Russian Tea, the BourbonGuy Way

Well, I’m back. I hope that you folks didn’t mind the content rewind while I recovered from the nasty cold that my wife picked up on an airplane and brought home with her. Now that I’m back, I thought I would share one of the things that helped get me through the coughing fits. Nothing helps coughing or the sore throat that it can bring quite like a hot drink. And if that hot drink has a touch of bourbon in it, well, that just makes things a little nicer, doesn’t it?

According to Southern Living, Russian Tea is a staple hot drink listed in many an old church cookbook down South, though it seems to be virtually unheard of here in the Upper Midwest. The recipe that I grew up drinking used three-quarters of a cup of Lipton Instant Tea, a cup of powdered Tang, a packet of Kool-Aid lemonade, a teaspoon each of cinnamon and cloves, and enough sugar to make you love it. My mom used about a cup and a quarter. I usually cut that down to a cup or less. (Though if unsweetened Kool-Aid packets are as hard to find for you as they are for me, you can leave out the sugar altogether and substitute enough of a presweetened lemonade mix to make two quarts of lemonade into the mix instead.) Then you’d add a few spoonfuls of the powdered mix into a cup of hot water and enjoy.

Now, as I said, my family has been making this instant powdered version of Russian Tea for years (sans bourbon, sadly). And, once I moved out of the trailer court and mixed with folks that had never lived in a house with wheels, I used to get a lot of strange looks from coworkers when I would bring the drink mix out. Apparently, the thought of instant tea, Tang, and Kool-Aid offended their more upper-class sensibilities. But they’d usually come around once they tasted the spicy, sweet concoction.

And so, in the back of my mind, I always had the idea of trying to recreate the recipe from the non-instant forms of the ingredients. The sort of thing you could brew beforehand and then warm up for a family gathering instead of trying to make it a cup at a time. In my experiments, I used the same ratios as the instant version. I didn’t use your usual Lipton teabags for my version. I wanted to eliminate the grit at the bottom of the cup that the spices bring to the instant version, so I thought of using Chai instead. Now my local grocery store didn’t have a chai in their tea section for some reason, so I settled on Good Earth Tea’s Sweet and Spicy teabags instead. And damn if it didn’t turn out even more delicious than the original recipe.

And better yet, it paired great with an ounce of bourbon.

Russian Tea, the BourbonGuy Way

• 6 parts Good Earth Sweet and Spicy tea, brewed according to the instructions

• 2 part lemonade

• 2 part orange juice

• 1 part Wild Turkey 101 bourbon

Mix together the tea and juices. Warm the mixture to about 170° F. Add bourbon and serve in a mug. Garnish with an orange or lemon slice, if you are feeling fancy.

We mixed up a large batch to keep in the fridge and then just reheated it as we went. But you could just as easily do it a cup at a time. The recipe above fits my favorite mug if you define “one part” as one fluid ounce. I think I nailed it with this one. Instead of just being my “oh shit, I’m sick” drink, this recipe will be coming back for the long northern winters as well.

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From the BourbonGuy Archives: Bourbon and Beer Chili

So, my wife caught something on the airplane back from her trip last week and was nice enough to share it with the group. As such, I am digging back into the archives and resurfacing an article published way back in 2017. Since she was nice enough to share her cold, I will be nice enough to share her award-winning chili recipe. Enjoy! (Ignore the 2017 weather report, though the description of the cold is still spot on.)

It's a cold, damp, and rainy spring day outside today. The kind of day that I know is necessary for a lush green summer but still not the type of day that is all that fun to live through. Especially when you are sick with a cold. I have the kind of cold that affects the upper respiratory. So, of course, that means no fun tastings either. 

But wait! There is one thing that would be perfect on a day like today, a big bowl of Chili. I talked to my wife about it and she was gracious enough to share her secret and award-winning (office chili cook-off winner is an award, right?) recipe with you fine folks.

Bourbon and Beer Chili

Ingredients

• 1 bottle of beer – Heavy stouts or hoppy IPAs both work nicely, Stouts make for a sweeter finished product.

• 4 oz of bourbon – Make it something you like to drink. We use Old Grand-Dad 114 or Wild Turkey 101. The sweeter the bourbon, the sweeter the chili will be.

• 1 pound of stew meat – we use beef or venison

• 1 pound of Italian sausage

• 1 large onion chopped

• 4 cloves of minced garlic

• 12-ounce can of tomato paste

• 2 – 15-ounce cans of tomato sauce

• 2 cups of beef stock

• 2 cans of chili beans (We use 1 spicy Bush’s and 1 of the Black chili beans)

• ½ cup brown sugar

• 1 tablespoon of Cocoa powder

• 2 tablespoons Chili powder (or more to taste)

• 1 tablespoon of Mexican Oregano

• 1 teaspoon ground Cayenne pepper

• 2 Dried Chipotle and 1 Dried Serrano Peppers – chopped or otherwise broken up. (We grow our peppers. Then we dry and smoke the jalapenos into chipotles or just dry the serranos.)

Instructions

• Start boiling the beer and bourbon in an 8-quart stock pot.

• In a large skillet, brown the meat. It helps to do the Italian sausage first and then the stew meat. Add to the pot.

• Brown the onions and garlic in the skillet you used for the meat. Add butter or oil if needed. Add to the pot.

• Add the rest of the ingredients. Feel free to add any other spices you like in Chili.

• Heat until boiling and then simmer for at least a half hour for the flavors to meld.

• This is better reheated the next day so prepare it the day before.

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Hickory-Smoked Bourbon Gouda from Red Apple Cheese

If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you know that I live in Minnesota. But I wasn’t always a Minnesotan. I grew up in a very small rural town in Northwestern Wisconsin. I started life in a town that was a collection of buildings along one side of US Highway 63. There was a car dealership, a cemetery, a bar, a small post office, a few houses and a creamery that was known locally only as “the cheese factory.” I lived in a mobile home court that was located behind them all.

I grew up with the smell of warm curds in the wind as I walked past the creamery on my way to a local fishing hole. When I could steal a dollar from my dad, I wandered into their retail store to buy a soda, a piece of candy or a bag of fresh cheese curds. All in all, I had no idea that I was living a cheese-lovers dream (maybe not the trailer court, but the easy access to fresh cheese). I just knew that I liked the cheese that they made.

Fast-forward to adulthood and I had the opportunity to live all over Northern Wisconsin: Menomonie, Eau Claire, the Fox Cities. Everywhere I lived, I ended up finding a local creamery/cheese shop much like the one I grew up near. And each of those shops had their specialty. The one I grew up near specialized in cheeses like Muenster and mozzarella. The last one I lived near specialized in 10- to 15-year-old cheddar. That is the sort of cheese that will bite you back.

But, sadly, all of that ended when I moved to Minnesota. Gone were the small specialty cheese shops with creameries in the back. I could only get my cheese in the grocery stores. Which is fine, but. there is something about knowing that the delicious cheese you are buying is made behind the back wall of the store you are standing in. Luckily I make frequent trips back to see family and friends.

On the last such trip, my wife stopped into the Ellsworth Creamery to get some of their famous cheese curds. While in their retail shop, she found a cheese that was “quasi-local” that she thought would be of special interest to me. It is a Hickory-Smoked Bourbon Gouda from Red Apple Cheese. This cheese is produced from cow’s milk sourced from near Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, by a company in Connecticut. And unlike many “bourbon” foods, this one lists bourbon as one of the few ingredients. Needless to say, as this combines two of my favorite things on earth, I was very excited to give it a try.

Hickory-Smoked Bourbon Gouda from Red Apple Cheese

Purchase Info: Ellsworth Creamery, Ellsworth WI. Less than $10 but I don’t have the receipt.

Nose: A strong hit of whiskey on the nose with smoky notes backing it up.

Mouth: Whiskey sharpness and hickory smoke initially. After chewing, a lovely creaminess blossoms on the palate. There is a lingering smokiness.

Thoughts: There is a strong whiskey note to this cheese that might turn some people off. I like it though. This pairs really nicely with a glass of Wild Turkey 101 and works great as an evening snack with that and a few crackers.

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Robin's Bourbon and Beer Chili

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It's a cold, damp and rainy spring day outside today. The kind of day that I know is necessary to a lush green summer but still not the type of day that is all that fun to live through. Especially when you are sick with a cold. I have the kind of cold that affects the upper respiratory. So of course, that means no fun tastings either. 

But wait! There is one thing that would be perfect on a day like today, a big bowl of Chili. I talked to my wife about it and she was gracious enough to share her secret and award-winning (office chili cook-off winner is an award, right?) recipe with you fine folks.

She wanted me to share that this is a heavily adapted version of a recipe that was shared with her by a fellow Minnesotan via Twitter. 

Robin's Bourbon and Beer Chili

Ingredients

• 1 bottle of beer – Heavy stouts or hoppy IPAs both work nicely, Stouts make for a sweeter finished product.
• 4 oz of bourbon – Make it something you like to drink. We use Old Grand-Dad 114 or Wild Turkey 101. The sweeter the bourbon, the sweeter the chili will be.
• 1 pound of stew meat – we use beef or venison
• 1 pound of Italian sausage
• 1 large onion chopped
• 4 cloves of minced garlic
• 12-ounce can of tomato paste
• 2 – 15-ounce cans of tomato sauce
• 2 cups of beef stock
• 2 cans of chili beans (We use 1 spicy Bush’s and 1 of the Black chili beans)
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon of Cocoa powder
• 2 tablespoons Chili powder (or more to taste)
• 1 tablespoon of Mexican Oregano
• 1 teaspoon ground Cayenne pepper
• 2 Dried Chipotle and 1 Dried Serrano Peppers – chopped or otherwise broken up. (We grow our peppers. Then we dry and smoke the jalapenos into chipotles or just dry the serranos.)

Instructions

Start boiling the beer and bourbon in an 8-quart stock pot.

In a large skillet, brown the meat. It helps to do the Italian sausage first and then the stew meat. Add to the pot.

Brown the onions and garlic in the skillet you used for the meat. Add butter or oil if needed. Add to the pot.

Add the rest of the ingredients. Feel free to add any other spices you like in Chili.

Heat until boiling and then simmer for at least a half hour for the flavors to meld.

This is better reheated the next day so prepare it the day before.

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Not Whiskey, But Tangential: A Selection From BourbonBarrel Foods.

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I’ve lived most of my life in Minnesconsin. It’s my name for a region that encompasses a good sized portion of both Minnesota and Wisconsin. Having lived on both sides of the imaginary line that runs down the center of the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers, I know from experience that the culture of both is essentially the same. They both celebrate deer hunting in the Fall and fishing pretty much any time of year. They both call a casserole a “hotdish.” They both have a weird fondness for Jello with other foodstuffs inserted into it. And farming, both dairy and corn, is a major industry. I guess the major point of difference is whether the football teams you root for wear green and yellow and red and white or purple and yellow and maroon and gold.  

Historically, in both places, the food has been bland and tended to be either white or transparent. I don’t think it was until I started to travel to St. Paul as a teenager that I realized that food should have spices. The fanciest we got was to sprinkle a little garlic salt on the venison when Mom wasn’t looking. 

I think this might be why I like to cook so much. I love flavor. I love to see how various ingredients play and meld and sometimes create something new. It’s the reason I love bourbon too. It is seldom that you will describe a bourbon's flavor as delicate. 

It was with all this in mind that, while at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, I stopped by the Bourbon Barrel Foods booth. I like bourbon, good things tend to come from barrels, and I like foods. I was curious to see what sort of concoctions came from a combination of the three. 

Initially, I grabbed a container of Bourbon Smoked Pepper and the Woodford Reserve Bourbon Smoked Chef’s Spice Blend. Both were wonderfully rich and smokey. I use the black pepper to season eggs for breakfast, and I love the Chef’s Spice Blend on every meat I cook on the grill. Hamburgers, chicken, steak, you name it, it works on all of them. It even tastes good on potatoes. Really some killer stuff.

I liked that Bourbon Smoked Chef’s Spice Blend so much that I soon used it up. Luckily they also sell on their website. So I popped another container of the spice blend in my cart and went looking at the rest of the items they offered. 

Woodford Reserve Bourbon Smoked Lemon Pepper
This uses the Bourbon Smoked Pepper, lemon peel, onion, garlic and various other spices. It’s tasty enough. I tried it on chicken and fish, but I suppose it would work on anything you might want lemon pepper flavored. 

Bourbon Smoked Sugar
Beautifully smoky on the nose and mouth. Once I purchased this, I had a hard time deciding how I was going to use this. I wouldn’t want that kind of smoke flavor on my morning oatmeal. And though it might taste good in a cookie, I didn’t buy it in a package big enough to use that way. Eventually, I came up with the perfect use for it, though. Simple syrup for an Old Fashioned. It adds just a hint of smoke and complexity to the drink. 

Bourbon Smoked Garlic Salt
I can see the salt crystals. I can see the dried garlic. I can certainly smell the garlic, but I don’t get any overt smoke on this one. That said it is still one of the better garlic salts I’ve used. Unfortunately, I use only a bare minimum of salt in my cooking, and I use garlic salt even less. Good thing I only sprung for the .75 ounce container. I have a feeling this one will stick around for a while.  

These folks are creating some excellent stuff. I’m enjoying almost all of them and will certainly be looking for more. Thankfully it looks like some of their products are available in Minnesota. Apparently, I’m not the only Minnesconsin resident that has woken up to the fact that it is ok to have flavorful food.

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Orange-Spiced Cocktail Cherries

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Last weekend I took a long weekend away to spend with my niece and nephew in Door County, WI. If you haven’t been there, it is the peninsula that juts out of the side of Wisconsin into Lake Michigan. One of the things that Door County residents are very proud of is their cherries. If you make a fruit product in Door County, you better have at least one expression that contains cherries. Cherry jam, jelly, wine, vodka, soap, cider, ice cream, candy, you name it. And while I’m not any sort of judge of cherries, I don’t even particularly like them. When you are there, and they are in season, it’s hard not to come home with at least a quart of them.

Luckily even though I don’t eat cherries, every time I get some, I decide to try to make my own cocktail cherries. Because even though I may not like cherries by themselves, they do play really nicely with bourbon and rye whiskey.

The last time I made some, it was chocolate bourbon cherries because those were the ingredients I had on hand that year. Thanks to my recent exploration of Michael Dietsch’s Whiskey cocktail book, I find I have a lot more items to play with this time. I really like Manhattans, so this year, I tried to really think about what flavors I wanted to include in my Manhattan so I would end up with the perfect garnish. I used cherry puree because some of my favorite bourbons have a ripe cherry note to them. I used dry curaçao because I prefer orange bitters to aromatic in my Manhattan. I used New Riff new make rye and Old Grand-dad 114 to give it a flavor that would play nice with the bourbon or rye. I used the spices from the Brandied Cherry Recipe in Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s The Bar Book because I thought they would play nice in my drink. 

Orange-Spiced Cocktail Cherries

Pit one quart of fresh tart cherries (mine was about 1 2/3 pounds). You will need one pound for the recipe and the remainder for the cherry juice. (if you are looking for a cherry pitter, I recommend the OXO Cherry Pitter. It works great and isn’t expensive.)

Syrup Ingredients

1 cup cherry “juice" (Puree the remaining pitted tart cherries (about 2/3 pounds) in a blender, run it through a fine mesh screen, and add water to the result until it makes 1 cup)

1 cup sugar

Syrup Spices

1 tbsp cinnamon chunks (crushed cinnamon sticks)

1 tbsp Juniper berries

1 tbsp whole Allspice 

1 whole Star Anise (broken up slightly)

Syrup Sprits

2.5 fluid ounce Dry Curaçao 

1.5 fluid ounce New Riff new make rye

4 fluid ounce Bourbon

In a medium saucepan, combine the cherry juice, the sugar, and the spices and bring to a simmer (not a boil). If you want to avoid straining it later, tie the spices up in a piece of cheesecloth so you can fish them out). Once the mixture is at a simmer, let it simmer for 5 minutes to infuse the spices. Then add in your pound of pitted tart cherries. You’re just looking to warm up the cherries, not cook them, so stir them a few times and pull it from the heat.

At this point, the cherries should be well below boiling, but measure it to be sure. Once it is below 160 degrees (you don’t want that alcohol boiling off), add your spirits and stir. 

You have a couple of choices at this point. If you make a lot of cocktails, you can just pack them in a mason jar and pop them into the fridge. If you think you might need it to last longer, you can put them into half-pint or pint jars and process them in a hot water bath canner for ten minutes to can it. This is what I did. I ended up with three half-pint jars to use later and about half a jar of the same size that I will use right away. 

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My new favorite “Small Batch” bourbon

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Last week I decided to try something. I’d read an article describing a recipe for peach infused bourbon. Having had a few peach and bourbon cocktails, I was excited to try it myself. I love making infusions, though as I have stated on more than one occasion, I like making them more than drinking them. I almost always end up dumping them out after about a year in the cupboard.

Being the geeky obsessive type, I decided that I really needed the right bourbon to infuse. It had to really capture the caramel and vanilla flavors as well as present a nice spiciness that could stand up to the peach.

I did a little looking through my notes and decided that Maker’s 46 would be darn near perfect…except I didn’t have any. So after thinking about it for a bit I decided to actually look at what I did have in the house. I’d decided that a nice soft wheater would probably be perfect. Looking at my selection of wheated bourbons I landed first on Larceny, but I wanted the proof to be somewhere in the 100 proof plus range (as higher proof alcohols will absorb the other flavors faster) and Larceny was only 92. Then I looked at Old Weller Antique. It had the proof, but was also a bit too hot for what I was thinking. 

I eventually decided that I was going to blend the two. This way, maybe I could have the best of both worlds. As I was standing there though, I had another thought. This year’s Evan Williams Single Barrel was pretty caramel and spice forward as well. And then I looked over at the Booker’s on the shelf. That batch, though strong, also presented those flavors well.

I was recently asked how I go about deciding what to put into a blend. This is a perfect example of how I go through the blending process. First I start with a goal. In this case I had a flavor profile in mind. Caramel forward with a nice spice. Then I go about finding those ingredients that will give me that flavor. Of course there is often some trial and error. I normally start with equal parts and move from there should the need arise. But in this case, everything just clicked right from the start at equal proportions. 

I really think this is the best blend I’ve made. And that includes the experiments I did with all the Four Roses Single barrels. But here is the best part: all of these bourbons are readily available in most parts of the country. 

Arok’s Small Batch - Mix of distilleries edition

Details: Equal parts of Larceny (Heaven Hill), Evan Williams Single Barrel 2006 vintage (Heaven Hill), Old Weller Antique (Buffalo Trace) and Booker’s Batch# 2013-6 (Beam). Approximate final ABV is 51.44%.

Nose: Initially the nose on this is very closed. It really benefits from some time in the glass. After sitting for a bit, there is a very strong caramel and vanilla presence. Subtle hints of fruit follow along with a nice almond scent. Overall this is the type of very sweet nose that I could sit and smell all day.

Mouth: Some nice heat. Strong caramel and vanilla presence again along with black pepper, almond, hints of cherry and some nice oak tannins.

Finish: Long, spicy finish with lingering black pepper and oak tannins. 

I’ve already stated my thoughts above. I think this is the best blend I’ve created to date and it is one that I will probably be coming back to on more than one occasion. But I’m guessing you are asking how it worked with the peaches…and to be fair, I really don’t know. It was too good to use in that way. So if you have the ingredients on hand I really recommend trying this. And if it isn’t quite right for you think about what will make it better and adjust it. See if you can’t dial in your new favorite small batch bourbon.

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Barbecue Sauce made from MB Roland Kentucky Black Dog

Disclaimer: I consider Paul and Merry Beth of MB Roland to be my friends and in my statement of ethics I promised to disclose when I am sharing one of my friend’s products and to only review them when it was truly something I really liked. While there is no review, one of their products does play a featured part in this post.

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Minnesota is a cold place. We normally get snow until April. We get cold rains until mid June. And the threat of snow starts coming up sometime between mid September and the end of October. But summer? Summer is grilling season. Sure summer doesn’t last long, but that means that you just need to make the best of it. Every night from the Fourth of July until Labor Day the air in my neighborhood is filled with the smell of someone’s grill. It’s a magical time. 

Last week, I finished the last bottle of barbecue sauce from my last trip to Memphis. There is a barbecue place there that makes a sauce I just love and I stock up every time I drive through. In a pinch it’s available on Amazon, but I got to thinking that it might be fun to make my own. And of course, if I was going to do that, it would probably have to have some whiskey in it.

The idea of a whiskey barbecue sauce is not new. There are a ton of them out on the market. Go into any store and you’ll probably find two or three. The problem is that most of those are very sweet. I personally don’t care for sweet sauces. They just aren’t my thing. I like a sauce with a tad more tangy vinegar in it. Of course the first thing I did was look online. I looked at whiskey based sauces and most of them still looked too sweet. So I took a step back and thought for a minute.

A bourbon based sauce would be sweet to complement the sweetness of the bourbon, but what if I didn’t use bourbon? I started diggging through my whiskey shelves. When I pulled out the MB Roland Kentucky Black Dog I knew I had hit upon something. Black Dog is unaged whiskey distillate. The first step of creating it is to smoke the corn. And that smoke really comes through on the finished product. It is sweet, but hits you with a full head of smoke. I thought that this would be the perfect thing to build my sauce upon. I also grabbed some of their St. Elmo’s Fire, a cinnamon and cayenne flavored spirit to add a little heat.

The first step in making this was to see what it would taste like when I substituted it for bourbon in a whiskey barbecue sauce recipe I had used before and enjoyed. (I like this one from AmazingRibs.com because I really like what making the whiskey reduction does for the sauce.) I tried it and it was pretty tasty. Still too sweet for me, but I could tell I was on the right track.

So then I got down to work and after some delicious trial an error came up with the following.

Black Dog Barbecue Sauce 

Makes about 1 cup of sauce. (All quantities are U.S. Fluid Ounces.)

Start by making the reduction: 

• 4 oz MB Roland Kentucky Black Dog
• 1 oz MB Roland St. Elmo’s Fire

In a small sauce pan, bring the spirits to a boil and let reduce. When you are finished you want to have a little over a tablespoon of liquid remaining. Please supervise this step. You are putting flammable liquid over heat and you don’t want it to catch fire. Once you have the reduction finished, remove from heat and add the everything else to the sauce pan.

Everything Else: 

• 3.5 oz Tomato Ketchup
• 2 oz MB Roland Kentucky Black Dog
• 1.67 oz Dark Molasses
• 0.75 oz Apple Cider Vinegar
• 0.5 oz MB Roland St. Elmo’s Fire
• 0.5 oz Worchestershire Sauce
• 0.5 oz Dijon Mustard
• 0.5 oz Tomato Sauce
• Pinch of Kosher salt
• Pinch of black pepper
• Pinch of granulated garlic powder
• Pinch of granulated onion powder

Stir thoroughly and bring back to a simmer. Let it reduce until it has reached your desired thickness. 

I’m really proud of this one. The sauce is sweet from the MB Roland spirits, ketchup and molasses but tangy from the vinegar and vinegar containing products (ketchup, mustard, Worchestershire, etc). It has just the tiniest touch of spice and enough smoke to play really nicely with meat. 

This was pretty tasty on a burger, but where it really shined was on some pulled pork that we brought home from a local barbecue joint. I’m going to need to head back to Kentucky, I think. My bottle of Black Dog is almost empty.

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BourbonGuy.com accepts no advertising. It is solely supported by the sale of the hand-made products I sell at the BourbonGuy Gifts Etsy store. If you'd like to support BourbonGuy.com, visit BourbonGuyGifts.com. Thanks!