made it (in Finnish!)

Random Access Cocktails (RAC)

RANDOM ACCESS COCKTAILS

A good Monday evening to everyone! Last night I had a little game with a friend of mine after some heavy duty Dungeons&Dragons. He had brought a bottle of sour apple schnapps so I thought "Why not randomly decide two other liqueurs and whip up a drink of them?" What a splendid idea!

Three "rules":

1. 2 cl of sour apple included
2. one lime wedge squeezed in
3. 4 cl of apple juice included

So we headed to my bar cabinet and rolled a d20 to decide which Dekuyper liqueurs we would use! We both rolled once and with 20 bottles available we got the following combinations:

• peach & blueberry
• amaretto & watermelon

#1

sour apple, peach, blueberry, apple juice, lime wedge

So here's the first one. With a fresh aroma, you couldn't really notice the peach flavor. The blueberry on the other hand dominated most of the drink leaving only a crisp, US-candy-ish (jelly bean) aftertaste to it!

#2

sour apple, amaretto, water melon, apple juice, lime wedge

The second one was a peculiar mixture! You have that distinct almond aroma, tastes like amaretto and then changes to the watermelony flavors! The apple part has completely disappeared!

In its essence, both cocktails weren't "super delicious". Sure, one goes (for the ladies) but they both had a problem of being very sugary (like candy), synthetic and something youngsters would appreciate. All of this was culminated in our discussion:

Me: "Try having six of these!"

Friend: " :D "

The Predator

The Predator

Here you have the Predator. I got this recipe from a Finnish cocktail based "forum", history of this drink is unknown. So I decided to give it a shot. To be honest, I can't really remember much of this drink. But if I really try to think hard I believe the ingredients are the following (at least the proportions):

• 2cl lime juice
• 2/4cl blueberry liquor
• 2/4cl brandy
• battery energy drink

I believe using 4cl of both alcohols give an edgier drink. So what needs to be done is to build the drink in a high ball glass filled with ice and top it up with energy drink. Garnish voluntary. Now a word of warning for you all. Any energy drink has a bad habit of totally dominating the drink. What I can remember from this as well, I couldn't taste much of anything except for the battery. If that's a good thing...that's up to you. If I would make this cocktail again, I would substitute the battery with 7Up.