The Fujian Merchant
Picture rights: DRINKS Magazin
Recipe:
- 45ml El Dorado 12yo rum
- 15ml Cruzan Black Strap rum
- 15ml Distilleria Quaglia Tamarindo Liquore
- 25ml double strength Lapsang Souchong tea
- 1 bsp gomme syrup
- 1/2 bsp grilled lime juice
- 1 dash Dale DeGroff's Pimento bitters
Stir everything for 20 seconds (without ice) in a small pot and heat it up to just before the boiling point, strain into a heat resistant ceramic mug. Garnish with a dried lime wheel (optional: & some of the tea leaves).
For the november/december issue of the German edition of DRINKS magazine, I was once again allowed to contribute 2 cocktails that I created myself. Ideally hot drinks, as the theme had to fit in with winter & Christmas (hence the special background in the photo above, see my original photo down below). I immediately decided on tea as my focal point, wanted to play with an Asian theme and present a light & dark combination of drinks, here the dark cocktail. The first conscious choice as basis was the wonderfully smoked Lapsang Souchong, as well as going in a hearty direction, with rather unusual flavors and a slight umami direction. Therefore, the tamarind liqueur from Distilleria Quaglia, a highlight of this year for me, was very quickly chosen next and it went quite easily from here. As the second drink was already definitely going to be based on Baijiu, I wanted an alternative with the second drink for the magazine and chose a fitting deep & dark rum combo.
Light smoky notes on the nose, notes of fermented red fruit and dark molasses. A similar mixture on the attack, initially molasses, a little cocoa, then red, nutty fruit from the tamarind, delicate acidity from the grilled lime, but very subtle and merging into the smoky, leathery tea, then fine spice from the allspice, tea and oak from the rum in the last third. The gomme syrup in particular helps to make the drink very velvety and harmonious despite the tea and to "glue" everything together even better than normal simple syrup and gives it a touch more depth.
Art Pairing
As soon as I had chosen the tea at the beginning, memories of one or two wonderful original wood & copper engravings by European travelers from the eastern Chinese provinces came to my mind. As my original bowl was also a dark shade of black with a certain amount of pigmentation (as you can see in my original picture down below), I also immediately thought of corresponding, beautiful historic bowls from Chinese history...
Copper engraving on paper, circa 1725, ‘De stadt Aymuy – La ville de Aymuy dans la Chine.’ (The city of Amoy or Xiamen in China.), gesamte Seite: ca. 49 x 38cm, published by P. van der Aa, Leyden
Bowl, Northern Song or Southern Song dynasty, 12th century, Jian ware, Stoneware with iron-pigmented glaze, China, Fujian province, 8.8 x 19.2 cm (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC)
My original picture
