The Japanese Cocktail Recipe

The Japanese Cocktail, another one of those slightly obscure drinks, this one uses brandy as its key ingredient or cognac but what's the difference? Brandy, cognac, armagnac sometimes it gets confusing. Welcome to the Cocktail Spirit on Small Screen Network. I'm your host Robert Hess. Now, brandy is interesting product. A lot of people kind of get confused by especially if this is brandy its cognac, what's the difference between cognac and brandy? Well the main difference is that cognac is brandy it’s just made from the cognac region of France. So they take great pride in the brandy to make there so they applied the name of the region to it. Armagnac similarly is named after the region the Armagnac region of France and so Armagnac is also a brandy. The main reason why we don’t hear about Armagnac is often we do a cognac is because cognac is all actually you got a short line associated to it makes it easier to actually shift the cognac out of the cognac region to other places in the world or Armagnac is land bound and so its harder to distributed. And that’s why we don’t hear about Armagnac as often. They're both excellent versions of brandy but they taste slightly different on each other but I would say Armagnac is just as good if not better in some cocktails than cognac is. Unfortunately here in America we don’t get Armagnac as often. So what exactly is brandy? Well, it comes from France mostly and France you know is known for wine or all of that brandy is distilled wine. That the cognac region or any region that’s making brandy will take and take their wine and distill it in order to increase the alcohol it content there by turning in to the brandy. Officially to be called a brandy you have to make from fruit so it distilled spirit made from fruit. So you can have pear brandy, apricot brandy, apple brandy or grape brandy which is what brandy is. When it just says brandy you know it’s made from grapes or from wine. If it’s made from some other fruit it has to say the name of the fruit on top of it. The cocktail I'm going to make for you now that uses brandy is called the Japanese Cocktail. The Japanese Cocktail is another one of those rather of screw cocktails that very few bartenders are going to know. It’s also fairly old. Joy Thomas wrote about it not in his first book but in his second book that he wrote. In the first book that one took and had both his mix drinks recipes as well as recipes as well as recipes for bitters and other bar things that was written by somebody else. Then he took and separates the book out and created a new edition and May 1887 in which it just his cocktail so the second book was not included in this book. You know this one he included the recipe for the Japanese Cocktail. Japanese Cocktail was really quite simple. It’s made with two ounces of brandy. Like I said in this case I'm actually using cognac to a certain extend it doesn’t matter you can use brandy or cognac. And then a half ounce of Orgeat syrup. Now Orgeat syrup can be difficult to find with the increase popularity of coffee bars and stuff like that are using various syrup for flavoring the coffee you can usually find Orgeat syrup anywhere they're selling coffee syrup at. If you can't find the Orgeat syrup you can use almond syrup instead. They're basically the exact same thing the main difference you're going to notice is that Orgeat syrup is cloudy while almond syrup is going to be clear. I have seen some almond syrup are cloudy and I've seen some Orgeat syrup that are clear but for the most part that’s the main difference. Orgeat syrup also should technically have a little bit of orange flower water added to it but I really can't notice that from a flavor standpoint and especially in a cocktail with that other thing going on you're not going to pickup that little tiny bit of orange flower water might be there so you can't find the Orgeat just get regular almond syrup. So adding half an ounce of Orgeat syrup to our two ounces of cognac and then we’re adding a couple of dashes of brandy or a brandy we already add the brandy were a couple of dash of Angostura Bitters. Now since this included a slightly cloudy ingredient the Orgeat syrup we could shake this cocktail. Myself I still like stirring at though so I'm going to stir this one. We’re going to strain this and lemon twist for garnish, lemon twist on this one and again taking the yellow of the twist and rubbing on the outside of the glass before I drop it in. And now we have the Japanese Cocktail.