I love Manhattans. You love Manhattans more than most people love their children, though. That's my go-to cocktail. The only thing that changes in my Manhattan, it's so easy to make, it's so delicious. It showcases whiskey, but it makes it easier to drink too. It softens it up and gives it extra aromatic complexity. I love it. The problem with me and Manhattans, the only thing that changes about my Manhattans is the whiskey, because I have my vermouth, which is the Cokey vermouth, the Torino. I have my bitters, which is the Fee Brothers old-fashioned aromatic bitters. I have my cherries, but sometimes I'll even skip the cherries on that one. Every time I take a gamble on another vermouth, either I'm overspending for something that's not as good, or I get a cheapie and it just does not add up. It just does not hit the level. Totally. We started this, you and I had this conversation the other day. I said, I want to do something, maybe we should talk about Manhattan's and you were like, okay, cool. I said, okay, how about some vermouth too? He's like, why? I have my vermouth. I was like, okay, what is it? Koki vermouth? Yeah, yeah, okay. Well, you can try other things. I have and they all suck. I was like, well, that's not true. Either it paid like $45 for some ridiculous thing that doesn't taste as good, or it's like some M&R duck. Yeah, M&R does suck. We'll taste it and you'll see that it sucks. But there's a lot of really good sweet Italian torrino style vermouths out there. They're worth exploring though for sure. I didn't even know that torrino was a thing outside of on the label of the vermouth that I drink. So I am looking forward to learning. Well, here we go then. Here we go. Welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. My name is Roger. I do beer here at Binny's. My name is Shannon. I do communications, events, social media. I'm Greg, communications and Manhattan drinker. I'm Pat. I handle especially spirits related stuff. And today we're talking about one of my favorite subjects of vermouth, it is one of my favorite things to drink. It should be one of yours too. This kind of bookends against the Amaro episode. Yeah, totally. Aromatized wines. Fortified and aromatized wines. They go great with many, many things, especially different whiskeys, probably some rums, all kinds of stuff. I always feel that when people are put to the test and you say, you know, do you drink cocktails? The Manhattan is just the universal. What kind of cocktail do you like? And people, even if they don't really like them, they're like, oh, enjoy Manhattan. Yeah, who hates a Manhattan, right? It's just whiskey that's sweetened up a little bit. As alluded to, vermouth is a cousin of Amaro. They are trying to accomplish the same things. They're bittered, aromatized things, but vermouth has a base of wine, whereas Amaro will have a base of a distilled spirit. Outside of that, pretty comparable alcohol percentages. Vermouth, we're talking usually between 16 and 18 percent alcohol. It's like a fortified wine. Yeah. The main botanical, what has to be traditionally the main botanical, is going to be wormwood. That's where we get the word vermouth from. Vermouth is derived from vermut, the German word for the wormwood plant. Along with absinthe. Absinthe also uses wormwood. Amaro uses wormwood. Malort exclusively wormwood. So we love vermouth. Vermouth, like most great alcohols in the world, started as a medicine. We're talking ancient China, at least a thousand BC, we were fortifying alcoholic beverages with roots and herbs and spices and stuff like that. That was used as a medicinal tonic, again, to aid digestion, help stomach problems, things like that. And so, modern vermouth, it is wine that can be aged for a short period of time before other ingredients are added. The sugar is added before the wine is fortified, for sweet vermouths, actually. So the wine gets fortified, so they add a distilled spirit to it, to bring it up to about 18% alcohol to stop fermentation. Then they'll add sugar, and then dry ingredients are added. And the dry ingredients, again, are these botanicals, things like cloves, cinnamon, quinine, citrus peels, spices and herbs like marjoram, chamomile, things like that, juniper. Again, the main one being wormwood, and it varies by house style. So just like Amari, they are very protective of their recipe, and everybody's botanical mix is a big secret. Secreto. So the ancestral home of Virmuth, traditionally, was the Kingdom of Sardinia. The Kingdom of Sardinia was the island, and then this area that spanned the border of Italy and France. And as the Kingdom of Sardinia expanded, it eventually took over what is now the entire Italian peninsula. A treaty was signed with France to separate the border, and that's how Virmuth split into two styles, this modern Italian style and this modern French style. So the Italian style comes from Torino, from Turin, which is right on the border. What era are you talking about? I'm talking like the mid-1800s. By 1861 was when I believe this treaty- You're talking about like Napoleonic Wars. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, neat. Yeah. So that's where this separation of Shambari style and Turino style of vermouth really started happening. So we're going to start tasting some different Turino style vermouths, which are ones people are going to be most familiar. Things like martini and Rossi or Carpano. Right. Those are the affordable ones that are on shelves at every Binny's and also every grocery store you've ever been to. So I'm passing martini and Rossi Rosso vermouth around right now. When I was in college, I was working at the grocery store selling wines and spirits, and I'm like, I got to try it. So I just bought a bottle of martini and Rossi sweet vermouth and just tried it. I'm like, it's kind of gross. But it also kind of tastes like how you imagine wine tastes when you're a kid, like sweet and fruity. Yeah. Of the cheap vermouths, as crazy as it sounds, I think gallows is better. And gallows is like five bucks a fifth. Yeah, it's pretty cheap. This reminds me of like a pizza mixture that I used to put on. Yeah, the oregano. Yeah, the oregano thing is. I mean, it comes from a red wine base, but it's definitely oxidized to the point that it's brown. That's what we're saying right off the bat. So they should last a while in the fridge. Yeah. So that's a very important point of vermouth is vermouth is wine and it needs to be treated like wine. So when you open a vermouth to use it or whether you're drinking in neat with a citrus twist or something, or you're using it in more likely in a Manhattan or in a Grony, you need to refrigerate it when you're done and it should be consumed usually Okay. I mean, you smell definitely Italian seasoning on here. A little mint and if there's fruit from the wine, it's like a pruney oxidized raisin fruit. It's a serviceable vermouth. It's a bit one-dimensional. Not going to change your opinions about vermouth. A little molasses maybe. I don't want to oversell it though. A little orange and lemon peel maybe if you're reaching. Oregano City. So let's try though, first, for Vermouth de Torino, Greg's favorite, and the one that kind of started this whole episode, Cokie Vermouth de Torino, Cokie, C-O-C-C-H-I. And I would agree this is generally my go-to, or it was my go-to Vermouth for a very long time. And it's relatively inexpensive too, I want to say a 375 is 13 bucks, 12.99, something like that. And the 750 is 19.99. We're 18.99 on the 750s. Get more of that sweet root beer, like barrel root beer thing. Yeah, you got that kola nut, root beer-y, vanilla character. And this just goes with those cherries. Oh yeah. The Luxardo cherry, the maraschino cherries. Now immediately tasting this after the M&R, much more pronounced bitterness. Yep, yeah, like walnut, shell. And it's not as flabby in the oxidative character. Yep, and it's sweet and light on its feet, and it's sweetness, it's like a honey sweetness. Not cloying at all. Not cloying. And then there's definitely more of a lemon type character. It's not like citric acidity, but it's like that lemon brightness. It's a really nice complexity. I love this so much. All right, prove me wrong, because this is the apex of the podcast for me. Yeah, this is great. So yeah, Cokie Vermouth de Torino, this is hard to argue. This is one of the pinnacles of Vermouth, I would say. This is one of the best things you can get in that whole section of the store. Now, as I mentioned earlier, when you open a Vermouth, it needs to be refrigerated, and it needs to be kept refrigerated and should be consumed within a month. What I have here is a bottle of Cokie Vermouth de Torino that I opened probably four months ago, maybe five months ago. How did it last so long in your fridge? It was in the Ham and Vermouth fridge in our office. Next to the Whiskey Hotline office is a big commercial refrigerator where we keep all our open Vermouth samples and also an entire leg of country ham. This one's been open, how long did you say? Four months? Probably at least four months because the last time I did a staff training on Vermouth was probably August, maybe September. This is equivalent to the forgotten bottle at the back of the fridge. Yeah, totally. By the way, I love sriracha and the best sriracha is the first square. You tear the seal off and it's the freshest it'll ever be. Then it gets a little worse, it's still good. Do you keep your sriracha refrigerated? No. Neither do I. I buy the big bottles because I'm very ambitious about my sriracha use, but then after a year and a half, it's at the very bottom, I don't know. It's so much better fresh and that might be a little bit of an analogy. It still smells pretty good after some age. The nose is remarkably different. Much less pronounced bitterness, much softer nose. I mean, the nose on the fresh bottle is vibrant and layered and complex, and this one's a little flat. It reflects what you would expect with wine as it oxidizes more. Then so following up, Koki is a slightly more expensive option that I think is probably a little more popular at our stores, although I would argue not quite as good of a vermouth. This one costs a little bit more. Yeah, so I dove into this one and it's just not quite as good. But let's see. Let's taste it. So this is Carpano Antica Formula. Carpano Antica Formula is not, contrary to popular belief, an actual vermouth di Torino. This falls into a style of vermouth called vermouth a la vanilia. And this is shockingly vermouth with added vanilla flavoring. So this is the traditional drink in Turin. It was, for a very long time, at a cafe, a vermouth with vanilla added and some bitters added. So that's what this is. Think of this as like an RTD almost. And you can immediately, I think the vanilla has a bit of an artificial character to it. And I also think it's a little flabbier and just softer overall compared to the Cokey. It's not very bitter. And it's not very bitter. Has this been open for a while? No, I just opened that right now. You just opened this? That brand new bottle. It smells like flabby, like the age. I brought all brand new bottles of Vermouth today except that one Cokey just to illustrate the point. Yeah, it's not expressive in a lie. There is vanilla, but that's not. Now what I would argue and what will be available very soon at Binny's stores, Carpano does actually bottle a classic Vermouth de Torino called Carpano Classico. And it's got a blue cap. It's one of the only Vermouths I've ever seen that's a sweet Vermouth that has a cap that isn't red and it's got a blue cap and a bluish label on it. And we have it available in some stores right now for, I believe, $23 for a one liter bottle. There are three seven fives coming. So much more user friendly size for Vermouth. Most people don't drink Vermouth the way I do and they're not going to go through a whole liter. And those are only going to be $14.99. And those should be available at pretty much all Binny's locations very shortly. So Carpano Classico is what we just tasted here, but without the added vanilla and a little less sweet and more pronounced bitterness, I think it is truly the pinnacle of Vermouth in our stores. This isn't bad. No, not at all. It just needs some lift. It needs some vibrancy. But the one liter bottle of this sells for $40. You know, I think it's a really great $20 Vermouth in a $40 bottle. All right, what's next on the Hip Parade? All right. So staying in that sweet Vermouth style, but moving out of Italy and into France, we have the two examples of classic French style Vermouth, which is the Marseille style and the Chamboury style. So Nolly Pratt here is your classic Marseille Vermouth. These are both pretty affordable, right? Very. Nolly Pratt and Dolan. And Dolan is the Chamboury style. Yeah. What actually separates those? Chamboury is more oxidized. It's lighter and more subtle in its botanical mixture than the Marseille style, but it also uses oxidized wine, purposely oxidized, which is unique to it. It smells like mouthwash. It has a bit of a dusty musty kind of. I think I'm actually picking up flavors from the previous one. I get the mintiness you're talking about as well. I need a new glass. I walked into my grandfather's house and I didn't open the doors in a while. The windows have been closed. It's got that antique store, old person. What is that? Like a cheese rind? Weird. You're doing them side by side. Here, I'm going to pass the Dolan around too. Just looking at it, you can tell the Dolan is more oxidized. As Greg alluded to earlier, it's got that more brown and tan color to it. Pat, both of these producers make drive remove also, which we don't have today, but is that more of a French thing? Yeah, we wanted to focus more on whiskey cocktails here, and you don't see a lot of whiskey cocktails with drive remove. A Perfect Manhattan, you might recall, has some drive remove that's equal parts dry and sweet for move. But drive remove is normally a reserve for gin cocktails, vodka cocktails. Okay, now that I have these two both side by side, the Dolan smells weird. It's liver sausage. Yeah, it smells like garlic and black pepper. You have that spice mix that you use to season game. Yeah, this smells like mace. So Dolan Rouge here actually has more than 50 herbs in it. I like it because it's not excessively sweet. It's a sweet vermouth. So weird. All right. The supplier says it works perfectly in tomato and meat cookery. I can see that. Yep. Yep. A little more fruit on the palate and a little more sweetness on the palate. But it's like this whole spice box and not like baking spices. It's like all the meat spices, the meat rub spices. Now, the Nolly Pratt- I kind of like it. The Nolly Pratt. Oh, I love it. The Nolly Pratt next to it though seems that it has a little more bracing alcohol character and a little sharper botanical note. Yeah, brighter butterscotch qualities, like even like a little bit of like sharp tannin or something grippy on the finish of the palate. That could give you some dimension in a cocktail, but the wood in a whiskey would give you the same effect, and I'd rather just have a good whiskey in there. Yeah, it's true. So that's just the basic French versus Italian style, but a big up and coming vermouth region is actually Spain, and there's been a lot of articles written about this over the last several years. Our selection of Spanish vermouths has grown incredibly as long as I've been here, which isn't that long, and so we're going to try one of those right now, which is Vermouth La Cuesta, which is actually from the Rioja region. So shockingly, the base is Rioja Red Wine. Huh. A little Tempranillo, a little Grenache, a little of the third one that nobody remembers. Where's Barbara when we need her? Right? She'd be like, actually. Is La Cuesta a place or is it, like what is that? That's just the brand name. Does that mean toast or cost? I think it's also the wine house. Like they make wine too. Okay. But it's not fortified and aromatized. Cool bottle, very old school, retro. Yeah, and so we were actually, we're getting some Vermouth from the sherry producers too. Gonzales BS now makes a Vermouth that we carry. The smells kind of gave me too. Totally. It's got that earthiness to it. Yeah. I didn't know this was a thing. Iberian Vermouth. This is a great Vermouth though. I think it has more of the wine character and definitely some more wormwood note. I think this is a challenger for some of the best stuff that Italy makes. I think it's a little lighter body too. It's not quite as syrupy, not as sweetened. I was going to suggest this would be the wine drinkers vermouth. It definitely has that tempertino quality. Isn't this an awesome vermouth? It is. It's very wine. I mean, it's less aromatized and more straight. You can understand its lineage pretty easily. Venice wears that right on its sleeve. That's cool. I don't know if I'd choose it over the Italian, but it's mouthwatering too. It really hits you. We should mention that, especially in the past, people would drink high quality vermouths just straight on their own, which I feel doesn't happen as much anymore other than at Pat's house. So this would, if you're figuring like, would there be one that would be nice to just serve as an aperitif wine or a digestif kind of thing, like have a little glass of it and sip on it, this would be a good place to do that. So Pat, do you drink your vermouth straight or are you mixing it? I drink my vermouth over a large ice cube, and if I'm not being a lazy ass, I'll put a citrus twist on it. Just like I enjoy my vermouth, just as a kind of after dinner, just digestif. Love it. So also worth mentioning while we're talking about sweet vermouth is Blanc vermouth or Bianco vermouth, which is really just sweet red vermouth with the color filtered out through like a charcoal filtration, the same way you would have color filtered That's kind of confusing. Like filtering out color like in a $250 tequila. Yeah, exactly. But it looks like it's dry vermouth, like on the shelf, but there's black ones and white ones. Yeah, because you see that it's either clear or pale golden color, and you're assuming like, well, this is vermouth. If it's not dark, then of course, it's going to be dry and bitter and herbal and aromatic, but they're actually not. So we're going to try the original blanc vermouth, which is from Camos, which is a Chamboury neighbor to Dolan. So still French, right? Still French. It's now owned by Dolan though. Unlike Dolan blanc, so Dolan also makes a blanc, but the Camos blanc is less sweet than other vermouth blancs. It has a bit of a stone fruit and alpine herb and nut kind of character to it and kind of floral, a little more floral note, not as vanilla heavy and oak heavy as the comparable Dolan blanc. So that's in the wine base, the color stripping, and also in the seasoning or the spices that they're adding to it. Totally, totally. We also have a Bianco. You might have seen Carpano Bianco at a few of our stores. There is our Carpano dry, but the Carpano Bianco is kind of what we tasted before with the color stripped out. This is my jam. I love this. Like elderflower, you get pencil lead or pencil? Very much that alpine flower character, man. I love long fruit. Now, this is another one where I have these at home and I just drink them on their own. Like a little bit of grapefruit? Yeah. That's nice. Now, it's something that they also make a really interesting white Negroni. So Negroni, one of the few cocktails I would actually make because it's truly a lazy man's cocktail because it's equal parts, one to one to one. Equal parts gin, vermouth, and Campari, or red beard of your choice, capoletti if I'm making it. Aperitivo. So a blank Negroni, something with a little less color in it. It highlights the red color more if you're using a blank vermouth. That'd be good. It'd be good with Aperol. Totally. Or that our hometown heroes Koval, their cranberry liqueur. Yeah. That could be an Aperol substitute for sure. Or just double that part because it's gin too. But you're going to have a sweeter Negroni, but could be kind of cool. Maybe throw in some cherry bitters. You know what? Some of the herb profile, this reminds me of escoria. Really? A very obscure bizarre. Escoria is one of those things that I taste like once a year, we'll do a staff training that we loosely title, what does that taste like? It's really interesting. My theory was that during the whole prohibition of Wormwood that that just added in there and they're like, no, I don't care, because it tastes a lot like absinthe, but it's better, it's not as one-dimensional as most absinthe. Yeah. So Blanc Vermouth, have you guys ever had a Blanc Vermouth before? Raj obviously has. I haven't. I haven't had this one though. I had Dolan before. I love the Dolan one. Yeah. So Dolan is a little more of that kind of oaky vanilla flavor than this Camo's. The Camo's a little lighter. Here's another cocktail idea for this. It's screams for gin, right? This is a variation of something I've been talking about, and you guys poo poo at every single time. I have here the Bitterman's Hellfire Habanero Shrub. And what this is, is liquid fire. Now you take gin, which gives you like a snappy, bitter herbal, and then you add that, which is the soft sweetness, and then add this, which is fire, and then you have this like super complex, pallet-wrenching cocktail. So it kind of sounds disgusting, but the important thing you hear is Greg is really onto something with the way he's building a cocktail, and that's covering these different areas of your tongue that are tasting different types of flavors. And I think that's something to consider whenever you're building a cocktail. Heat and sweet play off of each other so well, and then you add the weird bitterness and herbal qualities of a gin, too, and it just becomes this whole experience. It's great. Try it. Rhubarb. Add some rhubarb if you have it. Not everybody else's backyard is literally a rhubarb field. It couldn't help it. Those kind of cocktails, I think something that's interesting and people don't talk about more is we tend to always drink cocktails before dinner, but those can be really nice with a meal when they have like a diserbaceous quality to them and it really compare well with different foods. Because a lot of those- A lot of those similar ideas that we were just describing of the sweet and the heat, and that's in tons of different cuisines. For sure. So drink some of your cocktails while you eat, not just before. It's a good excuse to drink even more. There used to be a white fortified called Quinole, which was used in a couple of classic cocktail recipes, including a Corpse Reviver, number 9, 10, 2. I can't keep my Corpse Reviver straight. Number 2. We couldn't get it, and this cocktail faded into obscurity until Cokie Americano. So Cokie Americano is a style, is a vermouth in that it's a fortified and aromatized wine, and Americano is a vermouth whose primary botanical is gentian. Gentian is a root that has a particularly woodsy bitterness to it, and I brought some today. You guys have heard me talk before on this podcast about how much I love Cokie Americano. So I don't need an excuse to open a bottle and then have to drink the rest later. Yeah. So let's take a look. I had this before I had the Cokie vermouth to Torino, and I was like, well, the Americano is so delicious mixed with gin and other things, that I have to try the vermouth too. And that's how I got into vermouth. So some of the Cactilian aficionados argue that if you're going to make a Vespa Martini, for example, you should use this instead of the current Lillet. The current Lillet Blanc. The current Lillet is too like neutered. The current Lillet is a flavorless abomination. There you go. And we taste it whenever we do a fortified wine training, we always open Lillet and it's just it is so boring and bland. So they're doing the same thing, reviving the same recipe. Oh, it smells so good. It smells so spicy. I haven't had this in a while. So an Americano can be white or red. They same kind of flavor, though. So the thing is just however you want the drink to look aesthetically, think like clear and green creme de menthe or something. So it was again, in Italian and EU law, an Americano is this specific type of aperitif wine that derives flavor firstly from gentian. So that's really interesting to taste the bitterness on this, which isn't that far off from warm wood, but it's different. You can definitely try it. You can definitely taste it. More wood, less herb is how I would describe that. It has like a less conventional herb kind of aromas though, like it has a citronella eucalyptus. I agree. It also kind of smells like tea tree oil, if you've ever heard. Oh, yeah. What does that do? It's to help treat your skin. Get rid of warts. Flemishes. Put it on a wart. It's like an antiseptic. I have great skin and don't have to worry about it. Because it goes all the way up to here. And I cover up most of it. I have great skin. So as long as we're talking vermouth adjacent fortified and aromatized vines, we should talk real quickly about a Quina, Quina or a Quina, Quina or a Quinate, which is all vermouth derivatives primarily flavored and aromatized with cinchona. How do you spell Quina? Quina. Quinate is C-H-I-N-A-T-O. So I brought with me today beer Grand Quinkina. Beer is spelled B-Y-R-R-H, pronounced beer. So Quina comes from the bark of the cinchona tree, which is medicinally used as an anti-malarial. Keeps the mosquitoes away. And that's why it became so popular because we had a huge malaria problem in the area around Rome, and this became a way to treat it. But in order to make the medicine go down, so to speak, we had to figure out a way to get this cinchona quinine into people and make it somewhat palatable. And the answer was put it in the wine. You've tasted it and you've tasted it in tonic. Yes. So tonic water, famously quinine flavored. Oh, it smells disgusting. Hence the- This is awesome. You're crazy. Oh my God. Now, part of this, does it kind of, does it have a Welch's grape juice kind of thing? So that is because beer is made partially with mistel. And mistel is crushed and unfermented grape must. Yeah, I get a cranberry kind of flavor in this. Deepwood's off. Like right on top of the Welch's grape juice is this weird, piney, bitterness. Yeah, Welch's grape juice. So this is made with, the base for this is mistel and then a port-like wine. I'd say that. So it's got a bit of that tawny, caramelly thing going on there that lingers on the tip of the tongue. I almost think more of like a ruby because it's so jammy and fruity. It's like both because I mean even looking at it in the light, it has this red color but it's brown around the edges. I only said tawny just because this caramel note dried out. What is this like flowery or piney note floating on top of the thing? It's so weird. Kind of sage, rosemary kind of. Lots of flowers. So this is from the French Catalan area near the coast and border with Spain. Kind of cool. The French you say? Hey guys, I brought some rye. Hey, that's good, because I'm, much as I love vermouth, I didn't bring more vermouth, and I'd love an excuse to just make a bunch of Manhattans right now. All right, so it doesn't matter what this rye is, but it's definitely a single barrel sample that we either did or didn't take from somewhere in Michigan. Cool. Cool. So here's what I'd like to do. You're very committed to your Cokey Vermouth de Torino. I'd like you to whip up some Greghattan's. Okay. With three different red vermouths at least. Yeah. I'd like to see it with the Cokey, with the Carpano Antica there, and then probably I'm thinking maybe the Spanish La Cuesta might be interesting. Seems like a game. All right. Then whatever your usual bitter mix is, we'll all pick one that we feel is the best Manhattan there, and then let's play around the bitters, because it's winter time and it's a good time to play around with some easy to make whisky and vermouth I'm on it. I know which one I'm going to like the most. The thing we're missing here is ice and those cherries, which I don't always use. It's got to be a special occasion if I actually pop open the jar and pour one of those. Now, I know you meant ice in the shaker or mixing glass, but do you drink yours on the rocks or do you- I just mix them on the rocks. This is the Greghattan Classic. We have rye whiskey, coca vermouth, de Torino and three dashes of Fee Brothers Aromatic Old Fashioned. I started with the Spanish one. Oh, sorry. This is the Spanish one. You want to start with the coca? Let's start with the coca. Here's the thing about my Manhattan is when Pat was talking about different complementary flavors. The whiskey hotline turned me on to this in the first place. I liked a bourbon Manhattan way back, but it's a big gloppy mess. If you have a rye that has a lot of spice and a lot of punch, then it works against the sweetness of the vermouth and the spicy characteristics of the bitters, and you end up with this well-rounded cocktail that's not just sweet. All right, guys, this is my Manhattan. This is the one that I drink a couple of last night. So we've got a rye whiskey, Cokey Vermouthy Torino, and Fee Brothers Aromatic Old Fashioned Bitters. Yeah, and I use a bunch of bitters and a bunch of vermouth, so I mix just less than half and half, less vermouth than rye, but it's a ballpark. And then on a full recipe, which is, I don't know, I usually give the rocks glass worth of Manhattan with ice, three or four shakes of the bitters. So I like a lot of bitters. This is a nice Manhattan. It's got a firm bitterness that I think complements a lot of that rye spice pretty well. A lot of vermouth, but again, it kind of tempers the rye spice, but you can still taste the actual whisky. It's not just covered up by the vermouth. Says the guy who drinks a glass of vermouth. That's true, but I can tell right now that Roger hates it. He just thinks it tastes like cinnamon. Got a lot of baking spice. Now, if you mix it up with the good bitters, then I would be getting more than just the cinnamon red hot cinnamon tasting. You'll have your chance. So, Greg, this was Cokey, Vermithu, Turino. This got a thumbs up or thumbs down in the Greghattan. I'll give a thumbs up as a vermouth. Roger won't participate until we switch bitters. All right. Well, let's try the next one. So, let's try with Carpano Antica. Is this just where you guys realize that I don't know how to make Manhattan's? You know what pisses me off? You're at a restaurant and you're like, can I get a Manhattan? Then they're like, what kind of bourbon do you want? This is better than I expected. It's a lot more like citrusy. It's sweeter and fuller bodied. There's a layer of wood that doesn't exist on the coquille, or maybe it's vanilla that I'm reading it as well. That's what I think it is. I think this vermouth makes a rye taste more bourbon-like, in that it just adds sweetness and vanilla. Not bad though. Not bad. I know I like to trash it earlier. It's palatable. I just can't, I can't bring myself to spend the extra money for something that I, it's so close. I don't know that I like one better than the other right now. Let's try the third one. I mean, I feel like with the Carpano, the lack of bitterness and the perceived sweetness from the addition of vanilla, you know, you gotta try to step back and remember that you've drank millions of bitter things from all the different bitter beers that you drank over the years, and then all the Amarros and everything. So it's easy to see why people that don't have a background like gravitate towards it. Totally. Like there is a reason Carpano Antica is by far the best selling premium vermouth in our stores. And that's because it is a crowd pleaser. It is balanced. It has all the flavors people are looking for in vermouth without a ton of the flavors they are not. Like it's fine. It's great. But if you like Carpano Antica and you found yourself consistently spending some money on higher end vermouth, I think you can find some more interesting complexity in the Carpano Classical, the Toki Vermouth de Torino. I don't disagree. I'm just saying that I understand how it's gained so much popularity. I really like this one, but the vermouth totally dominates the whiskey. It does, yeah. This LaQuesta vermouth, it's such a Vinyas vermouth, it just thrashes that whiskey and slaps it around. It's pretty good though. It is pretty good. I prefer it the most of the three taste flies. Less cinnamon red hots, huh? Yep. So which of these vermouths? So we have three vermouths here. We tried Coke, Carpano and LaQuesta. LaQuesta is out, just dominated the whiskey and too much, made it too vermouth heavy of a Manhattan. If you like a vermouth heavy Manhattan, check out LaQuesta. So I would vote for probably Coke over Carpano. Yeah. Or I was going to say to throw Dolan into the mix, Dolan versus Coke. Man, the scientific process is just fallen by the wayside. You know what? Try the Dolan already and shut up. You know how you're knocking my inconsistency? That's kind of a Greghattan. There's no like... Come on. The Greghattan is a mumbling basement stumble of **** thrown into a glass. You got to go upstairs. I'm mixing drinks down here. I can't put Paul the Bed of the Walking Dead is on. You got to go upstairs to get ice. So you're like, tiptoe, don't knock over a chair. Greghattan number four, the Dolan version. This vermouth does not stand up to the bitters or the whisky. Which vermouth? Dolan. Or maybe it does. That's actually pretty good. That's a remarkably well-balanced Manhattan. Taste it next to your Cokey. Everybody have a Cokey still? Yeah. No. **** children. You know what? It's less caramel and sweetness and butterscotch and it's more like Alpine tree quality evergreen and the herbs that come with that. So, same Manhattan, Dolan is decidedly more herbal and Cokey is decidedly sweeter. It's more serious, yeah. I think if you're not looking for sweet gloppy, Dolan makes a sneaky good Manhattan. Look at you, Mr. Cokey, Cokey, Cokey. I'm kind of mad. And it's cheap as hell. You got a $7.50 of Dolan for the same price as a $3.75 of Cokey. A house brand, baby. Well, yeah, it's the cheapest good vermouth on the shelf. Of course, it's your house brand. Yeah. I demand quality and affordability. Roger's never paid more than $18.99 for any bottle, anything in his life. Not true at all. But I demand quality and affordability. Greg, your mind's looking a little blown over there. Yeah. Well, I feel like it's a little formulaic that I would be shocked by a new contender arriving, but that's pretty good. That's pretty good. I have to admit that's pretty good. When Greg mentioned his perfect Manhattan recipe to me, or not his, not a perfect, but Greg's perfect Manhattan. Greghattan. Greghattan. I mentioned that I always used two different types of bitters. And I think that's something a lot of people sell themselves short on is, you can get a lot of really interesting complexity out of a cocktail if you're using more than one type of bitters. And I know Roger's kinda poo-pooing some Fee Brother stuff, but I like them because they're cheap. And for two bottles of Fee Brothers. They are. It's like seven bucks a bottle. And they taste cheap. No, they don't. They taste admittedly one-dimensional. Yeah. The old-fashioned aromatic is cinnamon nut-making clove, but that's the flavor that you're talking about. So what I'm getting at with though is I use two dashes of Fee Brothers peach and one dash of cherry. Got it. One of each of those right here? And you get one taste, you get peach and you get cherry. And I get that they're not going to be some complex mole of spices. But I think for what I'm going for here in adding some stone fruit character and a little bit of that ripe red character from the cherry, you get a really nice Manhattan. So I'd like to see the Greghattan made with those. So the next round, we're going to take the Kokie Bermuth Torino. I'm going to mix four of them. No, I guess three because we have mine already. All right, I'm going to mix up a big, big batch, and we're going to ignore the residue inside this cup, and then we're going to put it into four little plastic cups. So for the bitter shootout, are we using Kokie or are we using Dolan? I would suggest Kokie because it's more neutral in terms of bittering herbs. I think that's a good point. For the record, I think the Dolan might have arguably made a better Manhattan, but let's use Kokie because it's going to let the bitters do their thing a little more. Right? Roger, you like that? You okay with that? All right. So the first one is the Brophy special. We call it El Broph. Brophhattan. The Brophhattan. So Brophhattan is two shakes of cherry bitters. Two shakes of peach, one shake of cherry. Two shakes of peach, one shake of cherry. By the way, a shake in my world is a healthy shake. Inverted bottle, thrust down and up. Pat, this is a remarkably different drink. You think so? Right on the nose, it's so fruity. It's so fruity. We picked the wrong vermouth to go with this because those two bitters are fruit and they're just blasts of cherry and peach. I think it's a pretty tasty cocktail. It's incredibly sweet smelling. Not a big peach flavor guy. I don't like peach snaps. When? I like real peaches. Roger doesn't like a fruit flavor. Yeah, I like real peaches. I'm sorry. It's not exotic enough for you. If we find some kind of Southeast Asian peach, you'll probably be all over it. If it was, it's that it's artificially peach schnapp flavor. I'm offended. If there's anything about this bitter combination, it allows the spiciness of the rye to shine through instead of over blowing the spice from the bitters. I was going to say that too. Yeah. I think this is a nice whiskey forward Manhattan recipe. I agree. It's like a pillar of rye surrounded by fruit sweetness. What's pretty cool. What's this next one that I have here? I'm on number two still. That's just Peychaud. Just Peychaud bitters. I have the least amount of experience with Peychaud versus any other kind of bitters. It's very floral. It's on the milder side. Yeah, that's barely. How many dashes did you put in there? Two. Two? It's soft and sweet too, but it's brand new bottle, so I was debating putting more in. No, this is a fine Manhattan. This is what I would expect at some generic steakhouse. Good quality whiskey, good quality vermouth, enough bitters. This is caveman's Manhattan. Yeah, there's a very bright red cherry floating in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. This is fine. I had one of those at a Gibson's. Yeah, totally. So this next one is how I typically make a Manhattan with Peychaud and Angostura. Rogehattan. Rogehattan. Oh, mine is definitely the winner. This brings back a little bit more that baking spice character, that sweet brown spice. It's not as fruity as mine, not as cinnamon heavy as Greg's. It's certainly more interesting than the Steakhouse one we just tried. The Steakhattan. This is a nice Manhattan. I can't decide. I like them all. This is a little more earthy spicy. And it allows the grip of the whiskey to shine through. This is a good Manhattan. These are all good Manhattan. These are all a good sourced rye, a great vermouth and different variations of bitters. This is terrific. This is pretty nice. If you don't want to make a garnish like this is a good. Yeah, this this man, Rogers Manhattan needs no cherries or anything else. Oh, sorry. I moved on to the last one already. Oh, what's the last one? Last one is both Angostura. So it's regular and orange. To citrusy. The orange shows up. Yeah, orange definitely shows up. And I think it drowns out the regular Angostura. Well, now the regular Angostura is very much orange-heavy, and has always been considered an orange-heavy bitter. But this Angostura orange is like curacao orange peel only. I like it though. Whiskey and orange is good. It's like putting that Ferrand dried curacao into your cocktail. Yeah. I vote for mine. I will say that the last one ends up tasting more like an old-fashioned. Old-fashioned, yeah. This is a tough call. These were all good. What do you pick? And all very different tastes. I mean, if nothing else, it definitely is humbling to see a variety of excellent Manhattans outside of my own tried and true recipe. Your tried and true recipe is very good, but I would probably agree there might be a bit cinnamon-heavy. That might be obviously a function of the bitters you're using. And I'd be interested to taste yours with the Fee Brothers Barrel-aged old-fashioned bitters because I think the Barrel would probably temper some of that cinnamon and let a little more of the savory kind of like nutmeg come out. You see what Pat just did? He just up-sold me to a higher ring bitters. Well, maybe. But I do think genuinely it would solve, that would be a step in the right direction of solving the only problem I have with your Manhattan. All right. Rogeh's Manhattan, very good, but not particularly exciting. This is like that. So like Rogeh's is the steakhouse Manhattan turned from seven to nine and a half. Like it's just a very good dependable Manhattan, but there's nothing unique or different about it. It's very traditional. It's not like crazy or anything. But we've had that. We've all had very good traditional Manhattans. I would argue that the Angostura one and Pei Shod with Dolan, again, adds a better level of complexity since the Dolan one is more herbaceous. I think so. There's so many different variations we could offer. So many different versions we could try. Isn't that awesome? It's great. That's what's great about cocktails. That and the fact that you make your whiskey more drinkable. Yeah, that's true. So all this makes me think is we need to try this again with even more bitters. 8, 9, 10, 11. I have 11, 12 different sample cups in front of me. We need to do another round. It's 3 p.m., but it's Friday. Right. So it's great. Hey, thanks for sticking around, everybody. What do you think? What's the verdict here? What the f*** was the point of all this? Well, obviously, I have 12 sample cups. Besides you getting slightly ripped up. No. Look at all this different... Think about this. I don't know, the sky is blue, but from one horizon to the other, there's a million different blues, right? We have all of these different variations of Just Rye. Dude, we've been legal for a day. What are you talking about over there? Just Rye, Just Vermouth, and Just Bitters. But we have so many different variations from just that limited palette. And then if you blow that out to all of the other different flavors available in our aisles, cocktails, you can do so much. It's amazing. You really can. I got to get my mustache and my sleeves out. Look, if you make a good cocktail out of bourbon, it's almost as complex of an array of flavors as purely single malt Scotch whiskey. Throwing the goblin down. Throwing down. Ridiculous thing. I know. A lot of fun. Try it at home, folks. Everybody was tasting along with us, right? Yeah. Everyone's like, oh, wait, how many dashes did he say? Yeah. Hit the pause button so they can mix it up and shake it. Yeah. Keep telling yourself that. So they all win. So yeah, verdict all different. What is actually the favorite? What is actually the favorite? If you like more oak forward flavors in a whiskey, you're going to enjoy Greg's Manhattan more. If you like sweeter, more fruit forward flavors in the whiskey itself, you're going to enjoy mine more. If you just want a crowd pleasing, dependable Manhattan, if you have some people coming over, who you can say like, hey, I'll make you a really good Manhattan, and they're going to be like, holy cow, this guy makes a Manhattan like I haven't had since that night at Gibson's, then they're going to just mind is going to be blown by Rogers. So. Yeah. I think that's fair. I think that's fair. So it's interesting to me because when like Joey and I are tasting single barrels of whisky together, Joe almost always goes toward the more oak driven ones, and I almost go always toward the more fruity and sweet driven ones, and I think my I'll tell you what I learned. I am going to continue having a bottle of Coke even with the Torino, but I'm going to pick up a bottle of Dolan. Yeah. Dolan made a pretty damn good Manhattan. Yeah. And for half the price. Wow. I mean, this is, I think what's really neat about this is that the Manhattan is obviously a very simple cocktail, but we just showed that you can change it up. You don't have to just keep making it the same way. We're going to, in two months' time, listeners, we're going to do this again with gin and some other sweet vermouths and do this with Negroni's. Cool. And do it with different red bitters. That's my summer cocktail. Because that needs to be after something like this and seeing the array of flavors in Greg's 12 glasses here, we need to try the same thing with Negroni. So I hope that's been fun. It's been enlightening for us. I hope you learned something too. If you have, do us a favor. Leave us a review. We'd appreciate it. So until next week, it's been a great time sampling some vermouth and whiskey. I'm Pat. I'm Greg. I'm Roger. I'm Shannon. Keep tasting. It was in the Ham and Vermouth fridge in our office.