Adventures in Milk Clarification

PART 1: DESIGNING A WEDDING COCKTAIL

First, let’s set the stage and describe the occasion and the cocktail we designed for it.

A while back, my good friend Ethan Hall, who has been a guest on this show many times, announced that he and his lovely girlfriend were engaged to be married, and I immediately knew that no matter where this wedding was going to happen, no matter what it looked like, I was going to make sure that there would be some kind of bad-ass drink involved. I’ve done it a few times in the past where I had to work with wedding caterers to batch a custom drink or learn a specific cocktail build to serve the guests at a wedding reception, and I was also aware that there are many ways to skin the cat of making sure people at the wedding are properly quenched with festive tipples. I was confident that we would have this well in-hand.

So as the wedding date was chosen and Ethan and his fiancee gradually zeroed in on a venue despite the many inconveniences and uncertainties posed by the pandemic, we started kicking around some ideas. Eventually, Ethan settled on the Jungle Bird as the format that he wanted to feature, and when all the logistical dust settled, we realized that the best way to get this cocktail to people was going to be in the form of a pre-bottled drink that would be waiting for them in a gift bag when they checked in to the hotel. The venue was going to run the bar for the wedding reception, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t give friends and guests a really special drink to enjoy before or after the occasion at the time and place of their own choosing. Bottled cocktails are great for that sorta thing.

The Plot Thickens

But here’s the thing folks – here’s the sticky wicket, the fly in the ointment – a Jungle Bird contains fruit juice in the form of lime and pineapple, and fruit juice isn’t stable unless you clarify it.

Now, if you were to go to a cocktail bar and order a Jungle Bird, the bartender would shake it up for you on the spot, and you’d be finished with it long before the solids in the fruit juice dropped out of suspension and ruined the flavor and texture of the drink. But because we were going to bottle this cocktail for our guests to enjoy at a time as yet to be determined, clarification suddenly became the order of the day.

Way back in Episode 76, we did a whole episode on how to make milk punch, which is a type of milk clarified cocktail. That show walks you through the history of milk punch, as well as the science behind why something boozy, acidified, and perfectly clear can remain stable and uncompromised by mold or bacteria, even if it sits on a shelf at room temperature for years. So if you need the 101 crash course on milk punch, I’d recommend starting there. Again, that’s episode 76.

But for now, back to the Jungle Bird.

Whenever you’re trying to do something creative, having a set of constraints actually works in your favor because it narrows down a universe-worth of possibilities into a manageable and manipulatable set of options. So let’s look at what those options were for our Jungle Bird, starting with the recipe itself.

First, the booze.

From Blackstrap to a Custom Blend

A standard Jungle Bird cocktail contains an ounce and a half of rum – traditionally, blackstrap rum. This is an unofficial rum category (more like a rum “style”) and it’s a little bit hard to define except to say that the end product is somehow flavored using blackstrap molasses, which is the darkest, least sweet, and most bitter or acrid tasting version of molasses. Basically, it’s what you get when you’ve boiled almost all the sugar and water out of your cane juice. To make things more complicated, some rum producers actually ferment blackstrap molasses and use it as their distillate base, but the vast majority of rum makers in this category (especially the more commercial brands) just add it after the fact as a sweetener and a flavoring agent.

Why is blackstrap rum traditional in a Jungle Bird? Well, that drier, slightly bitter note is going to help balance the brightness and sweetness of the other ingredients in the drink: Pineapple juice, lime juice, simple syrup, and Campari.

But as Ethan and I talked through the possible builds we could do for this batched cocktail, we came to the conclusion that the guests might not really vibe with a super funky blackstrap rum – it can be a bit of an acquired taste, and weddings aren’t generally when you want to break out your controversial or experimental flavors. So we figured what we’d do is dial things back just a half step by using a custom blend of Jamaican rums designed to evoke just enough funk to make the cocktail sing, but not so much that we’d upset the more mainstream palates on the guest list.

So what did our custom blend look like?

In the end, we settled on a blend of 2 parts Plantation Dark rum, 2 parts “The Funk” Jamaican un-aged rum, and 1 part Smith & Cross Jamaican-style over-proof rum. The Smith & Cross was the booze bomb and the HOGO bomb in this situation, “The Funk” formed the nucleus of the classic Jamaican flavor we were aiming for, and the much milder Plantation Dark rum acted as a sort of “binder” that helped meld everything together.

PART 2: SOURCING INGREDIENTS AND PACKAGING

So at this point in the process: we know our cocktail, we know how we want to make it approachable for our guests, and we know that we need to clarify this sucker and stick it in bottles. We had about a month before the big day, which was plenty of time to divide the work and get down to business.

Ethan took the lead on sourcing the booze, and to be completely transparent about the rum blend I just described, that was partially dictated by what rums we had access to here in DC. So it is worth considering the advantages and pitfalls of your local market as you’re trying to source ingredients. DC happens to be a very wide-open market, but other states in the US are much more restrictive when it comes to what’s available so sometimes a trip across state lines might be worth considering, depending on where you live.

For the fresh ingredients, I turned to our specialty produce provider that we use for making our cocktail bitters. We constantly place orders for stuff like fresh citrus and fresh ginger anyway, so it was no bother to throw some pineapple juice into the mix and add a few extra pounds of limes to our next order. I also got lazy ordered some pre-made simple syrup from them because I knew that the last thing I wanted to do was have to make that stuff stove-top when I also had to do a bunch of juicing. Now, if you don’t operate out of a commercial kitchen, and happen to be sourcing produce for a large format drink, the grocery store is only going to be a little bit more expensive than what we paid, unless you need some CRAZY amount of citrus, so don’t stress out too much on that front.

Glass is in Session

Next, I cruised some bulk bottle websites and sent Ethan a few bottle options to see what he liked. The two sites we focused on primarily were specialtybottle.com and burchbottle.com (BURCH). And as a little aside here, most people don’t realize that a number of companies out there are willing to ship one, a handful, or a few cases worth of bottles right to your door. Of course, the cost continues to go down as you order larger quantities, but glass bottles are non-controversial commodity goods that aren’t hyper-regulated, so they’re generally easy to source, even as a civilian.

The one caveat I’ll give is that, here in the US, we’re currently is a bit of a glass crisis due to supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic. We don’t manufacture a whole lot of glass in America anymore, and the stuff we do make tends to be expensive, so if you’re purchasing from one of these bulk bottle suppliers, you’re certainly buying stuff that was made overseas, which means you’re subject to any number of possible disruptions in the supply chain.

So although Ethan and I had to look at a few different bottle shapes and sizes, we did finally settle on a 375ml (or roughly 12.5 oz), clear, round bottle with a screw-top closure. I mention that term because your other popular closure option is going to be something called a T-Top, which is your classic cork or synthetic stopper that goes into the bottle, attached to a round wooden or plastic disc.

So I ordered our bottles and our screw-top closures, and I sent Ethan over to Canva to design the label for this creation, which we affectionately named “The Lovebird.” Canva is a free web application that’s basically photoshop “Lite.” Everything is drag-and-drop, you can upload photos, and it’s almost completely idiot-proof, so if you do need to design anything quickly, I highly recommend it.

He designed a 3” x 3” square label, which I then downloaded and sent over to Sticker Mule, which is a service I’ve used for Modern Bar Cart stickers in the past. So I knew it was gonna be good quality, and once the orders were placed for the bottles and the labels, all we needed to do was wait for everything to arrive, and then actually make this damn drink.

PART 3: BATCHING, FILTERING, RACKING, BOTTLING

The main batching and clarifying event took place about 5 days before the wedding. I woke up and used a vintage Proctor Silex juicer (called a “Juiceit”) to get 40 ounces of fresh lime juice. This took about an hour and a half, just so we’re clear on the time commitment. I could have probably used a hand press to save some time, but it wouldn’t have given me as much juice as the machine version, so I opted for yield over efficiency.

As I mentioned earlier, lime juice is one of the problems we needed to solve for in this cocktail equation in that we needed to get all those suspended solids out of the drink. So when the pulp and juice came out of the juicer, I passed it first through a normal kitchen sieve to catch the big pulpy bits, then through a finer mesh strainer (like you’d use to double strain a daiquiri), and then finally through a nut milk or “jelly” bag. These things are absolutely brilliant for filtering juices, so if you’re doing any sort of large format batching, definitely order one for yourself. They’re completely reusable and cost less than $10.

So what you see me doing here is hedging. I knew that, in principle, we should be able to clarify this cocktail just using milk curds, but there’s no reason I couldn’t par-clarify the lime juice ahead of time to optimize for the best possible outcome.

Later that morning, Ethan rolled into my kitchen with a few bottles of Campari, three types of rum, and a gallon of whole milk. This is an important detail. Through trial and error, I’ve found that whole milk does a much better job clarifying than skim, 2%, half-and-half, or heavy cream. So long story short, use whole milk.

I had my trusty copy of the aforementioned Liquid Intelligence open to the section about milk washing and clarifying. This turned out to be important for our order of operations because in a caption on page 271, Dave writes:

Always add the liquor to the milk, not the other way around, or the milk will instantly curdle.

Now keep in mind that in this scenario, he’s referencing that black tea infused vodka, which does not contain any citrus, so if he’s saying there’s a risk of curdling even before citrus enters the equation, you’d better believe I was paying attention.

So here’s what we did:

In a 5-gallon brewer’s bucket, which is just a regular food safe plastic bucket that has a lid and and spigot at the bottom, we first poured in a gallon of milk, followed by our rum, Campari, and simple syrup. This mixture looked exactly like strawberry YooHoo, which was both intriguing and slightly disturbing.

So at this point, we’ve got a less than 2.5 gallons of pink liquid in this bucket, to which we added our blend of lime and pineapple juice (40 oz of the Lime and 120 oz of the Pineapple, which works out to about a gallon and a third of tart fruit juice).

When you add citrus to your milk and booze combo, what you’re really looking for is the formation of curds. And these little wads of milk solids float around and mop up any solids in the beverage that might be floating around in suspension. So we gave it some gentle stirring, we began to see our curds form, and we knew we were on the right track.

Now here’s where things got complicated. Or perhaps we just got a little impatient.

After letting the blend sit in the brewer’s bucket for about 5 minutes, we decided that we were going to try and filter our creation, which (in hindsight) was probably the worst thing we could have done.

And that’s because as we started dumping this liquid through strainers and filters of various sizes, we turned our milk solids from nice big curds into TINY little curds, which, it turns out, are much harder to filter.

In this moment, I knew we were a little bit hosed, and I knew there was going to be a much higher “loss rate” associated with filtering out the milk, which would give us a lower yield than we were originally expecting. So I went into damage control mode.

I knew we needed to let this mixture sit so that the curds could settle, so I took a bunch of the lime husks I had leftover from juicing earlier that morning, I threw em in a nylon nut milk bag, and I hung that bag inside the cocktail so that it could take on some of the oils from the lime peel as the curds settled over the course of about half a day.

This was because I was anticipating the need to supplement with extra ingredients before bottling, which did indeed happen. More on that in just a moment.

Over the next 2 days – yeah…this turned into a 3 day project – 2 processes became rather important: filtering and racking.

The downside to filtering is that it’s tedious and time consuming. The upside is that it can be done well if you simply focus on passing your liquid through smaller and smaller holes. If you start by just pouring your milk punch straight into a coffee filter, you’re screwed. That filter is gonna clog, and you’re at a complete stand-still. But, if you have patience and use your head, it can be done correctly.

This is where “racking” comes in. Remember how immediately straining this cocktail was a big mistake? Well, that’s because we didn’t let the curds separate from the booze and settle to the bottom of the container.

So to accelerate the racking process, I passed everything I could through a nut milk bag and then an even finer mesh filter. I then kept transferring the pale pink, chalky-looking liquid to every tall, round, empty liquor bottle I could get my hands on. I stuck these in the fridge to let them settle, and after a few hours I was able to very carefully pour the top 75% or so through a coffee filter, while recycling the bottom 25% back through the rougher filters, which were always constantly just dripping into a bucket or a pot as I answered emails and did work in the background.

Now, one thing that could have saved me a whole lot of filtering here is something called a “separatory funnel,” which you can see on page 284 of Liquid Intelligence. Basically, this is a large, conical glass vessel with a valve on the bottom that allows you to purge the solids that settle to the bottom of a suspension without disturbing the perfectly clear stuff on top. To be clear, a separatory funnel is NOT a common kitchen tool – it’s more designed for lab stuff.

But, if you envision yourself doing a lot of milk clarifying and feel that saving time is worth the investment, you can pick up a 1 Liter separatory funnel on Amazon for about $50, with 2 Liter models available around $100. The advantages of a separatory funnel are that they’re waaaay more affordable than a culinary centrifuge, and they also allow you to side-step some of the more complicated freeze-thaw or gel-related clarification processes described in Liquid Intelligence, so not hyper practical…but I certainly wish I had one during this large-scale cocktail experiment.

So let’s fast-forward through a couple days of filtering and racking, racking and filtering, to the point where I had about 8 Liters of fully clarified junglebird cocktail, which left us about 2 L short of our end goal.

So here’s what I did. I didn’t freak out. I simply took the junglebird recipe we started with, scaled it to 2 liters, and realized I needed about 1 bottle of rum, ⅓ of a bottle of campari, about 8 oz of simple syrup (of which I still had plenty left over), and something clear that was in the vicinity of citrus juice.

So I ran to the liquor store, grabbed one more bottle of clear rum (because it would completely ruin the color to add aged stuff), then I created a citric acid solution with water and citric acid until it tasted roughly as acidic as lime juice. Unfortunately, I didn’t have powdered malic acid, which is the other component of lime juice, but this is where my decision to soak those lime husks really paid off. I added a little extra lime flavor when I realized our curds were broken because I suspected I would have to add some less authentic citrus flavor later on.

So I supplemented our clear, almost peach-toned clarified junglebird with extra rum, campari, simple syrup, and citric acid solution, plus about a half gallon of distilled water for dilution (because remember, jungle birds are shaken for chill and dilution), and happy result was that the end cocktail went from a decent shade of pale tangerine to a much more evocative shade of pink, which seemed fitting for a cocktail called “The Lovebird.”

The Finished Product

So the moral of the story here is that it might pay to think about what color your want your end product to be after milk clarification and see if there’s a way to pull that off by adding a little something on the back end. Our end product was a happy little accident, but yours doesn’t have to be.

From here, the process was quick and easy. I bottled the cocktails using a measuring cup and a funnel to ensure I was putting exactly 375ml in each bottle, I capped em, wiped em down, applied the labels, and whisked 30-or-so bottled cocktails off to Ethan so that he could assemble his welcome bags the day before the rehearsal dinner.

This was a long, and fairly complicated process, but there’s two primary takeaways I’d like to leave you with besides all the important process-related details I just described.

First: when you’re designing something custom like this, there’s real value in collaborating with someone. I came up with the milk clarification idea, and it was Ethan who brought the concept of a custom rum blend to the table. Working together with someone allows you to sanity check your own ideas and methods and just overall makes the process more enjoyable.

And second: don’t be afraid of creative pivots. We broke the curds – whoops. But it turns out that was an opportunity to infuse some extra lime flavor while the curds settled. Looks like we’re 2 liters short – whoops. But it turns out that was an opportunity to make the color of the cocktail even more beautiful.

The reason why I try to teach the basics and first principles of spirits and cocktails on this podcast is because you don’t have to be a master mixologist to pull off something like bottled cocktails for 40 people. You just need to understand some of the basics – like how things react when they’re combined and how you can reverse engineer a flavor using different ingredients if you find yourself in a pinch.

I’m happy to report that the Lovebird cocktails were a huge hit with guests at the wedding. They enjoyed the flavors, the clarity, the color, and the bottled presentation. I’ll have pictures and video of many different phases of this process over on the show notes page, which you can find at ModernBarCart.com/podcast.

Thanks for tuning in to this Bar Cart Foundations episode. I hope you learned some things from my recent adventures in milk clarification, and I hope that if you try your hand at something similar, you’ll share your results with us on social media.

Just remember, if at all possible, don’t break your curds.