B&B

After a good meal, it’s always nice to relax with a snifter of brandy along with your coffee. It’s something I learned from watching my father and, even though I was hesitant during my younger years, it’s become a moment I look forward to after a weekend lunch or a nice dinner. For me, brandy is the sipping spirit – better than whisk(e)y or rum, which I prefer before eating.

The whole experience is great. Just take a big snifter, Fill it with hot water in order to warm the glass while you fetch the bottle of brandy, discard the water and pour in a generous measure. Warm the brandy by nesting the glass in your palm and swirling the liquid gently. Stick your nose in and feel the tingling while you take in the aroma. Take a sip and feel the flavors on your taste buds – It’s all great.

The only downside is that it can get a little, well, monotonous after a while. There are many people who enjoy their standard drink as part of their regular routine, but if I was one of those people, I probably wouldn’t be a blog about pretty much every kind of drink I can get my hands on.

How can you beat this boredom? Well, for starters, there are a few different kinds of brandy, even without going into brands. Sherry, Cognac, Armagnac and others make exploring all options a lengthy endeavour. Unfortunately, cost can also be a factor, and drinking brandy after a meal hasn’t become a cliché of the wealthy without reason. I think the most expensive bottle of alcohol I’ve ever seen was by Hennessy.

Another option is to spice up your brandy somehow, and for this I recently found the B&B. The name is just the initials of its ingredients, Brandy and Bénédictine. The combination is surprising because it manages to use the potent fragrance of the brandy and use it as a vehicle to push the herbal notes of the Bénédictine into your nose at the same time. I find it works very well, and will be having at least a couple more before I get bored with it…

Recipe:

1 oz. Brandy
1 oz. Bénédictine

Pour into a brandy snifter and serve.

Notes:

The original recipe I found lists building this drink on ice as a possibility, but I don’t recommend it. If you can take the booze straight at room temperature, then that’s how you’ll enjoy it the most.

You’ll really want to use the snifter in order to get the whole aroma thing going. Getting a nose-full of the mixture is definitely one of the highlights of this drink.

Rating:

- I really wasn’t expecting to like it this much.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 1:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.