Unique Cocktail Ingredients from Around the World

You’re away from Blighty, you see an amazing bottle/fruit/random meat product and you decide it’ll be perfect in an incredible unique cocktail creation. But did it actually work? Clinton Cawood checks the postcards home

You know the story. A freezing-cold lager in the sunshine that you know objectively is bordering on flavourless, but is nevertheless right now contributing towards a transcendent holiday moment you’ll be boring people about for years to come. Or maybe it’s the taste of a local spirit when you’re so far off the beaten track you’re sure you’ll be hailed a hero on your return, a bottle of The Next Big Thing held aloft. No matter what your experience or training may say, you’re convinced this will be on your cocktail list back home.

But even as you’re in the grip of this epiphany, there’s a nagging voice in the back of your mind. Have you really struck gastronomical gold, or will this crumble into just so much dust and disappointment the minute you step off the plane?

These are the stories of bartenders that dared to dream. That risked bottles with reckless luggage handlers and braved customs regulations to bring their holiday ingredients back home.

Luckily, in most cases, the results were rather nicer than you might expect.

To make our Islay Coladas, we straight infused the gorse flowers into a few different spirits and made a syrup with the pineapple weed to preserve the freshness of the flavour, and used sorrel water for the citrus.

I’ve since found a gorse tree in Clissold Park in east London that I rinse for flowers regularly. They have flowers all year round, but you need them to be open, usually in spring, to get the full advantage of the flavour. Now I see it everywhere and grab it when I can.

Gorse sherry is pretty bang on too and can be added to simple classics for a bit of added complexity.

I also made a drink with Génépi, Brooklyn Lager foam and cornichon, but that was pretty minging.

Mastiha’s flavour is hard to pin down. It’s citrusy, earthy and green. I’ve never tasted anything like it. The drink I made with it is incredibly simple, but works because of the flavour of the mastiha.

I combined it with sage native to that area, a bit of orgeat, lemon juice, soda and a touch of saline to hark back to that idea of being next to the ocean.

When I moved to Manchester last year, I found that not only was Roots Mastiha beginning to gain traction, but so was Freya Birch Spirit. That’s two spirits, both made from tree sap and both being used in different bars in the city.

Even weirder, there was already a drink on our menu that used Freya, also with saline and something green. And another bar was using Roots with sage and orgeat. Those flavours just work.

There was some trial and error. Cooking the broth into grain spirits, shaking directly into drinks, scratching off the naturally-produced white powder on the kombu that gives the MSG flavours and putting that into a syrup… nothing was holding. The flavour was intense and slightly saline with a meaty texture for the first two to three days, but it dissipated into a weak kelp-like flavour by the end of the week.

We settled on a more common form of seaweed, vac-packing it into a 3:1 sugar syrup and making sure it was used within 14 days. For the next edition of the menu, we’re working on controlling that MSG flavour for use in a new drink.

My hardwired bartending brain immediately started thinking of how I could incorporate this salty, spicy and slightly sweet ingredient into the bar back at home.

Passing through Cape Town on the way back I picked up a bottle of KWV Cruxland, a beautifully-crafted South African gin with 100% grape spirit redistilled with a Namibian variety of truffle. Biltong and this earthy, spicy spirit would be the perfect partner in crime in crafting a truly South African drink.

I left the biltong in high-abv neutral alcohol for three days to make a tincture, and the results were outstanding. I made a twist on a Dry Martini – the Braai Martini (after the Afrikaans word for barbecue) – combining Cruxland gin, hickory-smoked dry vermouth and a few dashes of biltong tincture, served straight up and ice cold.

In the bar, however, this brought debate over using meat in mixed drinks, and of course the sustainability and locality of a drink with its predominant ingredients shipped over 8,000 miles. So the drink never made the list.

I brought back a few to try in a Margarita, which was extraordinary. I also brought back 4.5kg of mangoes (along with 2kg of señorita bananas and seven bottles of alcohol), so I mixed fresh local Philippine mango, a Philippine mango rum liqueur, Philippine dark rum and mint, and shook that with calamansi juice to create a sort of Mango Mojito. Amazing!

On the other hand, I brought back a coconut wine made from pure fermented coconut that at home tasted like nothing more than vinegar.

Once back on home turf, we brought in a whole jackfruit that we pulled apart and used for many, many things. But our favourite thing was making a Jackfruit Colada in our slushie machine, an amazing combination of jackfruit, Bacardi and fauxco lopez (made in-house by cooking whey with coconut chips). One of the best things about a Piña Colada is the slight saltiness that the pineapple lends, giving it a touch of savoury. In this drink, the Jackfruit and fauxco lopez both provide a distinct savoury element, giving it an unexpected umami kick.

We’re fortunate in London to be at an epicentre of world culture where influences from every continent mix and mingle to produce sometimes startling results, which means the city is awash with ingredients you would have difficulty finding elsewhere in the UK, if not most of the world, apart from the source. But it’s often the case that we only seek out things that are right under our noses once we’ve discovered them on the other side of the world.

This article was updated from one that was originally published in imbibe live magazine on November 01, 2018