Steve's Gin Rickey

Hello everybody. It's been a long time, I think it's been probably at least a month since the last time we did this. Four o'clock Pacific time, which means it's time for another drink. And, I'm excited this week, I'm excited every week though. What do I say, I like drinking. Interesting, my arm is kind of bionic, so I've been taking a little bit of break from these things, in fact I've been taking a break for everything, from everything.

I ended up tearing all the tendons of my right bicep off the bone, which is a lot of fun. I'm about four weeks into this thing right now. I can't lift any more in the pound, which sucks, I just got the hard cast off a little bit ago. At least now I can move my hand and stuff, which is cool. But I've learned three different things about an injury like this that no one should have to learn, one is how to wipe left-handed when you're right-handed. It doesn't feel natural, I'm just telling you right now.

The other one is blowing your nose with one hand, is truly bizarre, maybe some of you've grown up doing it. I haven't, it's tough, it's weird. And then most recently, over the last week or so, how to make a good drink left-handed when you're a right-handed person. And that's what I've been doing, so I'm back in the swing of things. And, this drink's really fun. So this is a variant of the Gin Ricky. Rickies have been around for a long time.

In fact, the original Ricky wasn't even a Gin Ricky, we're going to get into that because I love this story. The story of the Gin Ricky, or the Ricky just in general, is actually super interesting, this is actually a drink born out of politics, and so what more perfect time for the Ricky than now, right, it was invented by Colonel Joe Ricky, and his story when it comes to the drink starts on Friday, November 30th, 1883. Now Ricky, or Joe as everyone called him, was a democratic lobbyist and was extremely charismatic.

And he was accustomed to being the center of attention. And so, he and kind of a bunch of folks were at this bar called Willard's in Washington DC. Grover Cleveland had just been elected to the president of the as the new president of the United States, the Democrats had just gained a majority in the House of Representatives. And so there was a lot of hubbub at Willard's, and all the hubbub was about, you know, who's going to be the, the Speaker of the House.

And there were two people at the time who were being considered seriously for the Speaker of the House, and one was a gentleman by the name of Samuel J Randall, and he was a favorite, and he was evidently a long time kind of blue blood, and everyone assumed that he was going to get nominated to become the new speaker of the House. And there was another gentleman, John G Carlisle, who was a southern gentleman who was an incumbent, who was kind of a firestorm, young guy, new guy to the to politics, kind of an upstart and not, he definitely wasn't an established kind of guy, right.

Now one thing about Colonel Joe Ricky is that he never made a bet that he couldn't back, or that he didn't know about. He was the kind of guy that always had insider knowledge about everything he was, he was going to wager on or do in his life, right, even even when he was an actual colonel, right, so he actually bet that night at Willard's, a thousand dollars against a 500 bet that Carlisle, this upstart, would be nominated to be the new speaker of the House, right, and it was like, oh, it's a sucker's bet, of course we'll, we'll take that bet, right, right, so Colonel Joe Ricky is betting a thousand of his dollars against 500.

of your money to say Carlisle is going to win. And I was like, that's a sucker's bet. Right, especially since Randall was incumbent. Randall was the guy that everyone thought was going to get, going to get nominated, but sure is anything, you know, Ricky seemed to have some inside information. And John G. Carlyle did indeed get the nod, right. It was a fool's bet for Ricky. He knew what was going to happen and sure enough, Carla won, as did Ricky. And his one was pretty substantial, right. It was a thousand to five hundred dollars, so he won 500, which at the time in 1883 is equivalent to about 11 000 today. So needless to say, he's pretty happy.

And so he and this kind of, you know, political rat pack or whatever decided they were going to go out and they were going to just tie one on and have, have a great time. They're living high in the hog, so they started out with a very fine dinner. That dinner turned into a very boozy breakfast, which went into a boozier lunch and another dinner. So 24 hours of constant hooping it up, drinking and celebrating, right.

The following morning, after a little sleep, they adjourned to a local bar called Schumacher's. And the idea was to get ready for the day to come because they wanted to make it over to the capital, to see the proceeding and the swearing-in of the speak of the house and all the pomp and circumstance that went along with that, right. So, for all charisma and insider knowledge, though, Ricky was still not immune to hangovers. He gets them just like everybody else, but he did have insider knowledge for the cure, and that was a little bit of hair of the dog, right, and this is the stuff I love about this story. I actually pulled a couple quotes from a different, a couple different articles, and this is, you know, allegedly what, what he said.

Gentlemen, Ricky announced, as he did with his following around the room, the bar, I'm going to invent a new drink now, and here I don't know what it's going to be, but I feel that any of the old ones would not be appealing. Pretty confident, dude, right. And I think that in that moment of time he knew that what he was about to do would be his legacy. This drink would be his legacy, right. So he went to the bartender and he had the bartender, you know, squeeze out some fresh lime juice, no pulp, no rind, just lime juice in a glass, because

he needed the acid to combat the headache and stuff that was going on, and the only place that he knew to find that was in the lime, sublime. So started with lime juice. He poured that, he had the bartender pour that over some crushed ice, and then he drizzled some of the barkeep's finest bourbon on top of that. So this was the original Ricky, and then he added some carbonated water to really mix the, the lime and the bourbon together.

And so they were thoroughly wetted, right. And this is my favorite quote from, from Colonel Ricky. Now, gentlemen, Ricky proclaimed, though we have not partaken of this drink, I know it is going to be something divine, and let us christen it the Ricky. It, as it may be, one thing by which I shall be made immortal. Let each gentleman lift his glass to his lips and his eyes to the heavens and say, we christen the o nectar for all time known as the Ricky.

Is that the [bleep] or what, that's, I love these stories. It's totally awesome. So the Ricky was born. Now today there are all kinds of Rickey's, right? That's the original Ricky, super simple, and it actually sounds a lot like a whiskey sour if you pay attention, right, because It's bourbon, it's lime juice and it's soda water. Now whiskey sour is a little bit different, right? You've got lemon instead of lime and we typically use sugar, right, instead of soda, but it's pretty close. But there's all kinds Of rickies, there's rye whiskeys, there are bourbon Rickeys, There are brandy ricky's and gin ricky's.

And This particular ricky's my favorite, it's kind of a riff I do off the gin ricky, and I call it Steve's gin ricky. I know it's amazing, that the naming potential there for this drink. But I really like it. But there, there's one more story I want to talk about, about the gin ricky in particular. So Colonel Ricky actually committed suicide in 1903. No one really knows why he did it, some people think that he was depressed, but nobody really knows why. But before he died, he was living in New York, and this is about 1900, and he was sitting in a bar and a patron came up to the bartender and said, I would like a gin ricky, and of course Colonel Ricky's sitting right next to him and says, uh, jyn ricky.

sir, there is no such thing. I am from Missouri, sir, my name is Ricky. and I am the fortunate inventor of this mattress drink called the ricky. and it is bourbon, right?" So obviously the ricky was famous a long time ago. um, but Colonel Ricky only liked bourbon Rickeys, right, and I think one of the reasons why it got so many different forms and so many variants is because it really adheres to our rules of drinks, right? You've got some type of a booze or liquor, you've got some type of an acid, lemon, lime, something like that, and usually some type of a sugar, in this case it's soda water, right, but the variance I'm sure happened you know, super quick and, and super fast.

So let's get into this, Uh, this gin ricky, the first thing I want to do though, like, I don't think I've ever done a plug, I'm going to do a plug for this thing. About a year ago, I back a lot of fun stuff on Kickstarter, I backed this thing, it's called the Elevated Shakers by Elevated Craft. And this is the best shaker I've ever had, bar none. You should all go to elevatedcraft.com and buy one, I'm not getting paid for this, but this thing is awesome. So let me tell you why I like, right here it's stainless steel, and it's double barrel, which and, and insulated, right, so usually when I shake stuff up, it's super cold and you see the condensation on the outside.

Not with this bad boy, it's awesome, right? It doesn't get cold, you can feel this thing full of eyes, it's not going to freeze your hand Okay, the other thing I like about this thing is instead of popping off, everything screws down, you've got these nice washers here, and everything screws in here really nicely, so when your shaker gets really cold, sometimes it's hard to top or pop the top off, like, no worries here, it's just a screw, right, and with my arm being so hosed up, I mean, you can tell it's super easy to screw and unscrew. The other thing I like is, you can't really see it, I don't, oh, you can.

So we've got these corrugated levels here, and one side is ounces and the other side is milliliters, and it's actually acts as a measuring jigger which is freaking awesome, right, so it starts at one ounce, it goes all the way up to six ounces or 180 milliliters in this thing, and it actually measures half ounces as well, so this is super cool. And kind of the icing on the top is you've got a screw top filter.

I love that, instead of trying to pop that bad boy off, it just screws on and off, super nice. So I love this shaker, I really like it, I kick started about a year ago, I just got this a couple weeks ago. Um, and I, I, it's already my favorite shaker, I love this thing. So enough of a plug, but if you like to make drinks and you are looking for a new shaker, Elevated Craft, this thing is, it's awesome, like, like I said, it's my New shaker, I'm gonna use this all the time, so. What do we need for the gin ricky? Well, we need gin, we need dry gin, preferably, and the reason why dry gin is because, with a lot of the American flavor gins, they kind of expand from just the normal juniper taste, and that tends to sometime can, can actually make it taste better, other times can kind of dilute the taste of the ricky. In this case, I'm just going for a pure taste, right? So that's why I use dry gin.

By the way, we talked about this in the previous one. Dry gin, London gin, they're the same, a lot of times it's London dry gin. Usually I use Beefeater, but this time I went out and got some, this Costco London dry gin, just because I needed some gin, I needed a dry gin. My wife was at Costco, she said, hey, look, I got this thing, it's like, I think it was like 35 bucks for a half gallon, and I drink enough gin, I'm like, sure, let's at least try it, if it sucks, I haven't really spent that much money. It's actually pretty darn good, so we got a dry gin.

We have a freshly squeezed lime juice, that's a freshly squeezed, I squeezed this last night to prepare for this. We've got simple syrup, sugar water, right, some soda water, club soda, and some fresh mint. Okay, so the first thing we're going to do, like with every good drink, you should always, if you haven't tried the booze you're trying, you should always try it. I'm using a bit of a different jigger this time, just because I'm one-handed, it's easier for me to use this thing, I think I showed you guys, it's a kind of traditional American jigger, it's an oxo and oxo one I just got from Amazon, but it's got, it's nice because it's flat.

It's got really easy measurements so it's easy for me to use one-handed, this is actually pretty easy for me to do. But we're gonna do a couple three quarter pours, this is really good for solid and half ounce pours, on three quarters I kind of have to look a little bit harder, and I just don't feel like doing it with one hand, so, but anyway, we're gonna try some of this Kirkland gin, because I'm a firm believer that you should try every booze straight before you put in a drink.

It's actually really good for a dry gin. Most people don't like gin because it tastes like you're drinking a christmas tree, and I would argue that it tastes like that, you're drinking some super cheap gin. Now gin has, it's essentially a vodka that's infused with juniper berries, then that's the flavor of gin, right, and a dry gin is pretty much just juniper, this Kirkland stuff is actually really good. It's not overly juniper-ish, e.

it's super smooth, it's super light, very easy to drink, like this is, could be a good sipping gin. In fact, it's funny, it's got a little bit of like the botanicals of what I would call a typical American gin, that's kind of off the straightened path of a normal dry gin, so I'm not sure what the mix is. I'd be interesting to know who made this stuff for Costco. It's actually pretty good, so if you're looking for a, a decent, you know, dry gin, the the cop, the Costco Kirkland brand, it's pretty good.

So let's go ahead and start, first thing we're going to do, we're going to take some of that lovely mint, okay, we're gonna take the leaves, we're gonna put them in our shaker, okay, now I'm gonna take I'm gonna, four, let's take five or six leaves, let's take like six leaves and put them in there, okay, and we're going to muddle them, now remember when we muddle mint, we don't want to smash it, we don't want to, to break up the mint, you want to carefully just kind of bruise it, what you're looking to do is you're looking to kind of express the, or express the the mint flavor out of the mint itself, without ripping the mint leaf up, because if you, if you kind of muddle too hard, and you rip up the leaf, you're going to get chlorophyll in there, we're not using a lot of mince, you probably wouldn't know anyway, but it can change the, the taste of the drink.

So you just kind of want to be careful. You kind of just, you know, twist gently. You'll be able to see the bruises on the mint. If you're doing it the right way, and that's good, you don't want to see holes, you want to see bruises, okay. Okay, so muddled mint, that's good. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to add a ton of ice.

Ice. Awesome, got our ice and a shaker, okay. Let's start with the booze, we're gonna add two ounces of dry gin. Oops, a little bit more, maybe two and a half ounces, not bad, more booze is not a bad thing. And the thing about this particular gin is actually pretty smooth, it's pretty lightweight for a gin, so you know, you if you over pour, it's not gonna like ruin the drink at all, not that boring, too much booze is gonna ruin injury.

Okay, let's take our lime and we're gonna put about three quarters of an ounce of lime juice, right between half an ounce and three quarters of an ounce. Okay, and the nice thing about this particular jigger is everything below one ounce, it actually does in quarter ounces and you can see it really easy. All right, so we got three ounces, or three quarters of an ounce of lime juice, now we're going to use our simple syrup, remember this is just sugar water.

It's just equal parts granulated sugar and water. Boil the water, stir it up until it's super saturated, or not, sorry, not super saturated, until the the sugar totally gets dissolved, I got a little bit too much in there. I don't want too much, there we go. And then just put it in some kind of glass container, I think I told you guys this, I always put a little bit of vodka in here, and the reason why I put a little bit of vodka in with my simple syrup is because it lets it last longer, keeps it from molding.

So you can have it in your fridge longer. It's a nice little tip, don't put a lot of vodka in there, maybe like you know, for every cup of, or every two cups of simple syrup, maybe a tablespoon of vodka, somewhere between you know, a half a tablespoon, a tablespoon of vodka, not a lot, but enough to you know, keep it from from spoiling, okay, so now I've got everything in our shaker, we've muddled our mint, we've poured our gin, we've poured our lime, we have poured our simple syrup, that's awesome, now we shake it.

Let's see, that's the one thing, like before, you can always tell with my shaker that I've always used how kind of cold it was by feeling it. It's insulated so you don't get that, but it's totally off. Okay, got that shaking. Totally awesome, just screw that top off, we're going to grab a highball glass, we're going to fill that highball glass full of ice.

Yummy, yummy. Perfect, how about glass. Meat concoction. And I, I, I love having a strainer on my jig, or on my shaker, it's totally awesome. It's, it's really good, it, it prevents you from having to get your own skin or something like that, and this thing's awesome, I love that, now what we're going to do we're going to take our club soda, we're going to put a couple ounces, maybe 2-3 ounces of club soda in there, top it off.

And as a garnish we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna put a nice little mint sprig, look at that, that's just a lovely little drink now. If you like cucumber, remember I told you there's a variant with cucumber. You can actually take a cucumber slice and muddle it with the mint. I'm not a big cucumber fan, but actually it works out okay. Cucumber kind of has a summery taste when you mix it with drinks sometimes, and this drink is definitely a light drink. You could also use a cucumber coin as a garnish, right, but I like mint.

So this is the Steve Gin Ricky. Two ounces of dry gin, three quarters of an ounce of lime juice, three quarters of an ounce of simple syrup, shaken, poured over rocks. Add club soda, you know, two, three ounces of club soda, and a nice garnish of lime, cheers. That's a super yummy drink. One thing about this drink, if you're not a big fan of club soda, you don't really have to add the club soda to it, it's a really good drink without the club soda.

The one, the nice thing about the club soda is it just makes it a much lighter, much more refreshing drink, mostly because it's diluting the alcohol. But the other thing is, is the club soda, it's not like adding water that vents their effervescence, in it, the carbonation in it actually kind of adds a little extra something. And club soda, obviously, it doesn't taste just like water, it's got a little flavor in it, and it adds to the drink. So you don't have to use a club soda, but I recommend using club soda. If nothing else, then if you're going to be drinking a lot of these, you won't drink as many, maybe I don't know.

So that is the Steve Gin Ricky. Hope you guys like it, I certainly do. I'm not sure how many more of these I'm gonna be drinking tonight. I don't know, we'll see, but super good. Colonel Joe Ricky, obviously this was his legacy to the world, thank you, Joe. So don't know what we're gonna do next week, or if we'll do something next week. We'll see, kind of as the mood strikes me. I actually found some really good Bourbon Cream, maybe I'll make something with that, maybe we'll make something like, you know, as we're moving into the fall, maybe we'll make some BSB drinks, we talked about those before, some of these brown sugar bourbon drinks that you can only really make with brown sugar bourbon.

BSB is cheap, you can get it for like 15, 18 bucks a fifth, it's not expensive, but the drinks they make, these harvest punches and these fall punches, they're really good, you know, we haven't made any kind of White Russian or Black Russian, those are always super good, kind of in the fall, those always remind me of fall, the winter time, stuff like that, so we may start getting into some more hearty drinks, as opposed to, you know, gin drinks or vodka drinks. Although, you know, the Black Russian is a vodka drink technically.

But we'll see, anyway, thanks for tuning in, guys. It's been a long time, I'm hope you got something out of it. Steve's Gin Ricky, super awesome, super easy, super good, super refreshing. And Colonel Joe Ricky, God bless you for giving us this lime sublime drink, cheers everybody. And I will maybe see you next week, we'll find out. Bye.