Battle Sage — Hajime!

The illustrious Stumbling Dragon came up with our first subject of Cocktail Kumite: Sage. It is a delightful aromatic leaf, one I highly recommend in this recipe for roasted/braised chicken, and just like mint, it seemed like a natural fit for cocktails.
It was not.
As Mr. Blood and Sand mentioned, the aroma is a small part of sage's flavor profile, with the rest tasting like you took a variety of shrubs and decaying leaves and blended them into a distasteful vegetal mess. The trick of any sage cocktail was to harness the good bits we know and love while masking the trash.

One of the drinks I made is lost to history, a fate it deserved. All I can say is that making a good sage syrup was harder than I expected.

My second concoction was considerably better. Inspired by sage in fruit desserts, namely its use with pear and apple, and the forehead-splittingly obvious mint julep, I made an apple-pear-sage julep. While it won't be served at Pegu Club any time soon, it does have potential:

Apple-Pear-Sage Julep

• 2 parts bourbon
• 1 part pear brandy
• 1 part applejack (this could be favorably replaced by calvados, if you had the resources)
• 2 or 3 medium sized leaves sage, plus one.
• 1/4 teaspoon sugar (or more)
• dash Benedictine
• twist of lemon

Put the sugar, maybe the Benedictine, and the sage leaves into a tumbler and muddle like there is no tomorrow. It's the only way to get any quality sage flavor out, as best as we found. Combine everything else in a shaker, mix until cold, and add to the glass. Take the extra sage leaf and rub it around the lip of the glass to get the sage aroma out and squeeze the drink with the lemon twist.

I think this actually has some merit, but as with pretty much everything else that all three of us created, it would have been better without the sage. Actually, no, the aromatic sage on the glass is a nice gimmick, but the muddled sage probably was more useful for inspiration than actual flavor.

As an aside, try to make the Tenochtitlan. It is amazing.

The Story So Far: Stumbling Dragon

Although I consider myself a junior mixmaster, I've had a few successes over the past few months. These are my favorites:

Sage Battle: I tried to make a sage julep here. It wasn't particularly sagey, but it turns out that bourbon is delicious. I'd like to revisit sage in the future, but I found it to be tricky the first time around.

The South Will Rise Again: The idea with this drink was to capture the platonic ideal of "swamp," without actually tasting like swamp water.

Swamp Thing (Original)

• 3/4 oz Bourbon
• 3/4 oz Green Chartreuse
• Top off with club soda

Sparkling: My favorite this time was a traditional cocktail – Wikipedia claims that it was first invented in 1861. I think that choosing the right beer makes all the difference, although I suppose it would be more correct to say that it makes 50% of the difference. The recipe calls for stout, but since the stout is going to be mixed, I think that choosing one that is a bit more reserved is a good idea. I went with New Holland's "Dragon's Milk," which is technically not a stout, but is dark, malty, and a bit creamy. I prefer something a bit more bitter for drinking straight, but it worked well here.

Black Velvet (Traditional)

• 1 part Dragon's Milk
• 1 part champagne

Some recipes suggest that you should float the champagne on the stout. I think it's much tastier, and more attractive, to mix them.

Sweet Vermouth: I wound up putting together a variation on the Americano. Although this sounded pretty tasty by itself, I didn't have any Campari on hand, and wanted to try something a little different. I think the result is quite palatable.

Ceco (Original)

• 3 parts sweet vermouth
• 2 parts Becherovka
• dash orange bitters
• splash of club soda

If you're not familiar with it, Becherovka is a Czech bitters (thus "Ceco"). Actually, I would describe it as a clove liqueur, but the important thing is that it is tasty, and now not too hard to find in the USA. It's not nearly so aggressive as Campari, so the resulting drink is a bit smoother than an Americano. The orange bitters were suggested by my fellow mixmasters, and greatly improve the drink. No, clove+orange=tasty should not be a surprise. Both of the main ingredients are pretty sweet, so the club soda helps round things out.