Southern Comfort

[cowdery]

I would assume one of the recipes Chuck wrote was combining Comfort with bourbon to make a Southern Rob Roy-type cocktail such as this. It was a good drink, and had a rich, "historical" taste to it.

Nope. The starting premise of all Southern Comfort recipes was to use it as a whiskey substitute.

[cowdery]

Actually, the two Southern Comforts we have in the store are 70 and 100 proof.

Delicious! My point is made. And you know who owns Southern Comfort?

Brown-Forman!

[cowdery]

showing very pure peach and citrus flavors

The syrup used to flavor the GNS contains several fruit concentrates. Peach is one, but the dominant one is apricot.

In retrospect, I probably should have started this thread in "Non-Whiskey Alcohol," but since Southern Comfort has always positioned itself as a whiskey, I think it belongs here. Most stores, for example, stock it in the whiskey section. In fact, Southern Comfort is in the tradition of 19th century compound whiskies that contained little or (as in the case of Southern Comfort) no actual whiskey.

[Gillman]

Well, and now that I've read Southern Comfort is a Brown-Forman product, I can see real possibilities for good "in-house" Rob Roy-type cocktails, e.g., Old Forester and Comfort or Woodford Reserve and Comfort. When I think back to the blending manual I've read from 1885, Southern Comfort sounds something like the fruit mixtures described in the book for blending GNS and whiskey. It would have been a very fruity, intensely sweet mixture, possibly viscous. The recipes for these fruit concentrates (given in the same book) always employ neutral spirit as a base, so they were liquid to a degree. This was to aid the maceration of the fruits and probably to preserve them. I am not sure if Southern Comfort, sweet as it is, is as concentrated as those 1885 peach, raisin or date mixtures were. Probably the Southern Comfort formula is a surviving example of the range of blending agents and compound spirits and whiskies known in the late 1800's, just as rock and rye is. But my point being, Comfort is close enough to those blending agents to be used to make a cocktail which would emulate the taste of a blended whisky of 1885. One could experiment with different amounts of Comfort in relation to other whiskey and spirits: say, one part Comfort, one part Canadian Club or Seven Crown, 2 parts good rich bourbon or rye. The combinations are endless. To come close to the blended whiskies described in the 1885 book, one would have to add the Comfort sparingly, probably not more than 10% of the total. Because, in that book at least, the fruited additive is mainly a blending agent, one can tell this from the small amounts indicated to be used, only 1% or so of the total blend. To produce one of the top grades described in the book, I would do something like this: cover bottom of a tumbler with Comfort (say a half-ounce or less), pour normal measures of two good bourbons, add rocks, dash of good rye whiskey to float on top.

Can there be such a thing as a Gazebo Cocktail 2004?

Gary