I've been reading cocktail blogs, hanging out at cocktail nerd bars, and doing some amateur bartending for myself and my friends for a couple years now. I'd long categorized flaming cocktails as frat-party shooters alongside slide shots (a.k.a ice luge) and Blow Jobs (SFW: the drink, not the act). Float a little Bacardi 151 on some sweet liqueur in a shot glass, light it, and pass it around the beer pong table.
Two things prompted me to take a harder look. First, I was talking to some fellow cocktail nerds about things we could do to entertain ourselves and others at Burning Man. I had recently been flipping through David Wondrich's wonderful bartender's-guide-cum-history Imbibe!
, and remembered the Blue Blazer. It's a simple drink of Scotch, water, and a little sugar, but the fun is in the presentation. From Imbibe:...In front of a crowd filled with anticipation and booze, he proceeds to prepare a mixture of Scotch whisky and boiling water, light it on fire, and hurl the blazing mixture back and forth between two silver mugs "with a rapidity and dexterity that were well nigh unbelievable"It's the sort of thing that needs a lot of practice. I played around with my Boston shaker for a while, pouring (cold) water between the parts, but I splashed far too much water on my hands and the floor for me to be comfortable trying that with anything alight. Eventually, I plan on coming back to that and giving it some thorough practice.
The second part of my inspiration came from following a link to David Arnold and Nils Norén's (Cooking Issues, their blog) experiments with the Red Hot Poker. It's essentially an overgrown soldering iron that heats itself rapidly to around 1700º F, and which then they plunge into various interesting cocktails. This reportedly creates flavors that can't be created any other way, since instead of simply heating the drink or igniting the alcohol in it, it vaporizes the mixture and caramelizes the sugars.
They provided a couple very interesting and tasty-sounding recipes that they played around with, including a mulled ale and a Red Hot Manhattan. Unfortunately, they didn't go into great detail about flamed drink fundamentals. and I haven't been able to find a great deal of information elsewhere.
Mission
So, through a series of experiments, I plan to investigate and report the answers to these questions:
- What ingredients work well in flamed drinks, and why?
- How do the flavors change when you flame them?
- How does the alcohol content change when you flame them, and how does the initial alcohol content affect the process?
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