Latest / Into The Barchive / Martinis That Aren’t Martinis
Transcript
- ITB: Welcome to the Bar-Ky. Welcome into this episode of Into the Bar-kife where we are going to ask the question, when is a martini not a martini? Yeah. And today we're going to talk about a very specific moment in cocktail history, that neon lit stainless steel backlit bottle lounge music moment, a time when everything, and I mean everything was a martini. What a chocolate martini a watermelon martini the espresso martini and the Appletini Right if it was cold sweet and served in that V-shaped glass iconic V-shaped glass. Hey, congratulations. It's a martini and yet many of these strengths had absolutely nothing to do with the classic martini. Based off the specs that we talked about before, you're correct. It's not a 2-1-2 anything. No, absolutely not. So today we're diving into the 1990s wave of martinis that weren't really martinis at all. We're going to explore the rise of martini bars, unpack the cultural forces behind the trend, and make two iconic examples. As we said in the last episode, the Appletini and the porn star martini. And now before we get too smug about sour apple schnapps, we're going to ask the question, did the 1990s actually help save cocktail culture? Because history is always is lot more complicated than it looks. Okay. So we're going to what? Acknowledge that? Yeah. So, you know, when we think of the classic martini, like the symbol of minimalist restraint, two parts, Jen or vodka, one part, vermouth, and maybe some betters, we're going to move into where martinis are like these candy colored canvas. I've got everything to play with. The world is my oyster. Yeah. Okay. So we've acknowledged the irony. We're going to go and before we kind of judge those old school cocktails too harshly, let's actually go back to the beginning. Let's make them and let's elevate them. Yeah. Let's get shaken. Let's get shaken. So the first drink we're going to make in this martinis that aren't martinis is the Appletini. All right. And so the Appletini was invented in the 1990s by Los Angeles bartender Adam Karsten. And so essentially it was made with like de Kuyper sour apple schnapps and vodka. And you just shake them together and it'd be like neon green and tastes like a apple Jolly Rancher. The version we're making today is how can we take that joint that idea but translate it to a craft cocktail sensibility. So this recipe comes from ⁓ Cocktail chemistry it was in his book entitled cocktail chemistry. So what we're going to do is start with a half ounce of lemon juice and we're going to add that to the small side the small tin of our shaker. We're going to then add a half ounce of simple syrup. So I mean, again, we're looking kind of in that daisy sour template here. One of the first ways we're going to add apple is by taking a fresh Granny Smith apple. So I'm going to slice the apple up. I'm going to get, we'll say two nice slices like this and drop them in our tin. Now we're gonna do a little muddling to get some of the juice. Of course, we're using the Granny Smith apple here because it's tart and sour. So gonna muddle that up a little and try to avoid getting it in our eyes along the way. So muddling that along and we'll call that good. you don't want to make like apple puree or anything like that when you muddle, but kind of release some of the juice, some of the oils, things like that. Now let's add the booze. First step vodka, right? We're going to add an ounce and a half of our vodka. So I'm using Belvedere here. So it, the, its base ingredient is rye grain and so it lends a little creamier mouthfeel to the drink so add that in. Now instead of DeKyper's Sour Apple Schnapps we're adding this New York Sour Apple Liqueur from Leopold Brothers. Again one of our favorite distilleries in Colorado. They're taking New York green apples they're then distilling this they're adding ⁓ the apples to essentially their grain base that they distill there at Leopold Brothers and then they add a little extra lactic acid to help contribute to a little creamy mouthfeel so a half ounce here and If you kind of see this it's got a little of that greenish color to it It's not the neon green of the dekaiper sour apple schnapps So you're not going to get the exact same ⁓ color that you might there. And now let's ice up our tin on the big side. Get a couple good scoops in there and then we'll shake for 10 to 15 seconds. Now, you could stream this into a coupe, but because we're sticking with this 1990s theme of martinis that aren't martinis, we're going to go with the more classic glassware, the V-shaped martini. Now, my V-shaped glasses are a little angled up instead of out. It helps hold the drink in a little better, in my opinion. I like the slim line. V-shaped martini glasses. So again you get that hint of the green with the fresh juice the Kraft Sour Apple liqueur from Leopold Brothers. It's not neon, but again, it's a nice Color there and then finally we're going to end With a nice piece of that granny Smith Apple. We're gonna just set that on our glass and we have an improved Appletini. Cheers! For our second cocktail, we have the Porn Star Martini. This may get us in trouble on YouTube or some of the other streaming services. We are not showing any illicit material here. It's just the name of the cocktail. But if we do, maybe this rises our viewership up a little bit. The Porn Star Martini, while very seductive in name, it is just as seductive as a cocktail. What we're gonna do is start with an ounce and a half of vanilla vodka into our small tin, ounce and a half of vanilla vodka. Our next ingredient is a passion fruit liqueur. This Chanola brand, if you actually notice, very fresh. This is slightly oxidized because we've had it for a moment. So very fresh ingredient. Highly recommend this bottle of Chanola. You're to do a half ounce of this Passion Fruit Liqueur. Our next ingredient most people probably haven't used in their home bars is passion fruit. We're going to go with a full ounce. of fresh passion fruit. Next, a very nice ingredient is ⁓ vanilla syrup. To go along with that vanilla vodka, we're going to go with a half ounce. And our last ingredient is going to be a half ounce of fresh lime. Let's ice our Big 10. and shake. Grab your frozen or V-glass. And we're going to double strain. And the cool thing about this cocktail, it's two garnishes. The first garnish. is a dehydrated passion fruit coin and the second garnish and probably the most playful of them all. Is a side card a sparkling wine? And my friends, we have the porn star martini. Cheers. Now that we've built the cocktails, let's build the context. This modern martini boom or the post boom pre-boom? Well, okay. So first we've got to think about like the trajectory of the martini itself. Okay. So the original martini, gin, vermouth, stirred, restrained, it's definitely a symbol of minimalism. It's about dryness. Precision and elegance. I mean in many ways after World War two It's an identity marker white think madmen before madmen, okay? But by the 1980s and the early 1990s a lot of that classic top cocktail knowledge was just gone Vermouth had been neglected ⁓ vodka taken over sweet candy flavored liqueurs dominated the back bar. And so the martini was really more of a format and how the drink was served rather than the recipe of what was in the drink itself. So the vessel defined the cocktail. Yeah. So if it served up in a V-shaped glass, it's a martini. That's it. That's the rule. Does that rule still hold fast or? Is that just a moment in time? I mean, certainly not quite as prevalent as it used to be, but certainly in some sectors and with some particular cocktails, that may still be the case. I would say with the modern cocktail Renaissance, more cocktails are served up mainly in coupes and they stay away from the V shape just to hold true to the ⁓ appearance of that V-shaped martini idea. Absolutely. Well, the resurgence of the coupe comes alongside the cocktail renaissance, and I think partly maybe the resurgence of the coupe is not just looking back to history. It's also a way to kind of like say, we're moving away from these style martinis. ⁓ And, you know, in many ways, pop- culture accelerates the trend. So when Sex and the City debuted in 1998, it glamorized the stem cocktails and the V-shaped glass for a new generation. You know, the cosmopolitan, some people would say, again, technically not a martini, but is a 90s style martini. Don't go too deep into that. I think we have that ⁓ topic in a Episode or three away from now. Okay, so well we won't go too far into the Cosmo But I mean it matches this in terms of bright colors fruit flavors vodka base, okay So the martini in the 1990s, it's really no longer about juniper and vermouth. Nope. It's gone Yeah, so it's about vibes. Yep, right. It's going about it's going to bars and you have Menus full of like candy colored drinks that look chic and approachable. Bright colors, greens, pinks, oranges. Yeah, like a couple years ago, we went to a bar, it was called Martini's, and we were in London for a Titans football game and the group we were with were having an event at this bar like a Titans pep rally or something like that. And it was like a fixture in time, almost like a museum in a sense of it was a 90s style martini bar where the menu was full of martinis, but practically none of which were gin and vermin. It was these type of martinis. So let's go and talk about maybe the craft of this, or backlash for that matter. Yeah. So as we're coming out of the 90s into the early 2000s, ⁓ this backlash, using your word, begins as bars like Milk and Honey are going back to those old, historic, pre-prohibition recipes, going back to more proper bar technique. They respect and refrigerate vermouth again. ⁓ Gin re-emerges. It's not just vodka, vodka, vodka. ⁓ Stirred drinks reemerge. It's not shake everything ⁓ So the classic martini is coming back into those I find it funny that You just mentioned that gin comes back, but both of ours are vodka based Mine is a flavored vodka and your so's yeah, but again our drinks predate that ⁓ true, You know, we've got 90s strengths. This backlash is occurring in the early 2000s. But, but this is where it gets complicated. Without these type of drinks, without the 90s martini boom of martinis that aren't martinis, wouldn't the cocktail renaissance have occurred at all? If there's nothing to fix, would it ever been fit? Like they can't fix something that Never existed. So no, yes. Well, but not only that, you know that these martini bars were popular these sugary fruit flavored candy colored martinis kept bars busy and it introduced millions of people to shaken drinks in stem where so it wasn't just you know, gin and tonic Jack and coke rum and coke think Pour pour dot dot. Yeah. Yeah. The idea of like, ⁓ making a shaken cocktail. Flare. Yeah. mean, Ask. But it normalizes ordering something other than beer, wine, shots or highballs. So we now have the introduction of shaken cocktails that people are like, hey, I want something that's more than just a splash here, pour there. Yeah. Walk me through this then. while the 90s may have abused the name Martini and gotten away from the original drink, they kept the ritual of the shaken cocktail alive. And while the early cocktail renaissance may have banished vodka from the back bar, right? Because it's like, let's get back to gin. In the Women's History episode at Audrey Saunders' Pegu Club, people said, you know, we have juniper flavored vodka, right? Is as the cocktail renaissance movement matured, something interesting happened. Bartenders stopped mocking drinks like the Appletini and they started rebuilding them. Like what can we take from what we've learned and make these sickly sweet artificial drinks like palatable and make them complex and nuanced? Back in our last episode, same thing to those amaretto type drinks. It's re-approaching some of these ingredients. Some of those ingredients being sour mixes, some of those ingredients being just crappy liqueurs that were used inside of the Appletini, right? The neon green type liqueur. Yeah. So instead of sour mix and florescent artificially flavored liqueurs, We get fresh citrus, real fruit purees, like with the passion fruit puree you use, house made syrups, better base liqueurs, like with the Leopold sour apple cordial instead of the Kuiper sour apple schnapps or sour apple pucker, right? And it's, you know, these essentially are like daisy cocktails, right? Yeah. They're base spirit liqueur. citrus and sweetener. But the real question is, are they balanced? For both of these cocktails, they are reimagined and perfectly balanced. mean, that Appletini, re-approached and reimagined the way that it is, is no longer a joke. It's actually a beautiful cocktail. Yeah, I mean, it- It's essentially a vodka daisy with an apple liquor modifier. mean what talking about pop culture I mean the Apple teeny became popularized by the sitcom shrug scrubs right scrubs not shrubs scrubs ⁓ But where JD would I mean our one episode he said I would like an apple teeny and the most girly drink you have on your menu and the bartender was like so there'll be two Apple teenies but It was because his Apple teeny was like two ounces of de Kuyper sour apple pucker and an ounce of vodka. And it tastes like an apple jelly ranger and super sweet. I enjoy that you make a reference to scrubs as it's making its resurgence, you know, over the last, I would say month or so it just did its little revamp on Hulu or whatever platform, but yeah, what's. What's old is new again in the world of TV, just like with Sex and the City, right? Yeah. And just like that. I just like that. So Appletini isn't an embarrassment. It's a Vodka Daisy. The cocktail Renaissance didn't just revive this classic martini. It actually redeemed some of its 1990s cousins. Absolutely. So I if we take a moment and Just revisit a couple more specifics on the Appletini. You know, the original color, that neon green, mean, it sexy on the back bar. And when you look at some of those, like, dark bars that have the... Backlights. ...illuminated back bars, things like that. And I mean, this was like pre-Instagram, you know, people were still taking pictures and the visual presentation mattered. I mean, for these like electric colored cocktails. And so again, the problem here wasn't the idea. It was the execution. It was too much sugar. And so this version that we made is more balanced. It has acid. ⁓ It's not too sweet. And it's an apple tea that tastes like an apple, not an apple flavored Jolley Rancher. I mean, how could it not with you muddling fresh grant Granny Smith apple into the cocktail? Like it takes away that fake flavor that's in maybe a lower brand apple liqueur, sour apple liqueur and using a true sour apple to bring the fresh fruit, the fresh juice, the fresh acidity sourness from that specific fruit into that cocktail. Yeah. And not only that, Todd Leopold at Leopold Brothers is bringing out like real fruit into his liqueurs. It's not fake extracts and artificial flavoring. He's bringing the apples in. He is mashing them. I mean, he is thoughtfully doing it. I mean, his original training and distilling was from Ode-V distilleries in Central Europe. So he knows how to distill fruit. And so That makes a difference as well. And again, the Appletini is essentially just a vodka daisy. Again, one of those classic templates that we covered at the very beginning of our podcast. So you would say the 90s didn't just invent bad drinks. They just forgot about balance. They were just pouring stuff into a glass and making it look bright and sexy. Absolutely. So how about that? porn star. Okay. ⁓ other than the sexy name, like I alluded to in the thing, it's like, it is a sexy cocktail. I love the fact of this cocktail that you can go from drinking it and then having a sidecar, almost like a palette cleanser and then going back. Now there are some people that would potentially pour their sparkling wine to the lengthen it into their cocktail. I'm not one of those individuals that likes to do that because I do like to take a drink. and then Palette Cleanze, especially if you've got a nice bottle of sparkling, whether that be Cava, Prosecco, Champagne itself, know, whichever one you go, I think if you were to order this in Vegas, it would probably be a bottle of Champagne that comes with it, if you're a high roller. I'd be a bottle of Dom Herringdon if you were a real high roller. So, but take me back to it. Tell me more about this Porn Show Martini. So... Even though the premise of this episode is more the 90s, this one really emerges in the very beginning of the 2000s. It was created by Douglas Ankara, a British bartender working at the Lab Bar in London. Originally it was actually called the Maverick Martini, ⁓ because it was named after a gentleman's club that Ankara frequented in South Africa. And so... He sold as the Maverick Martini initially and then renamed it the Porn Star Martini to evoke something bold and glamorous and provocative, right? That risque, yeah. I don't see the fact of a Maverick Martini selling as well as the name Porn Star. Like, if I see that, I don't see Maverick. I see, you know, something more delicate or... provocative. If I were to think of a Maverick Martini, I would think more, you know, Doc Holliday or something like that. More maybe bourbon or something based or darker age or something. ⁓ No, switching it to that name does elicit more, pique more interest. Absolutely. I mean, even today, it is one of the most ordered cocktails in the, in Great Britain. I believe on different guide which is a website based in Britain that kind of like a Liquor.com and buy punch things like that. It's a British version of that I believe like for multiple years in a row the porn star Martini was the most searched cocktail on their website again Maybe somebody fat-fingered, know, whatever doing other things and they were looking up but the cool thing about this one is it leans into vanilla twice, right? Not only, well actually it leans into two different flavor profiles twice. It's vanilla in both the vodka and the syrup and then the passion fruit in the liqueur and the puree. Like bringing both of those in is magical. Like it's made up of vanilla vodka, passion fruit, passion fruit puree. The only odd guy out is the lime juice but that's only there to bring the acidity level up. Yeah, and I mean part of it's the difference in texture, right? So the vanilla vodka brings some vanilla flavor, but typically no sweetness or very little sweetness. The vanilla syrup brings more sweetness and viscosity. The passion fruit liqueur brings some alcohol and some body from it. The passion fruit puree brings like fresh passion fruit and passion fruit is a very, ⁓ Tangy sort of ingredient and so it balances it out in the passion fruit puree again brings texture and so You know you got this cocktail. It's sweet. It's sour. It's creamy ⁓ It's got a lot of interesting flavors. It's tropical with the passion fruit I mean as as we put it out here you can see at the cocktail It's like it does after a while start to separate the puree kind of gives a little bit of a head. It does settle out, but that doesn't make the cocktail bad. It's almost like the foam that you're having through an espresso, martini, or some kind of froth-based cocktail. Pulling the drags through, it actually elevates the cocktail, ⁓ which then goes to another thing of elevating the cocktail, that sidecar, right? What's the purpose of having sparkling wine just other than making it? One level higher or did it did it accompany the day? Well, I mean I definitely think like it's part and parcel of the concept of the drink You know in my mind this is like a baller drink, right? It's like yes. I would like a porn star martini and then it's like it's not just a little snack garnish or something. It's like full on some more liquid, more booze. But given the texture of the drink, the taste, you know, because it, it's creamy and mouth feel, it's a little on the sweet side of balance. The sparkling wine is a palate cleanser. is. So for me, I like take a sip of the martini, take a sip of the sparkling wine and Sinecar and it resets your palate because if you drink sip after sip of the martini, you'd get palate fatigue. So this helps you reset. Okay, so what makes this drink so enduring is definitely the texture, right? The contrast, bright acidity, aromatics, tropical aromatics for that much, creamy mouth fill. I mean, Base all that and then you get to rinse with the sparkling wine and then experience all over again. Absolutely. So you're approaching a new each time. Each time. It's a good approach every single time. ⁓ Would you say that this, since it's newer, truly is a descendant of the Appletini? Yeah, I mean again, it is a fruit forward brightly colored martini. So even though Ankara invented this in the early 2000s It comes out of this 90s sensibility But he's bringing like this is more like his recipe Okay, this isn't like here were all the artificial liqueurs he used and things like that and it was sickly sweet He started from a more balanced perspective. I mean, in many ways, like, the ingredients have only improved since his time. for his passion fruit liqueur, he would have used Pessoa or something like that. Chanola didn't exist twenty plus years ago. So, I mean, there are opportunities to improve upon that with the quality of ingredients, but... I think he was maximizing the ingredients he had available to him at the time. So I would say as kind of wrapping this up in our outro is since the early nineties, late nineties, early two thousands, more ingredients have become available. Better ingredients have become available when it comes to those flurry martinis, re-approaching, retrying, remaking your chocolate martinis, your watermelon martinis. Those are the things that we would want you to do. As we wrap up today's episode, always we would like you to like, subscribe, comment in our channel, give us some feedback, interact with us, but we challenge you to make those. martinis that you used to love in your earlier ages and see if you can't use a better, more, probably more thoughtful ingredient than what we used to have access to. By doing that also follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Apple podcasts, Spotify. We would love for you to subscribe or send us an email over at podcast at into the bar archive.com. Let us know your favorite V shaped cocktail. And on the next episode, what do we got? So we've gone from the 19th century minimalism of the classic gin martini to 1990s maximalism with all sorts of neon colored fruit flavored martinis to what we've done modern balance. And the martini has survived all of those eras. So next time we're going to leave the neon lights behind. We're going to head somewhere a little more traditional. And just in time for the Kentucky Derby, we're diving into juleps. The mint julep? Absolutely. So crushed ice, fresh mint, bourbon, southern identity. We're going to explore how the mint julep became the most iconic drink in American horse racing. and why simplicity can be just as powerful as spectacle. Until then, whether it's stirred with vermouth or glowing electric green, every cocktail tells a story. Thanks for digging into the past with us on Into the Bar-Cive. Cheers.