And then it might be days or weeks before I ended up using them again. But as soon as those bottles were opened, they had to go into the fridge and stay there. Over the course of any given six- or eight-week period, I wanted to try recipes that called for many different vermouths. This is how I first encountered the vermouth problem. Which meant that refrigerator space was always at a premium. My wife is extremely generous, kind, and supportive of my cocktail making, but she is also a fairly serious home cook who likes to keep fresh stocks of veggies, sauces, creams, and other ingredients for her own kitchen projects. But until last year, I shared a single refrigerator with my wife. Today, I am lucky to have a small, dedicated fridge for cocktail ingredients. Often enough, it also means sharing a refrigerator. Marriage means sharing a life with someone. But there is a solution - not a single bottle, but a rolling three-vermouth rotation. That’s why I think of vermouth a little like a Christopher Nolan movie - as a puzzle involving the deep complexities of time and space. Maybe everyone in your household really loves vermouth, and you do have room for all those bottles, but even still: How much vermouth are you really going to drink over the next month or so?įor home bartenders, then, vermouth presents a somewhat unique challenge. And even if your fridge technically has room, you might have a spouse or roommate who’d like to use the ice box too. The refrigerator solution comes with its own problems: Even if you want to explore the fringes of the category, you probably don’t really have room for a dozen bottles of vermouth in your home refrigerator. But even with proper storage, vermouth still has a limited shelf life. This significantly extends its lifespan after opening. The easiest way to slow the oxidation process is to store open bottles of vermouth in your refrigerator. An open bottle sitting on your bookshelf will last a few days, a week at most. But exposure to air changes wine through the process of oxidation. An open bottle of whiskey might keep for years, perhaps even decades. That’s because vermouth is wine, which means it rapidly degrades after you open it. And there’s a bigger problem for home barkeeps: It’s not just a matter of choosing the right vermouth for the drink. This is a perfectly good plan when you have multiple refrigerators on site and make hundreds of drinks in an evening.īut that’s an expensive proposition for a home bartender. Your choice of sweet vermouth can make or break a drink, and the right choice can transform a pretty good drink into an incredible one. But it can be a challenge to figure out which ingredients pair well, in part because of the huge variety of vermouths available today, even in smaller markets.Ī cocktail bar has the luxury of picking exactly the right vermouth for every drink, keeping as many bottles as necessary open, chilled, and in circulation at any given time. A cocktail is a relationship the ingredients have to get along. It’s about how the differing ingredients work together. But it’s not just about which ingredient steals the show. As in many movies, the love interest is often more interesting than the lead. In the dramatic schema of cocktails, sweet vermouth is a recurring love interest for whiskey and gin, and it pairs well with rum, mezcal, and even aquavit as well. You can’t make a great Manhattan, Negroni, Boulevardier, or Vieux Carré without it. Every show needs a supporting cast - and when making cocktails, there’s no more important supporting cast member than sweet vermouth. But you don’t want to build your collection out of base spirits alone. When it comes to classic cocktails, base liquors like whiskey, rum, and gin are typically the stars of the show. Today, we’re going to discuss the second bottle: sweet vermouth.īuilding a cocktail bar is an iterative, branching process. The major difference between this recipe and the Gin and It is the addition of bitters.If you’re building a home cocktail bar, the first bottle you should buy is Rittenhouse Rye. It is however an easy drink to make as it has only two major ingredients. Whether this is the original martini or not is debatable. The drink is also sometimes called the Original Martini as the recipe dates back to the 19th century. The drink takes its name from one of the ingredients, which is the sweet vermouth. Since the early part of 20th century, the drink is often called the Gin and It. The Sweet Martini which is also sometimes referred to as the Sweet Vermouth Martini dates back to the late 19th century and is one of the earliest of cocktails. This drink recipe uses sweet vermouth instead of the dry. It is very similar to a Classic Gin Martini which uses Gin and dry vermouth. The Sweet Martini is a drink made with Gin (or Vodka) as the base spirit and sweet vermouth.
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