Roe's Bouquet

Cocktail blogging is not all toil and sweat. Sometimes people give you bottles of booze or invite you to a special event. A couple of weeks ago we were lucky enough to be a part of the DC launch of Roe & Co’s Irish Whiskey at the fabulous Jack Rose Dining Saloon – an evening we thoroughly enjoyed.

We are always happy to try new products, but we don’t promise good reviews if we don’t actually like the liquor. Thankfully, this whiskey is one that we are pleased to recommend. We also really enjoyed meeting Caroline Martin, the distiller, and hearing about how this blended whiskey came to be. The name is pays homage to George Roe and his Dublin distillery – once the largest distillery in Ireland. 

Roe & Co DC launch party at Jack Rose
The Whiskey is a blend of Irish malt and grain whiskeys aged in bourbon barrels. We found it to be quite smooth and with warm spice notes. It has the characteristics of a nice bourbon. It’s pleasant to drink neat, but at the launch party we were able to mix our own highball variations using an array of ingredients that were laid out for us.

The drink that we created that evening we later perfected back in our home bar. It’s a combination of the Roe & Co Irish Whiskey, pear, hibiscus, and ginger beer. Letting a hibiscus tea bag sit in the glass with the whiskey for a few minutes allows the drink to take on the floral notes and a beautiful rosy hue – hence the name of our drink Roe’s Bouquet. The pear is not there simply to add flavor, but also as a way to reference the old pear tree that still blooms in Dublin on the site of the original George Roe Distillery.

The Cocktail Artist sketching at the Roe & Co DC Launch Party

The Cocktail Artist did a couple of quick sketches during the evening while we were at Jack Rose, and later did a painting of the Roe & Co Whiskey bottle. If you can get a bottle for yourself, we highly recommend it.

 Scroll down for the cocktail recipe. This is a drink that will be on our regular rotation during the warm weather.

Cheers!



Roe's Bouquet

2 1/2 ounces Roe & Co Irish Whiskey
1 Hibiscus tea bag
2 slices of fresh pear
1 1/2 ounces Ginger Beer 

Pour the whiskey into a mixing glass will the slices of pear and the hibiscus tea bag. Let sit for a couple of minute and then give the mixture a stir to release the hibiscus. Remove the tea bag and press the slices of pear against the side of the glass to release their juice. Add several ice cubes to the mixing glass and stir briefly. Strain into a double old fashioned glass with ice cubes. Add the ginger beer and give the drink a quick stir. Garnish with a pear slice.

The cocktail and the ingredients

Roe & Co Whiskey - original watercolor by The Cocktail Artist

Popular posts from this blog

Cherry Capital Old Fashioned

Image
Cherry Capital Old Fashioned - original watercolor painting by The Cocktail Artist If you've read some of our previous posts (such as the Up North Raspberry and Rye or the Grand Mariner Cocktail) you know that we're fans of the bourbon and rye produced by The Traverse City Whiskey Co . Traverse City, Michigan is known as the "Cherry Capital" for being the area with the largest production of tart cherries in the United States. In Traverse City, you will find wonderful freshwater beaches, lots of summer tourists, and (of course) cherries! You can attend the Cherry Festival in July, go to the Cherryland Mall, and fly into Cherry Capital airport. So the folks at Traverse City Whiskey (naturally) produce an American Cherry Edition of their bourbon. Here in the Nation's Capital we were lucky enough to find this cherry bourbon at our local liquor store. It's a nice bourbon for sipping neat, but during #OldFashionedOctober we also tried it in an Old Fashioned and
Read more

Lemon Bergamot Gimlet

Image
In case you don’t know us personally, or haven’t read the bio on our blog , you may not realize the “The Cocktail Artist” is really a partnership between two architects (who also happen to be married to each other). One of us comes up with the recipes, does the photography, and writes the blog posts – the other one creates all of the original artwork and offers opinions on the cocktail recipes. Being architects, we sometimes let our design-sense get the better of us – meaning we have been known to purchase a bottle of booze because we like the design of the bottle.  Occasionally this backfires, but rest assured (with some creative mixology or a bit of barrel-aging) we have always been able to make use of the contents of those impulse-buy bottles. Right now, two of the most attractive bottles in our liquor cabinet contain Italian spirits – Malfy Gin Con Limone and Italicus . Italy has always been a design trendsetter, so it’s not surprising that these bottles stand out (they ev
Read more

Amalfi Martini

Image
Darn! Why didn’t we buy those airline tickets to Italy when they were cheap? It would be so nice to be lounging in a beautiful Italian seaside town right now.  The Amalfi region, on Italy's west coast, is known for it's production of lemon liqueur and fine writing and art paper - sounds like the perfect place for us! Oh well, maybe it would be better to be there during the off season. Italy is probably packed with American tourists right now. Let's  just pull out the watercolor paints and the cocktail shaker and bring a bit of la dolce vita  to our patio. Our Amalfi Martini (naturally) features limoncello. It's a fairly low-alcohol liqueur, so we boost the proof of this cocktail by adding our vodka of choice - District Made Vodka by One Eight Distilling. If you are using a vodka that doesn't have much flavor on it's own (which, honestly, is most vodka) you may want to add a couple dashes of citrus bitters to this recipe. This just wouldn't be an Ita
Read more

The Last Call

Image
This post is a week late, but this blog is our hobby (not our real job) so we’re not going to worry about it. Anyhow, we came up with this drink for Mardi Gras as the “last call” before the beginning of Lent – a time when some of us stop drinking for 40 days (we’ll let you know how that works out). The name “Last Call” also references the classic “Last Word” cocktail. The Last Word is really a perfect cocktail. It’s equal parts of four ingredients (gin, Green Chartreuse, Maraschino Liqueur, and lime) and a superb balance of tart, herbal, and sweet. It’s one of our fallback cocktails – one that we mix up when we can’t make up our mind about what we want to drink.  Another classic that we regularly enjoy is the Aviation Cocktail. The Aviation is another gin cocktail and is one of the few that uses Crème de Violette – a sweet, floral liqueur that is typically a deep purple hue. It takes mixing quite a few Aviations to go through a bottle of Crème de Violette, so it’s probably
Read more

Douglas Fir Martini

Image
This was one of our very early blog posts. Now that the holiday season is here it seems like a good time to revisit it. Our cocktail recipe remains unchanged, but we wanted to add some information about the ingredients and include a bit more artwork. This martini, with it’s pine forest aroma, is our antidote to holiday stress. Mix up a couple of these to help you through your decorating, gift-wrapping, etc… Doesn’t enjoying a cocktail while you relax in front of the fireplace sound much nicer than struggling to get the Christmas tree in the stand? Along with The Cocktail  Artist's watercolors maybe we can give you the feeling you're walking through a pine forest instead of stressing out over some holiday preparations. At the heart of this cocktail is Clear Creek Distillery’s Douglas Fir Brandy . We discovered this unusual liqueur in our local liquor store a couple of years ago and just couldn’t resist giving it a try. Clear Creek calls it “a tree in a bottle”. It's m
Read more