Episode 47: the Hot Locomotive

Make 2 cocktails

• 16 oz (2 cups) dry red wine

• 2 egg yolks

• 1 oz honey

• ¼ tsp Ground cloves

• 1.5 oz dry curaçao (or triple sec) 

To a large mixing glass, add egg yolk, honey, cloves, & curaçao. Mix well with a small whisk or fork.  Heat up red wine until steaming hot but not boiling (don’t burn off alcohol). Whisk wine into yolk & curacao mixture. Serve in heat safe glasses.

The Locomotive is a surprisingly delicious recipe from Jerry Thomas’ 1862 bartenders guide. Essentially, it’s a bit like mulled wine, but it’s sweetened with honey, fortified with curacoa, and enriched and thickened slightly with egg yolks.

The instructions for this 160 year old recipe are as follows: “Put two yolks of eggs into a goblet with an ounce of honey, a little essence of cloves, and a liqueur glass of curacoa; add a pint of high burgundy made hot, whisk well together, and serve hot in glasses.” 

For anyone trying to make this recipe today, this description may seem a bit vague, so we’ve done our best to interpret it to create the recipe we posted above. High Burgundy essentially just meant dry red wine, as many English and American reds at the time tended to be sweet. You can use whatever dry red wine you like. 

Essence of cloves was likely an alcohol based tincture Thomas would have used in his bar, but he doesn’t provide a recipe. Home bartenders would only need a small amount anyway, so we opted to just use a bit of ground clove instead. This isn’t exactly authentic, but we think it tastes delicious.

As for how much a “liqueur glass” of curacoa measures out to, thankfully David Wondrich has done the math for us and determined that a liqueur glass is equal to 1.5 ounces.

Episode 25: Triple Berry Wine Cooler

According to the kitchn, all you need to remember to make a wine cooler at home is the ratio 4/4/2. You can create any flavor profile you want, as long as you use with 4 ounces wine, 4 ounces soda, and 2 ounces of liqueur.
We decided to go with the classic combination of dry white wine and lemon lime soda, and then 80s it up with some mixed berry flavored triple sec to create a homemade triple berry wine cooler.

Triple Berry Wine Cooler

• 4 oz dry white wine

• 4 oz lemon lime soda

• 2 oz triple berry triple sec (recipe below)

• Fresh berries for garnish

Add ice to a large wine glass or pint glass. Pour wine, soda, & triple sec over ice and stir to combine. Top with a few fresh berries for garnish.

Triple Berry Triple Sec

• 16 oz Triple Sec

• 12 oz frozen mixed berries (ideally blackberries, raspberries, & blueberries) 

Combine in a sealable jar and let soak for 24 hours. Strain out berries and refrigerate liquor. 

Originally, wine coolers were something made at home using light, dry white wines mixed with lemon-lime soda. Essentially, they were just a tarted up version of a white wine spritzer.

By the early 1980s though, store bought wine coolers were being marketed as soda for adults. They came in individual size bottles with easy open twist off caps, and they contained real fruit, artificial fruit flavors, and cheap wine, with roughly the same alcohol content as beer (4-6%). Flavor-wise, they were kind of a combination of a wine spritzer and sangria. 

According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1985, wine coolers accounted for close to 10% of all wine consumption in the United States. By 1987 at their peak popularity, that number was up to 20%, and wine cooler sales topped a billion dollars annually. 

The original bottled wine cooler was called California Cooler, which was founded by a couple of southern California 20-somethings. Michael Crete, the cooler’s inventor said, “The gang would get together on the beach in Santa Cruz, and I would mix together all these tropical flavors—pineapple, grapefruit, lemon-lime, white wine, and a little bit of club soda.”

At the time, Crete was working in wine and beer sales, so he teamed up with his high school buddy with a business degree and they spent a year and a half perfecting the formula.

California Cooler took off like crazy. They were selling 10 million cases a year by 1984. But before long, the big wine producers like Gallo wanted in on the boom. They launched Bartles & Jaymes in 1985, flooding primetime TV with ads. Seagram’s followed suit, and before long California Cooler was losing market share and fast.

By 1987, wine coolers were EVERYWHERE, but by 88 & 89, people were starting to lose interest, and sales started to dip across the board. The real death knell for wine coolers though came in 1991 when Congress more than quintupled the excise tax on wine from $.17/gallon to $1.07/gallon. 

This made wine blending a losing game and before you knew it, sweet carbonated malt beverages like Zima and Smirnoff Ice jumped in to take over the market. Bartles & Jaymes and Seagram’s both launched their own malt beverages, but California Cooler didn’t’ survive.

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Episode 22: National Guard Seventh Regiment Punch

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• 1 to 2 teaspoons sugar *see notes

• ½ oz lemon juice  

• 2 oz Brandy (preferably Cognac)

• 2 oz Catawba wine OR dry rosé wine **see notes

• 1 teaspoon raspberry syrup (recipe below)

• ¼ oz Jamaican rum (optional)

• Garnish: orange, pineapple, fresh berries 

Stir sugar and lemon juice together in a bar glass or rocks glass. 
Add brandy, wine, and raspberry syrup and fill the glass with ice (shaved or crushed preferable) 
Shake well and pour back into glass. 

Top with dark rum and garnish with fruit. Serve with a straw. 

NOTES:
* The original recipe calls for 2 teaspoons, but we found the cocktail far too sweet and much preferred it with only 1 teaspoon after some testing
** The original recipe called for a very sweet wine made from Catawba grapes. If you can’t find Catawba wine, Niagara or Concord grape wine will be very similar, or you could use any sweet white or rosé wine you like. However, we found this punch was far too sweet and much preferred it made with a dry rosé instead.

Raspberry Syrup

• 2 cups of demerara sugar

• 1 cup of water

• 1 cup raspberries (fresh or frozen)

Stir sugar and water over low heat until sugar has dissolved. Add raspberries stirring until the berries form a pulp. Strain into a jar and refrigerate. Over time, the pectin will rise to the surface and can be skimmed off.

The “National Guard Seventh Regiment Punch”  was probably around before the 1860s but we don’t know the actual origins. We just know that the recipe was published by Jerry Thomas in 1862.

This drink is named after NYC’s seventh regiment, which used to be the only regiment that made up the national guard at one point in history. They were known as a “silk stocking” regiment, meaning they were mostly made up of fancy fifth avenue blue blood types. 

During the civil war they were on their way to go fight at Gettysburg, but NYC’s draft riots broke out and they were called back. Fighting draft rioters in NYC was actually the only combat they ever saw during the entire civil war. 

This is one of the more unique cocktails we’ve ever had. The original recipe called for a very sweet wine made from Catawba grapes. If you can’t find Catawba wine, Niagara or Concord grape wine will have a very similar flavor, but you could use any sweet white or rosé wine that you like. However, we found this punch to be far too sweet for modern tastes, and much preferred it when we tried a version made with a dry rosé instead. A later reprint of Thomas’ book called for Sherry. 

Catawba grapes are a hybrid of wild grapes native to the East Coast crossed with European wine grapes. Catawba wine can be a bit hard to find today, but 200 years ago it was everywhere in the US. In fact, Jerry Thomas’ book actually has several recipes that feature it. The flavor of Catawba wine is sweet and distinctly grape-y, tasting more like Concord grape juice than wine. Posh wine snobs refer to this flavor as “foxy” and say that it also has a wild, musky, animal smell, but we just tasted juice box.

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