I just recently started smoking a pipe. i couldn’t find any corn cob pipes around here like we used to sell when i was a kid in PA so i bought a simple briar and took a recommendation on a tobacco… drinking while smoking is quite the sporting thing to do… double up your sensory overloads and double up your connoseurship… if everyone knows that life is short and the art is long you must multitask… well in my multitasking i got addicted to a certain flavor profile that the law has taken away from me… indoors anyhow. but maybe you can capture that rare pipe tobacco character in a glass…
my attempt was with an obscure to some african flower whose seeds can only be gathered by ants… the flavor of the flower is africa and it tastes like sahara dust. africa apparently also tastes alot like the tobacco flavor i crave.
so i put the rooibos which is decorated with vanilla bean in affordable rye whiskey and let it infuse for a couple days. the vanilla bean synthesizes some half assed oak aging on the young cheap whiskey and provides a body and mid palate to tie in all the red bush flavors. the beauty of rooibos is its lack of bitter principles. you can let it infuse forever without getting a bitter mess like you may with black tea. many plants are better with partial infusions which are high maintenance and hard to get consistent. rooibos is pretty simple. when you use a common decorated blend you mainly focus on getting enough vanilla character.
1 liter of old overholt rye whiskey
57 grams of MEMs decorated rooibos tea
48 hour infusion time with simple cloth filtration
I have made many cocktails with this “african rye whiskey” like the “coer d’obscurite” (heart of darkness) which is with a pimento dram sour but at the moment i’m really interested in the savoy cocktail books “gilroy” cocktail as a system for a drink…
La Perique (a type of new orleans tobacco)
1 oz. “african rye whiskey”
1 oz. cherry heering
1/2 oz. lemon juice
1/2 oz. dry vermouth (martini rossi)
1 dash of orange bitters (hermes)
stir…
the first sip is interesting and reminds me of rusty fruit water (in a good way) then i start to taste all the familiar flavors. the infused whiskey’s flavor integrate so well into the fruit components. this might be even better in a stiffer style cocktail… another splash of whiskey could fix that. the sour component reminds me of pomegrate synthesized by the extra acid on top of the heering. the dry vermouth is really hard to identify but hopefully its holding it down… over all the contrast remind me of nieto senetiner’s bonarda from mendoza. the wine has incredible constrasts of cherry fruit with leather and spice. this is all enhanced by the chewy mouthfilling tannic mouth feel. the dissolved solids in the infusion bring some kind of pleasurable mouth feel to the cocktail… they are not exactly silky but rather remind you of wine.
its like smoking indoors while eating fruit… the smoking ban doesn’t hurt so much anymore…