Tag Archives: Cana Brava

It doesn’t take an empire to earn a five-star review

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Big news for Dallas’ Jason Kosmas and his accomplices over at The 86 Company: Spirit Journal, the respected industry newsletter, has awarded 86’s newly released Ford’s Gin a stellar five out of five stars in its latest quarterly issue.

“It’s a pretty big deal,” Kosmas said. “I’m a happy boy.”

Understandable. The gin, which has already landed on the shelves of cocktail bars around town and local retail outlets such as Sigel’s, is the result of six years of planning, research and experimentation by Kosmas and his cohorts at New York-based 86, fellow bartender Dushan Zaric and renowned spirits ambassador Simon Ford.

The three set out to make a spirit that embraced the purity of simplicity, one that was workhorse versatile, manageable and free of extra botanicals or excess flavoring.

“We wanted to make a quintessential gin,” Kosmas says. “We didn’t want some flavor hook, some gimmick. We wanted to make a well-made gin that was going to behave well in cocktails.”

Judging from the review by Spirit Journal editor and publisher F. Paul Pacult, they succeeded: “Crystalline and flawlessly pure,” is how Pacult begins, later praising its “lovely, sturdy gin bouquet” and lauding it as “easily one of the best new gins I’ve reviewed over the last two years.”

That’s some intoxicating praise.

The formula was two years in the making, produced in collaboration with 8th-generation master distiller Charles Maxwell of London. What you’re drinking out of that carefully crafted bottle is the group’s 81st recipe variation, ultimately meant to highlight gin’s distinctive juniper calling card with coriander undertones to give it structure. But there’s also cassia and orris root, both common gin botanicals, with a friendly dose of grapefruit.

“Gin is one where you second-guess yourself,” Kosmas said. “One little tweak and it’s a completely different animal.”

The bottle itself, decorated in classy luggage-stamp chic, is a nod to gin’s global character, despite its British associations, from the elephant and passport stamps on the label and cap to the decree playfully splashed across its bow: “It doesn’t take an empire to make a gin.”

Ford’s Gin is just one of four base spirits The 86 Company is rolling out. Two – Cana Brava rum and Aylesbury Duck vodka – debuted earlier this year, with a tequila yet to come.

“I love it,” said bartender Brad Bowden of The People’s Last Stand, at Dallas’ Mockingbird Station. “For mixing purposes, it has a lot of utility.”

Oddly enough, the ergonomic design of the Ford’s Gin bottle itself has also drawn praise from so-called “flair” bartenders, the ones who flip and twirl bottles as they work just for show. Kosmas, though flattered, is both surprised and amused.

“I’ve never been part of that world, and I’ve never wanted to,” he says. But since the bottle was built for speed and accuracy behind the bar, it actually sort of makes sense.

“I guess it’s like streamlining a car: if you built a car that goes fast, at some point somebody’s going to drive it really fast.”

— Marc Ramirez, 12-5-12

Jason Kosmas is about to raise your spirits

What has Jason Kosmas not done? Maybe that’s what the Dallas bartending luminary was wondering when he decided to launch his own spirits outfit, which has debuted with Cana Brava rum and Aylesbury Duck vodka.

Who’s Jason Kosmas, you ask? (But only because you’re nice enough to play along. Either that or you’ve been under heavy sedation for the last decade.)

Kosmas studied under mixology master Dale DeGroff, co-owns New York City’s Employees Only, co-authored a couple of bartending books and then came to Dallas to wield his bar smarts at Windmill Lounge, Bolsa, Neighborhood Services and finally Marquee. What’s next, a reality show?

Actually, Kosmas has been ruminating on the spirits idea for some time, and with The 86 Company, he and his partners are rolling out a bartender’s basic palette. (Gin and tequila are set to follow.) All are meant to be user-friendly and affordably priced. And tasty, of course: Both hold their own behind the bar.

For Cana Brava, Kosmas visited a good number of distilleries before settling on Panama’s Las Cabras, run by Don Pancho Fernandez.

The name may mean little north of the border, but in the Caribbean, Fernandez is legend, a master distiller who for 30-some years had a hand in Cuba’s classic Havana Club rum. In Panama, his molasses-based rums are aged for three years in a combination of new American oak and older American whiskey barrels, then blended with older rums.

Fernandez, Kosmas says, “put together a blend specifically for us.” The result, officially introduced at last month’s inaugural Craft Cocktail TX festival is 86 proof and straw-toned with deep aromas of sugar cane, caramel and citrus.

Kosmas, right, with Standard Pour’s Brian McCulllough at last month’s Craft Cocktail TX festival

Cana Brava is just now hitting state liquor stores, but in the meantime can be found at places like Cedars Social, Marquee, Private/Social, People’s Last Stand, Sundown at the Granada, Victor Tango, Neighborhood Services and Malai Kitchen.

Kosmas likes Cana Brava in the classic Daiquiri – 2 ounces of rum plus ¾ each of fresh lime juice and simple syrup, shaken with ice, strained into a chilled glass and garnished with a lime wheel.

At Sundown at the Granada, Casey Willis’s Cana Brava mojito muddles seven mint leaves and an ounce of honey syrup with lime juice, then adds two ounces of the rum before shaking and pouring over rocks.

Private/Social’s Rocco Milano slips it into something summery that he calls the Sex Panther. Here’s the recipe:

            3 ounces Cana Brava

            Juice of three limes

         2 ounces Monin pure cane syrup (or agave nectar)

            2 slices of seedless watermelon (about 2-3 inches apiece)

            Place watermelon in blender, then add other ingredients. Add ice and blend, pour into two glasses and top each with a mint sprig.

— Marc Ramirez

Posted 7-9-12