Tales of the Cocktail Foundation’s Most Imaginative Bartender Competition presented by BOMBAY SAPPHIRE® Gin is an opportunity for bartenders to let their imagination and creativity shine. For more information and to enter, see the Official Rules at Most Imaginative Bartender’s site.

One look at bartender and photography enthusiast Ran Duan’s Instagram (@cocktail_lens), and it’s clear what he cares about.

As someone who has built a thriving cocktail-bar business in the Boston suburbs literally atop his father’s Chinese restaurant, he prizes family above all. “I know that sounds cliché,” says Duan. “But it’s the truth.”

Duan’s own career begins, as he tells it, with his father. Duan was born in Sichuan, China, and his family moved to America when he was three years old. His father’s dream was to sing opera, and he received a scholarship to study his passion, but it didn’t turn into a career.  Instead, he opened a Chinese restaurant inside Baldwin Mansion, which was built in the 17th century.

“My dad gave up his passion to be able to provide for his family,” Duan says. “That’s inspiring for me. In the Chinese culture, family is everything.” Duan grew up in the family business and intended to continue their legacy , heading to culinary school Johnson & Wales to earn a degree in hotel management. After graduating from school in 2009 and returning home, his father tasked him with opening a bar in the space above the restaurant.

However, the new grad didn’t have much experience in bartending. He learned by devouring books, cocktail blogs (he cites Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s blog as a particular influence) and engaging with Boston’s thriving bar scene.

Today, he describes his first bar as a “tiki-esque” space, with drink concepts and ingredients inspired by his world travels. “It’s been a whirlwind of being a craft cocktail bar within a Chinese restaurant in a suburb that’s not known as a destination,” Duan says. “We didn’t realize the magnitude of what we could make it.”

He also began entering — and winning — cocktail competitions. It’s telling that his Bacardi Legacy 2015 USA title was secured with a drink called Father’s Advice, a Manhattan/El Presidente mash-up featuring BACARDI ® GOLD RUM, Cardamaro, Punt e Mes, amontillado sherry and Giffard Banane du Brésil. The drink idea stems from a quote that his father shared when Duan’s son was born: “The greatness of a man is not measured by his wealth but by his integrity to love and his abilities to put someone else’s needs before his.”

As his bar and personal reputation grew, he eventually opened a second “secret” cocktail lounge, above the first, serving even more baroque cocktails. In 2017, he opened a third bar in Brookline — also adjacent to the Chinese restaurant owned by Duan’s parents — featuring South American spirits and tiki drinks.

His creative process for coming up with new drink ideas often starts with a specific concept, such as a memory, “or something our guests can relate to.” For example, he points to a drink on his menu called After School Snack, which channels a peanut butter and jelly sandwich; it’s made with tequila, horchata, peanut oil, cacao and cream. “We make it  reminiscent of childhood,” he explains. “Ever have a dish that reminds you of something your mom made? We always try to find the connections.”

The bar business also led him to his other obsession: photography. “I was sick of paying people to take pictures or take videos of our products for our website,” he recalls. “About four years ago, I bought my first camera, and I never looked back.” As with making cocktails, he taught himself, this time using online tutorials. His photography skills also provided a springboard into travel opportunities, which he also incorporates into his drinks, closing the inspiration loop.

“We try to put our journeys, our memories into these drinks,” says Duan. “That’s how I got started. But now it’s a passion — a creative direction for me.”

FAST FACTS

Home Town: Sichuan, China

Current Location: Burlington, Massachusetts (Boston)

Creative Passion: Photography/videography

Years in the Industry: 15

Number of Places Worked: 6

Favorite Bar(s): Deep Ellum, Drink, Eastern Standard, Hawthorne, The Publick House in Brookline, Matt Murphy’s Pub

Five Items That Inspire Ran Duan

1. My Sony a7R3. This is my daily shooter I use for work, for pleasure, for travel. It’s always attached to my head. It’s a great camera for low lighting, so I use it when I’m behind the bar or shooting for Instagram.
2. I can’t live without my tile. I tend to lose my keys or my phone or my wallet a lot. It’s a little keychain thing. I probably use it once a week. I live and die by it. For people who are very forgetful, it’s a lifesaver.
3. One of my favorite things to use behind the bar is my Cuisinart immersion blender. It’s one of my favorite bar tools because it makes blended drinks on the fly wherever you are, so you don’t need a loud blender, and you can surprise guests with a different texture. It’s a handheld immersion blender.
4. My GoPro Hero Black 7. I am obsessed with it. Sometimes while I’m bartending or midshift, we’ll make a quick little video. It’s probably one of the best action cameras on the market. We did a couple of pop-ups; we sometimes put a GoPro on our guest bartenders for the entire shift. It’s my action camera wherever I go.
5. I’m really obsessed with my Ninja Blender. I have kids. I never have time to make or eat a full meal. We just blend a bunch of fruit in the morning. Or I take it to the bar and we use it for making syrup — it has this quick little adapter. It’s like Magic Bullet, but I know that’s a different brand. I use it whenever I’m on the run or I have to do a quick little prep for the bar or do a quick meal for myself.

The post Inside Ran Duan’s Creative Toolkit appeared first on PUNCH.

An enthusiastic advocate for bartending’s lesser-appreciated spirits, Chantal Tseng goes out of her way to demystify the likes of aquavit, sherry and absinthe with every drink she mixes at the Reading Room in Washington, D.C. “I love watching people try these things, wrap their head around something, and like it,” she says.

Several times a year, the Reading Room team will deviate from its typical literature-inspired lists, dedicating an entire evening to absinthe, a category burdened with enough hoary folklore to fill the Library of Congress. For these special nights, Tseng and colleague Dan Searing offer the traditional flowing fountain, spoon and sugar cube setup, along with a roster of absinthe-based cocktails. This gave Tseng a chance to stump for the Tremblement de Terre, otherwise known as the Earthquake, a potent absinthe cocktail with roots in France’s Belle Époque.

Tseng was working at D.C.’s historic Tabard Inn in 2007, the year absinthe was once again legalized for sale in the States after a nearly century-long ban. She immediately did what she does best: hit the books for inspiration. She happened upon the Earthquake—equal parts gin, whisky and absinthe, shaken and served in a cocktail glass—in the 1930’s Savoy Cocktail Book, and was instantly intrigued. (According to Savoy author Harry Craddock, the concoction deserves its tectonic moniker “because if there should happen to be an earthquake on when you are drinking it, it won’t matter.”) 

Related Recipe

Earthquake

Chantal Tseng tweaks the equal-parts recipe for the modern palate.

More Recipes →

Tseng began tinkering with the recipe and was pleased to find it had potential, despite its apparent jet-fuel potency. “It’s not as terrible as you think, and that’s part of the reason why the recipe works,” she says.

More than Craddock’s version, however, Tseng was taken with a simpler iteration commonly credited to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the influential French Post-Impressionist and early advocate of American cocktail culture. Absinthe was Toulouse-Lautrec’s primary crutch, both figuratively and literally. Stricken with congenital disabilities from birth, the artist was forced to walk with a cane, which he customized to hold a half-liter of his choice poison as well as a drinking glass, according to Phil Baker’s The Book of Absinthe: A Cultural History. While he took it straight, he was wont to cut it with Cognac, too. “A notoriously heavy drinker,” writes Baker of the painter, “his preferred mixture was a lethal combination of absinthe and brandy known as an Earthquake.”

Originally an 50/50 mixture, Tseng has made her own modifications. “I don’t like it equal parts—it does get kind of sweet that way, even if you don’t add sugar to the absinthe,” she says. Tweaking the ratio to two-to-one, with a lemon twist, results in a crisper, drier drink that simultaneously highlights and tempers absinthe’s inherent licorice notes. Tseng is also fond of working in various sherries, vermouths, amari and sparkling wines into lengthened-riffs, further softening the high-proof edges.

Much tamer than how Toulouse-Lautrec took it, Tseng sees her edit of the Earthquake as a way to get the curious and skeptical engaged with the history and culture of absinthe. “It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” she says. “Well, with absinthe, it’s always a little crazy.”

The post Bring Back the Earthquake appeared first on PUNCH.

When the temperature tips past 75 degrees, Margaritas and Daiquiris start settling into their summer homes on happy hour menus across the country. But following the same foolproof sour formula of spirit, sweetener and citrus, the un-loved daisy boasts an added layer of effervescence thanks to a finishing splash of soda water, boosting the category’s inherent drinkability.

Take the New School Gin Daisy, for example. Following the template of its old-school sibling, the recipe maintains the critical citrus and sparkling components, but dials back the gin, adding grenadine in place of orange liqueur for a fruitier flavor. The Shady Lane, on the other hand, takes a more baroque approach, straddling floral, sweet and tart all at once. To the expected gin and soda water, Lillet Rouge and blackberry-lime syrup bring a freshness to the formula, while shiso’s peppery aromatics tie the whole thing together.

The daisy’s adaptable makeup means it can take on virtually any spirit so long as it’s spruced up with soda. At Brooklyn’s Diamond Lil, Nathan Vernard adds a measure of dry Curaçao and sweet vermouth to his pisco-based Valparaiso Daisy, while Alex Day calls on rhum agricole. Complemented by Lillet Rouge, lime and pineapple gum syrup, his Pins & Needles reads like the lovechild of a Daiquiri and spritz.

In a similar crossover, Shelly Lindgren’s Dusty Trails possesses the spirit of a cobbler with the spice of a buck. Fresh, muddled strawberries combine with rye, ginger syrup and soda water, for a drink that balances all the makings of a summer crusher: sweetness, tanginess and of course—fizz.

Gin Daisy (New School): Grenadine updates the classic soda-spiked template. [Recipe]

Dusty Trails: The spirit of a cobbler and the spice of a buck. [Recipe]

Shady Lane: Shiso crowns this blackberry and citrus summer crusher. [Recipe]

Pins & Needles: The lovechild of a Daiquiri and a spritz. [Recipe]

Valparaiso Daisy: A pisco-laced excuse for daytime drinking. [Recipe]

The post Desperately Seeking Daisy appeared first on PUNCH.

It’s summer in America. That once meant Gin and Tonic time, or Margarita time or Mojito time. Now, whether you like it or not, it’s spritz time. Italy’s classic low-ABV, bitter, fizzy, iced drink took roots in the United States a few years ago and today has grown into a mighty oak, with spritz menus springing up willy-nilly and aperitivo-makers both old and new fanning the flames as they fight for a piece of the Aperol pie.

The Top Three

Doppio Spritz

Two types of Italian aperitivo are the key to this winning recipe.

Jon Mullen's Aperol Spritz

A dash of citric acid and saline make for a standout rendition.

Spritz Tussaud

A classic Italian spritz topped with rosé Champagne.

More Recipes →

“There has been a lot of discussion about the Aperol Spritz lately,” said PUNCH features editor Leslie Pariseau, coauthor (with PUNCH editor in chief Talia Baiocchi) of the 2016 book Spritz, which arguably helped kick off the trend. “It’s definitely timely. We’ve come to a point where everything is a spritz. But is it a spritz?”

On a recent afternoon, PUNCH learned just how diverse the notion of the spritz has become when ten of the country’s best bartenders submitted their formula for an Italian-style spritz. Part of the drink’s identity is the general looseness of its construction. Still, there are some basic boxes to tick: PUNCH asked that the drink contain an Italian, or Italian-style, aperitivo bitter liqueur; wine; and bubbles of some kind, contributed by either wine or water. It was also required to be low proof. Yet even with guidelines in place, few recipes displayed what could be considered classic spritz characteristics.

The lineup of drinks brought to the fore other issues the judges had not expected to address. Two called for a syrup, something that was deemed unnecessary, as the aperitivo liqueur should bring all the requisite sweetness—and, frankly, quite unheard of in classic spritz-dom, which eternally favors the laissez-faire. Another two contained beer and were quickly dismissed for falling outside the traditional fray. Other drinks were only dimly recognizable as an Italian spritz. At a certain point, the panel prayed for the arrival of a classic Aperol Spritz, if only to reset the cosmic equilibrium.

They didn’t quite get that, but they did encounter a few satisfying drinks that came close, or at least answered to the name “spritz.” The winning drink came from Joe Campanale, who, as an owner of the Italian restaurant Fausto in Brooklyn, knows a thing or two about aperitivo culture. The Fausto Doppio Spritz surprised the judges by containing no wine, but instead, as the name suggests, two bitters: an ounce each of Contratto Aperitif and Forthave Red. This was topped with an ounce of tonic water, then soda water, and garnished with an orange wheel and a green olive. The drinkers found it simple, approachable and, though wineless, fairly classic.

Second place went to bartender Jon Mullen from the newly opened Greenwich Village all-day café Bar Pisellino, operated by the Via Carota team. His Aperol Spritz called for two ounces of Aperol, three ounces of brut prosecco, one ounce of cold soda water, and dashes of saline and citric acid solution. “It tastes like an Aperol spritz,” said Morrissey approvingly. “It’s one note—in a good way.”

Coming in third was Chantal Tseng, of Washington, D.C.’s Petworth Citizen and Reading Room, who put together a winning combination of one ounce of Cappelletti Aperitivo Americano, a popular option with bartenders in place of Campari or Aperol; two ounces of Perrier; and three ounces of rosé Champagne.

All three, the panel thought, would please any spritz-seeking consumer. And that, perhaps, is the final irony of the current mania for the drink that has gripped the country. Americans may want more spritzes, but the template has yet to open up to interpretation the same way other drinks like the Margarita or Cobbler have. Beyond Campari and Aperol, none of the newer aperitivo bitters on the market are recognizable—or called for—by customers. But that’s perhaps to be expected. Nobody orders a spritz because they’re in a thinking mood or want to debate cocktail construction.

“They’re just happy with a spritz if it looks the bill,” said McGee.

The post In Search of the Ultimate Spritz appeared first on PUNCH.

A primary prerogative of the modern tiki revival has always been the recreation of the past. Devotees of the genre have spent countless collective hours unearthing and deciphering cryptic recipes, reformulating extinct rums and tracking down original 1950s bric-a-brac in the name of restoring the tiki bar to its former midcentury glory. You’d be forgiven, then, for thinking that the fez—the traditional Turkish headdress that appears as a recurring motif across tiki mugs, backbars and atop the domes of dedicated bar goers—boasts a historic tie-in to the tiki world, perhaps even to Don the Beachcomber or Trader Vic himself.

“It’s not connected in any way to the original era—stylistically, culturally or anything,” says Martin Cate of the headgear in question. Yet at Smuggler’s Cove, Cate’s award-winning San Francisco tiki bar, the Rumbustion Society—an internal club that promotes rum education—bestows a signature embroidered crimson fez, as well as the title “Guardians of the Cove,” to second tier participants. So how did the fez cross over into tiki’s modern iconography?

The answer goes back only as far as the 1990s, a time when tiki was undergoing an early revival. Josh Agle, a Southern California–based artist better known as Shag, was exhibiting several of his midcentury-inspired paintings at a tiki-themed exhibition in Hollywood, some of which featured Shriners drinking at tiki bars. “Shriner iconography and apparel was a minor fascination for me since the early 1990s,” explains Shag of his interest in the Shriner fez, something the order officially adopted in 1872 in a nod to the fraternity’s Arabian theme. “My very first art show in 1997 featured paintings of both tiki culture and Shriner scenes, but it wasn’t until I did a painting called ‘Two Heavy Drinkers’ in 1998 that I decided to combine my two interests and feature Shriners in a tiki bar,” he says. Shag’s crossover with the tiki world only increased when he began designing collectible tiki mugs in the early 2000s.

While “Two Heavy Drinkers” is a fictional depiction (“Both Shriners and tiki were associated with drinking, so it seems like a natural fit,” says Shag), Cate notes that it’s more than plausible that Shriners, among other secret society members, drank at tiki bars, citing the proliferation of both society culture and tiki culture in midcentury America. “One thing we do know is in the 1950s, fraternal organizations and secret societies were a lot more popular and a lot more common than they are now,” he explains. “Whether you were a Lion, an Elk or a Freemason or a Shriner—whatever it was, chances are you had cocktails at a tiki bar.”

At Smuggler’s Cove, Cate adopted the headdress for his Rumbustion Society simply as part of the “gamification of the concept,” which involves bestowing tokens on guests after reaching certain checkpoints in their rum-drinking journey. It’s a prime example of how the felt headdress—which sits at the center of a Venn diagram of secret societies, role-playing and tiki—has become a sort of shorthand for a large swath of fantasy culture. To underscore this point, at Fez-o-rama, a specialty online retailer of bespoke fezes, popular designs include an icosahedron, a twenty-sided die associated with role-playing games, and a purple-and-copper-colored dragon from Dungeons & Dragons, described as the “perfect fez for your next dungeon campaign.” When the Fraternal Order of Moai was founded in 2005 as a social club for tiki fanatics, with chapters across the country, naturally they commissioned a distinctive fez for senior members.

Tiki’s adoption of the fez as a leitmotif in its modern iconography might seem, at first glance, entirely random—a conflation of concurrent trends that have little in common other than sharing an era and an inquisitive painter in the 1990s. But on closer inspection, the fez—a symbol of tradition, luxury and the exotic—fits. It is, in some ways, the perfect emblem for the genre, which has fantasy baked into its core, and which has long drawn on the visual identities of other cultures to further its own fantastical vision. Even drinking through a tiki menu feels like a choose-your-own-adventure game in which users must navigate the hazardous world of the Ankle Breaker, the Shark’s Tooth and the Zombie. With each successive order, you’re buying deeper into the fantasy. A few more Scorpions and you, too, might become befezzed.

The post What the Fez? appeared first on PUNCH.

If you’ve stepped into a hotel lobby or spent time at a spa, you’ve no doubt been offered a refreshing glass of cucumber-infused water. It is, after all, the official flavor of relaxation.

In the world of drink-making, it acts as something of the same—a beacon of summer, and the lot of easy-drinking cocktails that come along with it. To prove the thesis, we teamed up with Fever-Tree to celebrate the release of their Refreshingly Light Cucumber Tonic Water. The new expression sources calls on natural fruit sugars and quinine sourced from the Congo to deliver a mixer that’s as light as it is flavorful. We asked five alumni of our Bartender in Residence program—Nitecap’s Lauren Corriveau, Tenzing Wine and Spirits’ Mony Bunni, Law Bird’s Annie Williams Pierce, Death & Co Denver’s Alex Jump and Dante’s Stacey Swenson—to build drinks around the mixer’s profile.

“Fever-Tree Cucumber Tonic Water can be incorporated anywhere you would normally use a little something bubbly—highballs, spritzes, even punches,” says Corriveau, who has become known for drinks that fit squarely within what we’ll call the “relaxation drink” genre. “Cucumber is one of my favorite ingredients for that reason; it works well in both vegetal and herbaceous drinks, as well as those with more fruity and floral character.”

In Flowers & You, Corriveau mixes up a thirst-quenching spritz variation, with a base of blanc vermouth and brandy rounded out by a homemade grapefruit cordial and a splash of rosewater. “Playing on the delicate aromatic quality and impression of fresh green cucumber in the Fever-Tree Cucumber Tonic, I knew I wanted to keep it light, while highlighting the subtle floral notes,” says Corriveau, noting that the grapefruit cordial accentuates the subtle bitterness of the tonic.

For her take, Mony Bunni was inspired to create a light and refreshing riff on a Spanish-style Gin and Tonic she calls the Garden Variety, which marries blanc vermouth, cachaça, fresh strawberries and lime, and an entire bottle of Fever-Tree Cucumber Tonic. “The chamomile and rosemary notes of the vermouth added a beautiful herbal quality, supported by the green banana and fresh-cut grass notes from the cachaça,” says Bunni. “And I loved the clean cucumber profile of the tonic, which, in my mind, naturally goes well with strawberries and lime, for a fairly low-proof summertime patio crusher.”

Annie Williams Pierce’s take satisfies her mission to convert as many people as possible to sherry drinkers, via craveable, familiar cocktail formats. “When I first tasted the Fever-Tree Cucumber Tonic I immediately thought of a Pimm’s Cup,” says Pierce. In her Cool Aunt Pimm she pairs amontillado sherry with blanco tequila, fresh lemon juice, a spoonful of raspberry jam and a pinch of salt. “I wanted to make something crisp but also a little savory and round.”

Alex Jump went for a “slightly more bitter and floral route” with her Suppressor #1280, named after the style of minimalist yet sturdy low-ABV cocktails popularized by Greg Best and Paul Calvert at Atlanta’s Ticonderoga Club. Jump’s take features the Italian bittersweet vermouth Punt e Mes and the orange-forward Amaro CioCiaro, along with the elderflower-based St-Germain liqueur. “The Fever-Tree Cucumber Tonic has really beautiful cucumber aromatics, while still being delicate on the palate,” says Jump. “Its floral nature works really well with other citrus flavors.”

Finally, Stacey Swenson rounds out this batch of “relaxation drinks” with her Cool As Clarence, which takes its name from the scene in True Romance where Alabama slides her true love, Clarence, a napkin with the inscription, “You’re so cool,” written over and over. Swenson combines tequila and blanc vermouth with honeydew and a small dose of coconut milk for texture, all topped off with Fever-Tree Cucumber Tonic. She sums it up perfectly, calling it, simply, “a chill summer highball.”

Cool Aunt Pimm: Tequila and sherry update this Pimm’s Cup riff from Annie Williams Pierce. [Recipe]

Flowers & You: Lauren Corriveau’s thirst-quenching spritz. [Recipe]

Suppressor #1280: Alex Jump’s low-ABV summertime refresher cuts a middle path between bitter and floral. [Recipe]

Cool As Clarence: Stacey Swenson’s chill summer highball is kicked up with a spiced salt rim. [Recipe]

Garden Variety: Mony Bunni’s riff on a Spanish-style Gin and Tonic. [Recipe]

The post This Is What Relaxation Tastes Like appeared first on PUNCH.

The almond syrup known as orgeat has long been a key player in classic cocktails, from Trader Vic’s Mai Tai to Jerry Thomas’s Japanese Cocktail, not to mention the ever-widening array of modern concoctions. But as bar programs continue the trend towards environmentally-friendly practices, the water-wasting almond—the core of the syrup—has come under scrutiny, and a number of alternative orgeats are stepping up to the plate.

Among these alt-orgeats, which are cropping up at bars across the country, are syrups made from day-old pastries, seeds like sunflower or pumpkin seeds (pepitas) and even avocado pits.

Kelsey Ramage, who has began making avocado pit orgeat for her Trash Tiki events, which focus on using upcycled “trash” from bars and restaurant kitchens to make cocktails, started turning the pits into syrup for several reasons:

“My basic bitch tendencies mean a couple of avocado toasts in the morning,” she says, “and it only takes four seeds to make one liter of the stuff. Plus, almonds are hella expensive, not to mention take a lot of natural resources to grow. Why wouldn’t we use something more abundant and free?”

It’s these sorts of sentiments that put efficiency—of time, resources and cost—at the forefront that have become the driving force behind the budding crop of alternative orgeats. Here are five innovating examples being served across the country.

Avocado Pit Orgeat
Kelsey Ramage, Trash Tiki

While this recipe yields “a lovely warm toasted flavor” on its own, sometimes Ramage uses almond extract or a little orange flower water to “bump up the flavor.” She also uses this as a base for making falernum, adding spices (cinnamon, allspice, clove, anise) to the pan to toast with the pits, and then tossing in a leftover orange and lime husk to the overnight infusion.

Café Orgeat
Kelsey Ramage, Trash Tiki

For those who can’t bear the thought of going without almonds, Trash Tiki has a compromise: upcycled day-old almond croissants. “Just just hit up your local cafe and ask them to not throw out what they don’t sell,” the team suggests. The sugar, butter and oil are the functional ingredients, so don’t worry if the pastries aren’t perfectly fresh.

Sunflower Seed Orgeat
Claire Sprouse, Hunky Dory, Brooklyn, NY

“I like sunflower seeds for a lot of reasons,” says Sprouse, the owner of Brooklyn’s Hunky Dory. They’re drought-resistant, have deep root systems that reach untapped nutrients in lower soils, they gobble up excess nitrogen in the soil, the market is GMO free, they’re relatively low-carbon intensity to harvest and process, and the flowers can be used to feed animals or as a fertilizer for other crops. Plus, “they are delicious!”

Pepita Orgeat
Kevin Diedrich, Pacific Cocktail Haven, San Francisco, CA

At PCH, the menu is full of tropical cocktails. While some use traditional orgeat, Diedrich frequently experiments with a wide variety of syrups—including salted pistachio, macadamia nuts and roasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds)—to expand the flavor profile possibilities. He typically combines this pepita syrup in a colorful drink with blanco tequila, pumpkin puree and citrus: “We found the tequila works really well with pepitas,” Diedrich says.

Walnut Orgeat
Luis Hernandez, Lost Hours, New York, NY

Though not necessarily more environmentally sustainable than almond-based syrup, this alt-orgeat offers a seasonal rendition. Created for The Eddy, now closed, it filled out a tiki-style drink made with a split base of Cachaça and aged rum, plus a dose of cold brew coffee. The robust flavors demanded an equally assertive sweetener. Roasting the walnuts created a bolder, darker profile that fit the bill, and works well in recipes with other bold, dark flavors.

Try It In These Recipes

Jeremy Oertel's Bitter Mai Tai [Recipe] | [Photo: Daniel Krieger]

Cape Town Cup [Recipe] | [Photo: Lizzie Munro]

Mount Olympus Collins [Recipe] | [Photo: Daniel Krieger]

The NoMad Bar's Mai Tai [Recipe] | [Photo: Lizzie Munro]

Venus Fly Trap [Recipe] | [Photo: Lizzie Munro]

The post Orgeat Doesn’t Need Your Almonds appeared first on PUNCH.

Although it’s not the top-selling cocktail at his Miami bar, Cafe La Trova, Julio Cabrera insists that the El Presidente is the best cocktail—when it’s done right.

Using a recipe he first learned in Cuba, Cabrera has spent three decades “perfecting the elegance” of the Prohibition-era rum classic. Today the bartender—or, in his preferred Cuban parlance, cantinero—says the keys to his spirit-forward variation is simplicity, balance—and blanc vermouth.

The original El Presidente cocktail was first created in Cuba to honor Mario García Menocal, president of that country from 1913 to 1921. Eddie Woelke, an American bartender who worked at the Jockey Club in Havana during the Prohibition years, is usually credited with creating the drink, which began as a mix of equal parts white rum and dry vermouth, sweetened with a barspoon of grenadine. According to some accounts, when Gerardo Machado took over the presidency in 1925, he demanded his own version, resulting in a few dashes of orange Curaçao added to the mix.

“It’s like a Manhattan: very simple but unique,” Cabrera explains. “It’s one of the most beautiful cocktails I’ve tried.”

Related Recipe

Julio Cabrera’s El Presidente

A rum-heavy riff on Cuba's classic drink.

More Recipes →

The first time Cabrera tried one was in 1989, while attending cantinero school in Cuba. That version was made with white rum, dry vermouth and grenadine—no Curaçao. “It was much better than the Rum and Coke I was drinking at the time,” he recalls.

Over time, Cabrera has refined the drink specs. While he has tried many variations—“it’s been an evolution over 30 years,” he says—his preferred version snapped into focus in 2012, while working with late bartender John Lermayer to open The Regent Cocktail Club in Miami Beach. Cabrera was appointed to focus on both rum-driven and Cuban cocktails. “I tried to make them with a modern twist, and [the El Presidente] was one of them,” he recalls.

Compared to the classic equal-parts recipe, Cabrera cuts the vermouth in half: “I think there should be more rum, and just the vermouth as a modifier.” He recommends using a Spanish-style gold rum, specifically Banks 7, a blended aged rum that includes distillate sourced from Panama and Guatemala, among other countries.

Meanwhile, the vermouth should be a mellow blanc. Compared to the more austere dry vermouth, blanc yields a drink that is “more complete, more elegant, more balanced,” says Cabrera.

Cabrera made this swap after reading a 2012 Imbibe article penned by drink historian David Wondrich that suggested semidry blanc-style vermouth from Chambéry would have been the historically accurate choice in Prohibition-era Cuba. These two ingredients create an El Presidente that would have been similar to the ones head bartender Constante Ribalaigua would have mixed at Havana’s famous El Floridita.

The same year that Cabrera made the switch to blanc vermouth, dry Curaçao was reintroduced to the United States via a collaboration between Wondrich and Cognac maker Pierre Ferrand. Cabrera found the drier, bitter orange flavor profile better suited to his variation: “If you’re using blanc vermouth, it will already have a little sweetness,” he explains, and traditional orange liqueur will push the sweetness level over the edge, while the dry Curaçao maintains the drink’s all-important equilibrium. To that, he also adds a barspoon of house-made grenadine, “for color, not for sweetness.”

While most modern-day versions are served with an orange peel garnish, sometimes in tandem with a brandied cherry, Cabrera is adamant: no orange peel floating in the coupe glass. “I don’t think it is nice looking,” he says. Instead, his version calls simply for the orange peel to be expressed, then discarded, while a solitary cherry is dropped to the bottom of the coupe glass.

Of course, not all of his variations on the recipe over the past 30 years have been home runs. For example, his experiment barrel-aging the drink for a couple of months did not stick. “I tried it and said, this is not what I wanted to do,” he says. “I didn’t want it to change the original recipe . . . I keep it simple.”

Julio Cabrera uses blanc vermouth in place of dry, which yields an El Presidente that is “more complete, more elegant, more balanced.”

Dry Curaçao, rather than sweeter orange liqueur, keeps the drink in equilibrium.

Cabrera adds a barspoon of house-made grenadine, “for color, not for sweetness.”

While most modern-day versions are served with an orange peel garnish, Cabrera discards the peel after expressing the oils over the drink.

A solitary cherry dropped to the bottom of the coupe is finishing touch.

The post Mastering the El Presidente With Julio Cabrera appeared first on PUNCH.

Most bar innovations, from forced carbonation to rotovaps, escape the attention of even the most devoted cocktail enthusiast. But there is one concept of the last decade that even the most clueless barflies would have been hard pressed to miss. That’s barrel-aged cocktails. The barrel-aged cocktail has become so ho-hum ubiquitous that even the most run-of-the-mill gin joints and restaurants seem to have one on the menu, be it a Negroni, a Manhattan, a Martinez or an El Presidente.

The worldwide phenomenon began a decade ago when a Portland bartender happened to taste an off-menu cocktail at a high-concept cocktail bar in north London. That Portland bartender, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, took the practice—changing the aging vessel from glass to barrels—and brought it to his bar Clyde Common. Its success was immediate. A year after its debut in 2009, barrel-aged cocktails were seemingly everywhere, from New York to San Francisco to New Orleans. Part of its diaspora owes at least something to Morgenthaler’s website, one of the best read and most technique driven of the early cocktail blogs, and one of the few written by a working bartender.

Also lending a vital assist was the simultaneous rise of craft distilling. Young distillers trying their hand at immature specimens of bourbon suddenly found themselves with a lot of used barrels on their hands. (Bourbon barrels must, by law, be discarded after their first use.) Some of these were small barrels, which worked better for aging whiskey faster, and were, coincidentally, ideal for aging cocktails.

That perfect storm of circumstances kicked off a trend that proved to be no flash in the pan. Since the practice first peaked, Morgenthaler has had eight to ten barrels resting at Clyde Common at any given time. There is still at least one barrel-aged cocktail on any Clyde drinks menu (typically the Negroni, the most popular cocktail of the genre), and sales of the cocktails have never flagged.

To tell the story of the barrel-aged cocktail, we spoke with Morgenthaler; his boss, Nate Tilden; Gable Erenzo, one of the movement’s critical barrel suppliers; Kevin Denton and Thomas Chadwick, early adopters of the practice; and Philip Duff, a cocktail expert who provided Morgenthaler with the tip that would kick of the whole thing.

Origins

Jeffrey Morgenthaler (bar director at Clyde Common, 2009 to present): “I was at [the London bar] 69 Colebrooke Row on October 22, 2009. I was there for UK RumFest and was having some drinks with [bartender] Michael Menegos and the master distiller for Havana Club. Michael is a friend of mine, so we were just catching up, and I’d always wanted to go to that bar. I’d put on Facebook that I was there, and Phil Duff messaged me and told me to ask Tony [Conigliaro, the owner] for the vintage Manhattan. I even took a photo of it.”

Philip Duff (longtime bartender, bar owner and roving cocktail and spirits expert): “Honestly, I don’t specifically remember messaging Jeffrey, but that’s 100 percent something I’d do . . . Information traveled much more slowly back then, and I knew about Tony’s bottle-aging. Hence it was a nice off-menu item to ask for back then.”

Morgenthaler: “I mean, to be honest, it tasted like a Manhattan. Tony said that he found the flavors to be more ‘integrated’ after being stored in the bottle for five years, but I probably just wasn’t sophisticated enough to tell the difference . . . If I remember correctly, it was a Rittenhouse Manhattan. I made a shit-ton of them at work, so I was familiar with the way a fresh one tasted. I never felt like the flavors weren’t integrated with one another, whatever that means.”

Research & Development

Nate Tilden (co-owner of Clyde Common, 2007 to present): “Jeff came to me in 2009 with the idea of aging a cocktail in bourbon barrels.  He had visited a friend in Europe who was aging cocktails in glass and came back with the idea of doing aging on wood. I had visited Kentucky whiskey distilleries the previous summer and was feeling very American-whiskey-forward at that time, so I was quite interested in the idea.”

Morgenthaler: “I had this one-gallon oak barrel I’d received through being a board member of the Oregon Bartenders’ Guild, and I’d already filled it with Madeira and was just flavoring the barrel with the Madeira until I came up with something to do with it. I was planning on doing Madeira-cask-aged orange bitters or something. But the Manhattan seemed like a much better choice.”

Tilden: “We ran the financials together, and it was something like 500 bucks to buy the spirits and the barrel, which might have been donated, or we might have already had it, I can’t recall. I remember thinking that gambling $500 of Clyde capital on an idea that might be a total disaster was pretty low risk.  If it had been $5,000, [it] might have been a different story.”

Morgenthaler: “[Nate] was super supportive, but I couldn’t help thinking that he must have thought his new bar manager was mildly insane.”

Tilden: “Jeff tasted a bunch of the Clyde bar crew on his project throughout the aging process. I recall we all felt like six weeks was the perfect time on wood. The biggest difference we noticed was a mellowing of the Campari [in the aged Negroni] that really rounded out the cocktail . . . We did try a sample at nine weeks that was way too woody.”

First Reactions

Morgenthaler: “People took to it immediately. They’d never seen anything like that before. We sold out of that first gallon in like a week or two.”

Tilden: “We thought they were yummy, and I guess if the public hated them, then we would have drank that barrel ourselves and moved on to the next idea.”

Morgenthaler: “The other thing that made this the perfect storm was that Tuthilltown had just started selling their used bourbon barrels. So after we did the Manhattan, I had the idea to put a Negroni in a bourbon barrel. Seemed like a much better idea than aging a Manhattan, a whiskey drink, in a whiskey barrel.”

Gable Erenzo (owner of Tuthilltown Spirits Distillery, 2006 to 2015): “We sold all of our three- and five-gallon barrels from the first few years of whiskey maturation. The small ones were obviously the best for aging cocktails and the most sought after. Many of those sold were sold through our Tuthilltown online store, and much of the traffic coincided with Morgenthaler’s blogging of his aging projects. Lots of bartenders told me they bought through our site, without my knowledge of who, when I saw them in the field.”

Morgenthaler: “I put the whole thing on my website immediately, and people picked it up from there.”

Kevin Denton (bar director at Gramercy Park Hotel, 2008 to 2010): “A very unsung hero in the cocktail movement turned me on to barrel-aging: Mayur Subbarao . . . I tagged along on an Eleven Madison Park trip to Tuthilltown, where I bought one of their small barrels for the purpose of aging cocktails at Gramercy Park Hotel. The idea was really compelling, as I had already been messing around with oak chips in root beer. It didn’t make a ton of sense to barrel-age spirits, but I tried it anyway with the applejack Manhattan. It married and mellowed all those flavors so well . . . We got a few more barrels and ramped up production.”

Thomas Chadwick (owner of Dram, 2009 to 2017): “Dram may have been early on the scene of barrel-aged cocktails, but definitely not the first. Yeah, it would have been 2010. I remember procuring two small barrels from Tuthilltown. I know we did a Negroni, and for the life of me cannot remember other ones. I think a Vieux Carré . . . I was eager to try everything back then, and there was a lot more to explore.”

Erenzo: “Mike Neff at Ward III got one of our early three-gallon barrels, and I believe they used it many times for different aging projects. Daniel Hyatt from Alembic in San Francisco used a barrel I had given him many times, and I dropped off others when in town for WhiskyFest. Naren Young was one of the early bartenders aging cocktails . . . Eamon Rockey was doing some barrel-aging, perhaps while he was still at Eleven Madison Park. Abigail Gullo was using barrels. They were doing some barrel-aging at Rye and Bourbon & Branch, in San Francisco. Neyah White at Nopa.”

Legacy

Erenzo: “We loved the idea of our small barrels moving on to a new life. Since no Scotch, rum, or tequila distilleries were particularly interested in our small barrels, we had lots . . . Plus, it was fun to visit bars around the country that were coming up with creative reuses for our baby barrels.”

Tilden: “If you can take food or drink and do something magical with time and environment, then that satisfies the certain mad-doctor streak a lot of people have.”

Morgenthaler: “I think it’s just one more tool in a bar’s arsenal.”

The post The Aged Cocktail’s Barrel Zero appeared first on PUNCH.

Tales of the Cocktail Foundation’s Most Imaginative Bartender Competition presented by BOMBAY SAPPHIRE® Gin is an opportunity for bartenders to let their imagination and creativity shine. For more information and to enter, see the Official Rules at Most Imaginative Bartender’s site.

Don’t be surprised if you find Carley Gaskin literally scrawling drink ideas on the wall. The art school grad may have officially traded drawing for drinks—she’s now one half of a Chicago-based cocktail catering company—but her visual roots are clear: She has set up a blank wall next to her bar as a way to plot out cocktail concepts.

Most of these ideas involve minimizing waste and building cocktails using environmentally friendly methods. That might mean rescuing misshapen produce, or finding creative ways to reuse ingredients in drinks: Her zero-waste Geb’s Reviver cocktail, which won her the Bombay Sapphire’s Most Imaginative Bartender title in 2018, uses leftover fruit pulp, spent citrus husks and “dust” from dehydrated rhubarb and carrot—all byproducts of juices used in the drink.

Building drinks for cocktail catering clients involves flexing different muscles than planning the cocktail menu for a bar, Gaskin says. A standard drinks menu generally requires a broad array of offerings. Catering, though, allows for a tightly curated list, making it easier to maximize ingredient usage. She points to a hypothetical tequila-and-carrot cocktail that might be served at a wedding: How many different ways can that carrot be used—the juice, the pulp, the leafy top? “My creative process is finding those ingredients, trying to be as creative as possible,” she says, “and doing those things in a simple manner.”

One thing you’ll never see in a Gaskin original? Wasteful garnishes. “That drives me crazy,” she says. What’s the point of adding an extraneous bouquet of fresh mint to a drink? It increases the carbon footprint, she points out. It wastes water. And what is it adding to the experience? “I think ungarnished cocktails are some of the most beautiful,” she says. “Don’t put your trash in my cocktail.”

Gaskin didn’t set out to focus on sustainable drinks. It was, instead, an organic progression. The Nashville native began her bartending career at a sports bar while attending art school at Middle Tennessee State University. From there, she moved into the cocktail world, spending four years at a tiny East Nashville joint that helped pioneer the area’s craft cocktail movement. Next was a farm-to-table-focused restaurant where she was part of the opening team.

In July 2016, she moved to Chicago, where she met bartender and hospitality pro Josh Fossitt, who was in the process of opening a vegetable-centric restaurant. She joined the bar team and was quickly promoted to head bartender. The focus there was on low-alcohol cocktails—which presented Gaskin with another opportunity to keep experimenting with sustainable recipes. After about a year, she and Fossitt joined forces to launch their catering company, bringing “fancy cocktails,” as Gaskin puts it, to home parties, weddings and other events, as well as hosting free classes for industry professionals.

Her cocktail philosophy—essentially, use all parts of the radish—doesn’t stop at the bar. “Cooking and imperfect produce go hand in hand,” she explains. “I’ve found a lot of inspiration for cooking through making cocktails—and vice versa.”

FAST FACTS

Home Town: Nashville

Current Location: Chicago

Creative Passion: Cooking. I call it “Desperate Chef”—whatever’s in the fridge, I put it together.

Years in the Industry: Coming up on 10

Number of Places Worked: 4

Favorite Bar(s): Sportsman’s Club (Chicago); Pretty Ugly (Toronto)—It’s my favorite bar in North America. They make drinks using sustainable practices, and their staff is so nice.

Five Items That Inspire Carley Gaskin

1. Imperfect Produce. Imperfect delivers produce that is misshapen, or [that farmers or distribtuors] have too much of. We go through so much waste [for our business], we’re always trying to find new ways to reuse things. We work with oleo saccharum, make cordials, we dehydrate things and make punch rings—take a Bundt pan and use things for the punch. We’ve been getting pretty weird with that.
2. The Flavor Bible. It’s one of my favorite books. I have three copies: one at home, two at the shop. I‘ve had one for five or six years; it’s full of notes, my highlight marks. You have this leftover product and you want to know what to do with it—if I have a bunch of pineapple pulp left over, [the book] might say to pair it with cloves or baking spices. It’s an easy way to get inspiration through flavor pairings.
3. My Bombay Sapphire trophy. I’ve got it in the shop right now. It reminds me of the creativity that inspired me when I was working on the drinks. Overall I created eight different cocktails, including a cheese-washed tiki cocktail. It’s really delicious. Strange but delicious—that’s my thing. 
4. The Drawing Board. We took a blank white wall next to the bar and my business partner and I scribble ideas on it, using washable Crayola markers. We’re such creative people. We like to do so many things and we have so many ideas. We’ve concepted so many cocktails based on that wall. It doesn’t make sense to anyone else, but it makes sense to us. It’s inspiring to see what’s on the wall. And then when it’s clean, it’s on to the next one.
5. Taylor Hansen. He’s my partner. We’ve been together a little over three years now. Through my career—moving to Chicago, opening my own business—he’s always been there. It’s nice having a second set of ears, having someone to support you no matter what. And I have so many crazy ideas, he sits and listens to me ramble through and work out the kinks. If I’m feeling overwhelmed or in a creative slump, he’s always there to correct my course.

The post Inside Carley Gaskin’s Creative Toolkit appeared first on PUNCH.

“Clover Club is the only bar I’ve ever worked at—so it’s where I’ve learned everything,” explains Tom Macy. That means he’s an acolyte of the Julie Reiner school of cocktail making: classic, but with a spin; artful, but never too esoteric. “We want to keep things interesting but approachable. If we do a variation of a classic, we want to find a reason to earn that variation.”

Since the Old-Fashioned is such a simple formula, Macy finds that bartenders often get too caught up in doing “that Mr. Potato Head thing,” swapping in, say, tequila or mezcal in place of whiskey and, voilà, new drink. But in a cocktail where the base spirit is the star of the show—according to Macy, it’s responsible for 95 percent of the drink’s flavor—he believes you really have to figure out a way to maximize your modifiers.

Macy does that by creating what is known as a “biz,” industry parlance for a minuscule batch of non-spirituous ingredients that helps bartenders make drinks faster and more accurately. As Reiner once explained to him, back when the Singapore Sling was gaining popularity, bartenders would batch its small-quantity ingredients like Cointreau and grenadine. Then, when making the drink, they might yell at a colleague to pass them the “Singapore Sling business,” and eventually it got shortened to simply “biz.”

In his Brugal Biz, Macy uses three parts demerara syrup, one part oloroso sherry, one part banana liqueur and two dashes of Angostura bitters. The cocktail uses only a quarter-ounce of the biz, total, so that only a tiny amount of each ingredient—often less than a teaspoon—makes its way into the final drink. But the synergy between those ingredients is crucial. Macy has become famous for how meticulous he is when it comes to finding the perfect ratio for his bizzes, methodically testing any and all possible combinations.

“[Fellow Clover Club bartender] Jelani Johnson calls it my ‘tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and true method,’” he jokes.

Related Recipe

Rum Cooper’s Old-Fashioned

Tom Macy's perfected rum Old-Fashioned calls on Brugal 1888.

More Recipes →

This particular biz is perfect in an aged-rum Old-Fashioned, especially one that uses a Spanish-style offering like Brugal 1888. Since the Brugal is very dry, it allows Macy to control the exact level of sweetness himself, which he does with the demerara. In an ode to the rum’s secondary maturation in sherry barrels, the oloroso sherry in Macy’s biz helps bring out the rum’s oxidized nuttiness. Likewise, the whisper of banana liqueur—barely detectable at first sip—gives the drink a delicate tropical flair, and the bitters introduce baking spice notes to help round out the whole enterprise.

“Mainly, the drink tastes like one complete, symbiotic flavor,” explains Macy. “Because the Brugal 1888 is a cane sugar [spirit] instead of whiskey, the biz helps me lean into that decadence, without ever becoming too cloying.”

The post The Secret to Tom Macy’s Old-Fashioned? It’s In the “Biz.” appeared first on PUNCH.

Few flavor combinations signal the arrival of summer quite like that of rum and pineapple—just ask the Piña Colada. But there’s a shortcut to achieving that tropical burst of flavor, and its applications go way beyond resort drinks: pineapple rum.

The double-hitter has a long history in the Caribbean, where distillers were known to toss pineapple into rum barrels for added sweetness as far back as 1700s. But its stateside revival only goes back as far as 2014 when Alexandre Gabriel of Maison Ferrand and historian David Wondrich collaborated to create the historically-inspired Stiggins’ Fancy Plantation Pineapple Rum.

Named for the fictitious Reverend Stiggins—a Charles Dickens character known for his preference for pineapple rum—the modern interpretation of the spirit is both infused and distilled with Victoria pineapples. For bartenders, it’s a product that’s managed to exist outside the oft-derided realm of “flavored spirits” to become one of the most called on alt-rums in the modern drink-maker’s arsenal.

While it can easily be swapped in for a standard rum base in any classic rum cocktail (hello Daiquiri, Cuba Libre, Airmail), it has the ability to turn just about any drink tropical, even in small amounts. Here are few drinks that put it to good use, for when you’re in need of a little escapism.

Bittersweet—Golden Handcuffs
Though it’s only four ingredients, the Golden Handcuffs punches well above its weight when it comes to flavor, thanks in large part to the inclusion of pineapple rum, which brings its inherent depth to any recipe.

Bonus: Swap it into the Kingston Negroni, The Black Stallion Sets Sail, The Night Shining.

Daiquiri Adjacent—Fairbanks Loan No. 2
A split base of gin and pineapple rum stays true to the core identity of this drink, which bartender Brian Kane describes as a “Daiquiri on steroids.”

Bonus: Swap it into the Kingston Soundsystem, First Salute, The Golden Ananás.

Fruit Forward—Hey Baby, Que Paso?
Another Daiquiri riff that amps up the requisite lime with raspberry syrup, rhubarb-based amaro and, naturally, pineapple.

Bonus: Swap it into the La Bomba Daiquiri, Black Flag Grog, Pineapple Daiquiri.

Tall and Tropical—Pineapple Cooler 
An unabashedly tropical drink made with pineapple rum and ginger-spiced falernum.

Bonus: Swap it into the Miami Vice, Getaway Car, Coconut Water Highball.

Frothy—Bliss Point
In this summer-ready egg white cocktail, pineapple rum anchors the citrus medley of grapefruit, lemon and limoncello.

Bonus: Swap it into the Bumble Bee, Scorpion Kick, Monkey Man.

The post Turn It Tropical appeared first on PUNCH.

At Honeybee’s, a newly opened saloon-themed bar in New York’s East Village, Japanese-style highball machines dispense American Rye-balls, a wholly American spin made with domestic rye.

“It’s Japanese ingenuity meets American tradition,” says the bar’s beverage director, Sother Teague. “Since Suntory acquired Jim Beam, I asked if they’d rebrand one of the highball machines for me,” he explains of the genesis of the drink. Presented in a tall glass with Kold-Draft ice and adorned with nothing more than a lemon twist, the Rye-ball does not stray far from the simplicity of its Japanese counterpart, which has been a staple in the country’s bars and izakayas for decades.

Suntory introduced the highball machine in Japan in the 1980s in an effort to drive demand for highball cocktails—essentially a few ounces of whisky chilled with ice and topped with soda water. The machines, which protrude above the bar in a slender column about the height of two whisky bottles stacked end-to-end, refrigerate and marry the whisky with sparkling water, dispensing the finished drink like a beer on draft.

Once only found in Japan, things changed when Suntory released Toki—a blended Japanese whisky—to the US market in 2016, when they also began to offer bars Toki-branded highball machines. They first appeared at corporate events and a handful of carefully selected restaurants focused on Japanese cuisine. Eventually, the dispensers made their way to cocktail bars too—particularly those that specialized in Japanese ingredients and bartending techniques, ultimately becoming a symbol of a “serious” cocktail program. (A representative from Beam Suntory estimates that there are now more than 75 Toki highball machines at bars and restaurants in the United States.)

While highballs, with their two-ingredient construction, are relatively easy to make, bartenders cite the intense carbonation the machine provides (supposedly five times the fizz found in soda water) as a primary reason behind stocking one at their bars. “It also chills the whiskey, so the bubbles are slower to dissipate,” says Teague.

In part, that exceptional carbonation has led American bartenders to experiment with possibilities beyond the intended Toki Highball. At Chicago’s Blind Barber, beverage director Joe Briglio swaps in Haku vodka for whisky in a refined take on the vodka soda. At Washington, D.C.’s Zeppelin, the particular effervescence provided by the machine is described as “baller bubbles” by partners Ari and Micah Wilder, who use it to carbonate drinks like the Kabuki Springs, a blend of Roku gin, Italicus, grapefruit and lemon.

One of the more common tweaks bars are implementing, however, is to sub American whiskey for Japanese. Given that Suntory is the supplier, most variations tend to feature spirits within the Beam Suntory portfolio. Such is the case with Honeybee’s aforementioned Rye-balls, as well as the Wheated Highball at Tullibee in Minneapolis, made with Maker’s 46, a wheated bourbon. In Chicago, Longman & Eagle has also outfitted their machine to serve Jim Beam bourbon highballs instead of traditional Toki.

But Tony Correale, bar manager at Longman & Eagle, has tried the machine with other whiskeys too, calling on less-expected expressions over the course of several experiments. “They don’t all work for highballs,” he notes of his findings. For example, Compass Box Hedonism, a blended Scotch, was “amazing,” says Correale, “elevating the vanilla and caramel notes in surprisingly elegant ways.” Heavily sherried single malts, on the other hand, were a no-go. “Too cloying and sweet,” recalls Correale.

The Longman & Eagle team has even begun branching out beyond whiskey altogether to include lower-proof alternatives. One recent example is the Cap Corse quinquina highball, made with the Corsican aperitif wine in both its iterations. “Blanc or rouge make beautiful floral highballs,” says Correale. “It’s about exploring different spirits combined with highball water,” Correale says of the motive for tweaking the Toki machine. “We’re still talking about a two-ingredient drink, it’s not more complex than that.”

But some bartenders are looking to push the potential of the machine beyond the standard two-ingredient format. “I’ve been talking with Suntory about the possibilities of putting a cocktail through there,” says Briglio. The consensus, however, is that sugar from syrups and juices would be problematic for inner workings of the machine. For now, his solution is to top cocktails with the extra-carbonated soda water pulled from the dispenser.

While the idea of running a cocktail through the machine in the first place seems at odds with the simplicity of the whisky highball, conceptually it stays true to Japanese tradition. As Teague explains, “In Japanese culture, it’s common to really dig into the ordinary in an effort to create the extraordinary.”

The post The Highball Machine Has Been Hacked appeared first on PUNCH.

The cocktail menu at Colita reads like a flashback to high-school algebra. To the right of each cocktail is a series of numbers punctuated by decimal points and percentage signs that correspond to the alcohol level, sugar content and pH level of each drink. Below, many of the ingredients also carry a superscript (“gin⁴” “vodka³”), which designates the number of brands that make up the house blend of the spirit.

The menu is the latest handiwork of Marco Zappia, the gangly, man-bunned, 27-year-old boy wizard of the Twin Cities cocktail scene. A precocious homeschooled child, he bounced from Stanford to Berkeley to Bard to UW-Madison before landing back in Minnesota at age 17 and embarking on what quickly turned into an illustrious bartending career. Zappia came up through the ranks of Bittercube, a bitters producer and bar consultancy with bases in Milwaukee and Minneapolis-St. Paul. There, he helped open dozens of programs across the United States for founders Nick Kosevich and Ira Koplowitz—an experience that exposed him in quick measure to many of the modern cocktail concepts out there.

At Martina, an Italian-Argentinian restaurant, Zappia created four house vermouths and built most of the cocktails around them. At the newer Colita, a Oaxacan concept housed in a former gas station, he created a selection of traditional fermentations to use as cocktail bases, including pulque (made from the sap of the agave plant), tepache (pineapples) and balché (bark from the balché tree and honey). You’ll find these colorful beverages slowly churning away in carboys in the building’s former garage—which now operates as Zappia’s laboratory—and in large demijohns atop the restaurant’s horseshoe-shaped bar. It’s a clever innovation for a bartender who seems to rack them up effortlessly.

In fact, nothing’s been quite the same in the Twin Cities cocktail world since Zappia opened Martina in 2017. Apart from the original vermouths, his most significant move was turning every drink into a layer cake made of different expressions of the same spirit. In doing so, he simultaneously created dozens of signature blends, yielding drinks that can’t possibly be duplicated anywhere else. One drink, Dios, contains four mezcals, three ryes and three fernets. (His training manual is a 49-page document jokingly called “Marco’s Manifesto.”)

Zappia’s blends have social and economic, as well as flavor, objectives. Buying in bulk and blending spirits keeps costs low, making his cocktails simultaneously better and more affordable. A further bonus, in his view, is the elimination of brand influence at his bars. In this respect, perhaps more than any other, he should rank as a thought leader in the bartending world.

Meditating on a Zappia cocktail can leave you wondering which way to turn. Take the Puerto Rican Heartbreaker at Colita, for instance. Its initial base, like every Colita cocktail, is one of the house ferments, in this case Zappia’s modern creation, the Ispahan. Inspired by the work of French pastry chef Pierre Hermé, it contains lychee, dragon fruit, orgeat, guava and raspberry that is open-air fermented for three days and fermented for an additional week with botanicals sourced in Minnesota and Wisconsin. (Zappia describes it as “the best macaron ever.”) The ferment is then paired with the house blanco tequila mix, a mingling of three different tequilas, and is finished with a house-made pamplemousse liqueur, a saline solution, lime juice, and is sprayed with a nectar made of rose water, tonka bean tincture, neroli extract, calamansi extract and orange blossom water.

Catch your breath, yet?

If that seems like a lot of ideas for one cocktail to bear, it is. But somehow it works: It’s lively, yet delicate, a floral cross between a Paloma and a Twentieth Century cocktail that might represent the best employment of rose water in a drink I’ve encountered.

Emboldened by his success at Martina, Zappia’s ambitions are in fuller flower at Colita. The drinks, which are created in collaboration with bartenders Dustin Nguyen and Adam Witherspoon, rely on the usual riot of tinctures, infusions, macerations and blending. But the presentation is more flamboyant. Each drink has its dedicated vessel, from Turkish tea glasses to what looks like a glass blowfish pierced by a gold straw wearing a sort of charm bracelet. More than anything he did at Martina, this showy whimsicality nods to Bittercube, a group that has displayed some wild flights of fancy at some of its bars, notably Can Can Wonderland, a mini-golf bar in St. Paul.

Inside Colita

Colita is the second Minneapolis restaurant with a bar program by Marco Zappia to open in the last two years.

Marco Zappia, only 27 years old, has had an outsized impact on the Twin Cities cocktail scene.

Fermenting liquids fill up the cocktail laboratory at Colita. The space was once the garage of a former filling station.

The cocktails at Colita are built around four traditional fermentations, including pulche, tepache and balché.

The Puerto Rican Heartbreaker, a lively, yet delicate, floral cross between a Paloma and a Twentieth Century cocktail, has, like all Colita cocktails, many working parts.

The drinks at Colita and Martina use spirits bases compose of several brands. The gin in the Five Suns, for instance, is a mix of four gins.

The Five Suns, like most Colita cocktails, comes in a piece of unusual dedicated glassware.

The Naked Dani is a Margarita riff on crushed ice whose surface serves as an overflowing salt-foam bath for a tiny rubber ducky.

Pool Boy, a creamy and gentle clarified milk punch Pina Colada riff, contains a total of nine rums.

Sometimes he goes overboard. The near-ludicrous Naked Dani is a Margarita riff on crushed ice whose surface serves as an overflowing salt-foam bath for a tiny rubber ducky. Given the big show, the drink’s flavor is disappointingly innocuous—the spiced orange kombucha that dominates the blend waters down its impact, and the foam never quite integrates itself. (To be fair, Zappia “hyper-dilutes” some of his cocktails at Colita—up to 40 percent—believing that it makes them more food-friendly.)

Such flourishes are fun and inspire affection—and orders. But I prefer Zappia’s work when it’s more understated, as in the Colita Old Fashioned, in which the surprisingly smooth blend of four mezcals is given a complex spicy underpinning by a fermented amari liqueur (a house-made amaro that is cut with a fermentation made from the botanicals used in the maceration—“flavor on flavor,” as Zappia puts it); or the Pool Boy, a creamy and gentle Piña Colada riff reimagined as milk punch. The latter drink is tiki tradition squared: the two rum blends used in the drink add up to a combined nine rums. By the taste of it, not a single one was wasted.

While getting Colita on its feet, the inexhaustible Zappia and the Martina team has continued to work on the menu there. Mare, a splendid Martini variation, uses a “gingko vermouth” and ten drops of an “oyster distillate” made by resting oyster shells in grain spirit and then running it through a rotovap. It’s the oyster stout of the Martini world, with a bracing maritime edge. The house Garibaldi, called Giuseppe, meanwhile, combines house red bitter aperitivo, a syrup made from Seville oranges and spheres of frozen orange juice. It’s a likeable bit of cocktail surrealism.

The big question with operatic drink-makers like Zappia is always: Is it all worth it? I personally wouldn’t go on the winding Game-of-Life path he traces to get to his various results, but sitting on the receiving side, I had few complaints. Zappia has said he is after clean flavor profiles, and, amazingly, given his ornate constructions, he achieves that goal more often than not.

More important, he somehow manages to simultaneously demystify his work and connect it to the surrounding culture. It’s a subtly progressive purview that sets him apart from other molecular drink-makers, a group that can seem to exist in their own self-satisfied world. Zappia, by contrast, is a genial and curious teacher, and his passions—be they culinary or societal or both—are always presented in an infectious, fun-loving way. Martina’s Promiscuous cocktail is the perfect example. A riff on the dirty Martini, it comes with an ice disk broken into five pieces floating on the surface of the drink—a disarming garnish that makes me smile every time I think about it. The patron can choose to amusedly drink in all the thinking that went into their cocktail, or they can just amusedly drink it and let Zappia do the thinking for them. Either way, the math works.

The post The Boy Wizard of the Midwest appeared first on PUNCH.

While many American cities lay legitimate claims to famous cocktails, Chicago seems to have lost their receipts. Historic as they may be, no one really knows if the rum- and port-based Chicago Cocktail or the brandy-based Chicago Fizz were invented behind Second City bars. A search for his town’s definitive civic drink led Paul McGee to the Edgewater Beach, an odd but alluring tiki-leaning recipe with proven Chicago parentage.

In 2018, the Art Institute of Chicago commissioned McGee, co-owner of the award-winning Lost Lake, to develop a menu of cocktails for a reception celebrating the opening of their John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age exhibition. Naturally, McGee sought to represent Chicago’s drinking heritage with his selections, so he began poking around for leads. In the pages of Ted Saucier’s 1951 book Bottoms Up, he happened upon the Edgewater Beach, a mixture of Jamaican rum, Italian vermouth, lemon, sugar, and orange bitters—along with one quarter of a preserved peach.

Though Saucier’s text “gets a bad rap for having a lot of really bad cocktails in it,” according to McGee, the Edgewater Beach appeared readymade for modern consumption, a drink that could appeal to fans of the Daiquiri or Hotel Nacional. And, satisfying McGee’s original goal, it had real Windy City roots, taking its name from the Edgewater Beach Hotel, a long-gone destination renowned for its transportative atmosphere and celebrity clientele.

Comprised of an eight-story, 400-room structure built in 1916, along with an adjoining 18-story tower added in 1924, the hotel was a complex unlike anything the Midwest had seen before. Tropical in theme, it even featured its own private beach on the banks of Lake Michigan, which guests could take advantage of during Chicago’s fleeting warm-weather months. The seafaring atmosphere extended to the Marine Dining Room as well as its so-called Yacht Club, a nautically appointed cocktail lounge complete with a gangplank entrance and automated canvas walls that undulated like the sails on a schooner.

Related Recipe

Edgewater Beach

Paul McGee reworks this Chicago-born, tiki-adjacent recipe with a split rum base.

More Recipes →

While a rum-based cocktail seems like a natural fit for such a space, the drink actually came to life well before the debut of the Edgewater, albeit under a different name. The story goes that turn-of-the-century thespian William H. Crane invited bartender Gus Williams, a fellow Chicagoan, as a guest to his summer retreat in Cohasset, Massachusetts. There, Williams developed the Cohasset Punch, a drink almost identical to the Edgewater Beach. It was an immediate hit, and Williams wasted no time capitalizing on its popularity at his Chicago bar, Williams & Newman, while also offering a bottled version as early as 1899.

Williams eventually sold his secret formula and the drink made its way onto other Chicago menus, before the Yacht Club saw an opportunity to re-brand the drink as an Edgewater signature—it’s tropical DNA a clutch coincidence.

While hewing closely to the original is important to McGee, he manages to put the Lost Lake stamp on his interpretation. In true tiki fashion, he splits the ounce-and-a half Jamaican rum base between Hampden Estate Overproof, which features prominent stone fruit flavors, and the slightly mellower, Rum-Bar Gold. “The Hampden really complements the peaches, but I didn’t want to overpower all the other ingredients,” he says of his decision. He kept the vermouth component intact, more for its novelty than anything else, noting its rarity in tropical-leaning cocktails: “Not a lot of sours in the tiki canon have sweet vermouth in them,” says McGee. Replacing the called-for lemon with lime, meanwhile, brightens the mix, particularly when shaken with the spent lime hull, as McGee recommends, to draw out more citrus oils.

Despite being seemingly out of step with larger cocktail trends that favor fresh ingredients above all else, there is one element he refuses to substitute: canned peaches. “I wanted to keep it as close to the original recipe as possible,” says McGee.

The post Bring Back the Edgewater Beach appeared first on PUNCH.

I own a bar cart—an art deco number with a polished nickel frame. It’s where I stash my liqueurs and modifiers, and where, on the foxed mirror surface, I’ll sometimes whip up a Sazerac or Old-Fashioned. More than just a mobile space-saver in a tiny Brooklyn apartment, it’s a handsome décor item, to boot. Yet, never once have I snapped a selfie with it.

It seems, though, were I suddenly the owner of a globe bar cart—an inexplicable must-have amongst would-be one-percenters—that might all change. Globe bar owners love looming over their miniature earth, typically split open along the equator line to reveal bottles of Game of Thrones Scotch, crystal decanters of Cognac or, in one instance, Malibu Pineapple Rum. Hardly a casual affair, they don their finest dress wear (flashy pastel suits are standard, black tie is optional), and pose next to their liquor-loaded orb for a photo session bound for Instagram.

How did these cartographic carts become a ubiquitous signifier of finance bro cosplay, as recognizable as a logo Patagonia vest or Rolex Submariner?

Few drinkers even own a bar cart, let alone a globe, yet the odd amalgam of the two are inexplicably easy to come by. They’re sold on eBay, at Pottery Barn and on WayFair, which offers thirteen different models. There are desktop options and wall-mounted ones, too. In fact, you can buy them on Amazon or from Walmart. There is even an entire website devoted to them, Bar Globe World, which offers a stupefying number of options. “Every time you showcase a modern or vintage replica globe liquor cabinet in your home or office you make a statement,” reads the homepage. (That statement is: My all-time favorite book is Atlas Shrugged.)

It’s not some fat cat-come-lately trend either; Pete Campbell, the loathsome account exec on Mad Men, was quite proud of his; while fictionalized Nazis drank from one in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Italian manufacturer Zoffoli claims there have been globe bars as far back as the 16th century. The globe bar, it seems, has been a signifier of questionable taste for more than five centuries.

But what if you wanted to signal your penchant for world domination, but simply don’t have the floor space for a globe bar? Don’t worry—you can always opt for a globe bar tattoo instead.

The post You Will Instagram This: The Statement Globe Bar appeared first on PUNCH.

It may sound like an oxymoron, but there is such a thing as easy tiki. While the genre typically hinges on the appearance of extravagance, often flaunting upwards of 10 ingredients, multiple spirits and, of course, elaborate garnishes, tiki doesn’t need to be difficult. After all, Trader Vic’s most famous contribution to the canon, the Mai Tai, comes in at only five ingredients. Channeling a similar level of restraint, these modern recipes are likewise capped at five ingredients, offering a minimal path to tropical escapism, with easy-to-source ingredients, to boot.

While they’re not the usual tiki suspects, mezcal and Chartreuse punch above their weight when it comes to adding depth to cocktails. At San Francisco’s Smuggler’s Cove, Marco Dionysos does away with rum altogether in his Chartreuse Swizzle, an herbaceous take on the Carribbean original. Despite the unexpected pairing, the alpine flavors of the liqueur work in tandem with the unambiguously tropical elements of falernum, fresh pineapple and lime juice. At Otis in Brooklyn, bartender Channing Centeno takes a similar tack, opting for a smoky mezcal base complemented by yellow Chartreuse, lime and charred pineapple for what reads like a beachside bonfire in a glass.

Bitter elements like amaro and, well, bitters, can also offer a fast track to complexity when thrown in alongside traditional tiki components. At Fort Defiance, the Angostura Colada offers the requisite pineapple and coconut atop a full ounce and a half of Angostura bitters, all served over crushed ice. Though slightly more reserved, Cynar—an artichoke-based liqueur—lends a bittersweet element to Jeremy Oertel’s Artichoke Hold, a riff on Oertel’s own Bitter Mai Tai.

Trader Vic’s Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, meanwhile, stands as a testament to the timeless appeal of easy tiki. With just four ingredients (demerara rum, falernum, Curaçao and lime), it proves that sometimes less is more—even in tiki.

Chartreuse Swizzle: Chartreuse stands in for rum in this refreshing swizzle. [Recipe]

Artichoke Hold: A Cynar-laced riff on the Mai Tai. [Recipe]

Angostura Colada: A tikified take on the Piña Colada. [Recipe]

Royal Bermuda Yacht Club: Trader Vic's four-ingredient recipe for tropical escapism. [Recipe]

Revenge of the Line: Mezcal and charred pineapple read like a beachside bonfire in a glass. [Recipe]

The post Tiki For Dummies appeared first on PUNCH.

Each month, as part of an ongoing portrait of rising talent in the bartending community, PUNCH hosts a resident bartender who has demonstrated a strong sense of personal style. In this installment, New York’s Fanny Chu is taking over our bar, and debuting a custom menu of four original cocktails that we’ll serve throughout her month-long residency.

“You’re just on vacation when you’re at Donna,” says Fanny Chu, head bartender of the beloved rum-focused Williamsburg bar that she’s called home for the last four years. It’s this feeling that she enforces with each drink she creates. Toeing the line between tiki and tropical, Chu doesn’t get caught up on precisely where that line lies, but rather channels the lighthearted, escapist qualities common to both with every drink she puts on the menu.

“I want to make people feel how I felt when I first walked in,” says Chu. “What drew me to [Donna] is that it’s not a tiki bar, but they provide this elusive space where you can just go and relax and be away from the concrete jungle.”

When she moved to New York in December of 2011 to pursue her career as a trained lab technician, the only experience she had behind a bar was “free-pouring Long Island Iced Teas and Adios Motherfuckers” in California’s Costa Mesa gay bars. Had she not landed at an apartment next door to Donna, which opened in 2012, it might’ve stayed that way.

“I would go into Donna for the Brancolada,” remembers Chu, citing Jeremy Oertel’s signature Branca Menta–laced spin on the Piña Colada. It’s a drink that embodies much of Donna’s early aesthetic, which was a forerunner in what might best be termed “nouveau tropical”—that is, drinks that marry elements of classic cocktails with ingredients like orgeat and falernum, which are more commonly associated with tiki.

In 2015, Chu was hired as a barback, working her way up to a bartender position under the tutelage of former beverage director Karen Fu, and ultimately to the head bartender position, which she’s occupied since early 2018. During this time, she’s managed to build on Donna’s aesthetic, imbuing the drinks with her own twists along the way. Without straying too far from familiar frameworks—the Mai Tai, the Suffering Bastard—Chu finds ways to meld together unexpected flavors, not so different from the construction of the Brancolada that initially caught her attention. “Sometimes certain flavors you’re surprised at in terms of what goes well together,” she explains, adding that she typically arrives at these combinations by throwing two classics together and seeing what flavors work in tandem.

Her La Bandida, for example, reads like a Margarita married with a shandy, though she actually arrived at this result by first riffing on a Rob Roy variation created by a former Donna bartender, Tom Walker. From that recipe, she pulled in a blend of Aperol and crème de pêche, an unlikely pairing that now complements tequila and mezcal, salty cucumber cordial and a topper of IPA. The drink encapsulates the cumulative nature of many of her cocktails, which draw on the familiar Donna DNA and then test the limits of the template with additional ingredients. The result is a chorus of flavors that might seem disparate on paper, but still add up to a harmonious whole. La Bandida has become one of the bar’s most popular cocktails and a prime example of Chu’s approach to drink-making, which she describes as being first and foremost “to make drinks crushable.”

Here, get to know Fanny Chu in four cocktails.

Rum to the Jungle
The Rum to the Jungle is Chu’s nut-free take on the Mai Tai. “I feel really bad that people can’t taste a proper Mai Tai,” says Chu, noting that allergies to the almond-based orgeat preclude many people from trying one of her favorite drinks. Her Rum to the Jungle calls on a house-made cinnamon oat syrup in place of orgeat as well as Clairin and banana liqueur, an oddball addition that manages to make this spin even more tropical than the original.

Happy Bastard
A lighter take on the Suffering Bastard, the Happy Bastard reflects the tiki-adjacent character of many of Chu’s recipes, which are designed to be easy drinking, but in true tiki fashion contain unexpected turns of flavor throughout. Like early renditions of the Suffering Bastard, gin and brandy both make an appearance, but Chu swaps ginger beer for cucumber tonic water for a more refreshing finish; lemon adds a bright touch of acidity in place of lime, while elderflower liqueur harmonizes with the botanicals of the gin. Ginger still appears, albeit in the form of a syrup for yet another layer of complexity. It’s spicy, cooling and tart all at once. As Chu summarizes, “It’s a Happy Bastard because all these flavors marry so happily.”

La Bandida
“I wanted something crushable with tequila and salty cucumber cordial,” says Chu of her La Bandida. To these two components she adds a splash of mezcal, a house blend of Aperol and crème de pêche and a few ounces of IPA. It’s the sort of flavor pairing that doesn’t quite add up on paper, but in practice yields interesting results: The IPA manages to highlight a grapefruit note in the Aperol that makes for a citrusy, shandy-like result. “It’s weird, but delicious,” says Chu.

Nog Nog Noggin’ on Heaven’s Door
One of the ways in which Chu reinforces the escapist atmosphere of Donna is by creating cocktails that directly evoke a particular place. Her Nog Nog Noggin’ on Heaven’s Door draws on the flavor profile of Crema Catalana (“one of my faves,” she says), a custard-like Spanish dessert that she encountered while traveling through Catalonia with her fiancée. To translate it into drink form, Chu builds on a whiskey base complemented by Cognac, Cachaça, orange liqueur, cinnamon syrup, cream and eggs and serves it from Donna’s slushy machine.

Rum to the Jungle: Fanny Chu's nut-free take on the Mai Tai. [Recipe]

Happy Bastard: A lighter take on the Suffering Bastard that calls on cucumber tonic water in place of ginger beer. [Recipe]

La Bandida: An unlikely amalgam of agave, cucumber cordial, Aperol and IPA. [Recipe]

Nog Nog Noggin' on Heaven's Door: Crema Catalana in drink form. [Recipe]

 

The post Fanny Chu Is the Queen of Crushable Cocktails appeared first on PUNCH.

The cocktail world—and cocktails themselves—turned upside down sometime around 2009. That’s roughly when a handful of pioneering mixologists threw out the bitters rule book. Instead of using aromatic bitters in the usual doses—a dash or two, to accent a drink—they promoted them to starring roles, pouring in anywhere from 10 dashes to two ounces of the concentrated aromatic flavoring.

Not coincidentally, 2009 was also the year Cure opened in New Orleans. Tired of the status quo—classic cocktail formulae for stirred and shaken cocktails, and straightforward, Mr. Potato Head twists on those recipes—two of its bartenders, Maks Pazuniak and Kirk Estopinal, self-published a thin volume called Rogue Cocktails. The recipes inside did, indeed, go rogue, calling on ingredients seldom used at the time, like the herbal Hungarian liqueur Unicum and the fermented red rice distillate Batavia Arrack; ungodly amounts of Cynar, Campari, Chartreuse, vermouth and amaro; and, most eye-catchingly, generous amounts of Angostura, Peychaud’s and other bitters.

That moment in time broke the drink-building mode, and cocktail bartenders have never looked back. When Pazuniak and Estopinal first uncovered the Angostura Sour—an unusual mix of one-and-a-half ounces of Angostura bitters, lime juice, sugar and egg white drawn from the work of mid-century cocktail writer Charles H. Baker Jr.—it was like nothing they’d ever seen, and it inspired the journey of discovery that led to Rogue Cocktails. Today, their fellow bartenders take such bitter-heavy drinks in stride, thanks largely to the duo’s revival of the concept in the late aughts. Below are five of the more prominent cocktails to spring out of that movement.

Trinidad Sour: [Recipe] | [Photo: Valeria Alonzo]

Trinidad Sour (2008)

The Trinidad Sour is perhaps the most famous, and widely served, of the modern cocktails that use aromatic bitters as a base—in this case one-and-a-half ounces of Angostura. The origin story is rather tortured, but credit is largely given to bartender Giuseppe González, and the drink is said to have emerged somewhat stealthily at Clover Club in Brooklyn. (González claims to have put it on the menu; owner Julie Reiner contests this, but nonetheless put it on the bar’s recent 10-year-anniversary menu.) The bitters are buttressed by rye, which gives the drink structure and kick; lemon juice, which adds needed acidity; and, critically, orgeat, which gives the drink a creamy, vaguely tiki-esque texture. Some throw in an egg white to add further body.

Gunshop Fizz (2009)

The Gunshop Fizz was the signature cocktail from the book Rogue Cocktails, and one that first caught the drinking public’s attention. In New Orleans, Peychaud’s Bitters is used primarily to complete Sazerac cocktails. Anywhere from one dash to 15 are tossed in, depending on the bar or bartender. The improbable Gunship Fizz uses a full two ounces of the stuff. It’s enough to make the same drink’s use of Sanbitter, a bright-red bitter Italian soda, seem almost dull. The rest of the drink includes lemon juice, simple syrup, strawberries, cucumbers and several twists of orange and grapefruit. It was a through-the-looking-glass take on the Pimm’s Cup recipe at Chicago’s Violet Hour, where Estopinal had worked. It’s still on the menu at Cure, but you’ll pay extra for it: $17, as opposed to the average $10–11. (Bitters ain’t cheap.)

The Red Light (2009)

A split base of genever and Grand Marnier is bound together by one third of an ounce of Underberg bitters in this Charles Joly invention. It first appeared on a menu at the Drawing Room, the Chicago cocktail bar where Joly made a name for himself, and was later published in Beta Cocktails. (The original full name of the drink was “Roxanne’s Red Light,” after the song by The Police.) “We were a couple years into the Drawing Room and starting to experiment more and more,” recalled Joly. “The menu had some fun and weird turns. I think that Bols was very, very new to the scene. We were excited for anything we could get our hands on that we weren’t familiar with.” That included the hard-to-find Underberg, which Joly secured from a tiny German wine importer. It was the only thing he bought from them. The trio make for a fruity, herbal, and soothing drink that has a vaguely yuletide feel about it. According to Joly, the heavy pour of Underberg keeps the drink “honest.”

Sawyer: [Recipe.] | [Photo: Valeria Alonzo]

Sawyer (2010)

On paper, Don Lee’s Sawyer reads like a Gin Sour where the bartender grew indecisive and nervous about bitters at the end, shaking in far too many dashes of far too many different bitters. The recipe calls for 14 dashes of Angostura, seven dashes of Peychaud’s and seven dashes of orange bitters. One always wonders about the reasoning behind super-precise bitters measurements like this. (Would 15 dashes of Ango truly sunder the cocktail?) But it’s hard to argue with the result. Lee first served it at Momofuku Ko, where he intended it as a digestif drink. The embarrassment of bitters certainly do their work as a stomach settler. The drink is named for Sawyer Dufresne, whose father, chef Wylie Dufresne, was one of Lee’s early mentors.

A Moment of Silence (2011)

This drink by Maks Pazuniak appeared in Beta Cocktails, the 2011 sequel to Rogue Cocktails. It sprung from the blueprint for the La Louisiane, a classic New Orleans rye drink. Pazuniak kept the traditional rye base but threw out most everything else, adding instead Marie Brizard Apry (an apricot liqueur), Amaro Averna, Laird’s Applejack and a half-ounce of Angostura bitters. “I wanted to bridge the bitters-as-a-base category that we were exploring at the time with something more rich and elegant than the Gunshop Fizz or Angostura Sour,” said Pazuniak. “While the La Louisiane is luscious and herbal, this variant really plays up the spice level with so much Angostura and obviously a heavy dose of fruit from the Apry.” It makes for an enjoyably bitter little glass of fruit punch. A barrel-aged version of the drink appeared on an early menu at Aviary in Chicago.

The post The Drinks That Broke Bitters appeared first on PUNCH.

Each month, we pull together a selection of drinking-related items that have, for one reason or another, grabbed the attention of PUNCH’s editors, who spend pretty much all day, every day surrounded by booze. Here’s what we’re into right now.

Caminante at The Cabinet | Chloe Frechette, Senior Editor
At The Cabinet, the newest venture from Greg Boehm in the former Mace space, the menu is devoted to the spirits that most frequently disappear from Boehm’s personal liquor cabinet: tequila, mezcal and rye. In addition to offering a series of flights focused on the aforementioned spirits, there’s a cocktail list created in collaboration between Boehm, spirits consultant Justin Lane Briggs and lead bartender Christina Helmer. The Caminante is one of Brigg’s contributions. Cloudy in appearance and served in a bespoke jícara, the drink resembles pulque on the surface, but conceals a dynamic cocktail underneath. Consisting of jalapeño-infused tequila, orgeat, lemon and a measure of crème de menthe, the drink manages to be both a touch spicy and cooling within a single sip.

Cosmo Royale at The Long Island Bar | Leslie Pariseau, Features Editor
I’m going to subject myself to ridicule for a moment. Every summer, I rewatch a few seasons of Sex and the City. I can’t help it. It has something to do with the tides, gravitational pull, nostalgia, PMS, IDK. Anyway, you can make the leap when I say I’ve been thinking about Cosmopolitans  Luckily, I happen to live down the street from Long Island Bar, which is presided over by Toby Cecchini, the man who forever changed America’s relationship with vodka, Cointreau and cranberry. To be sure, most iterations of the Cosmo are a bastardization of Cecchini’s original recipe, which is dry, barely pink and totally spartan in construction. The other night, I stopped by LIB and politely asked bartender Tim Miner to humor a request. “Cosmopolitan, on-the-rocks, but a royale,” I said. His eyes got wide, but he agreed, and damn was the drink delicious. It’s basically a higher octane ‘90s-tinged spritz. Via DM, Cecchini, thankfully, approved.

Bordiga Chiot Montamaro | Robert Simonson, Contributing Editor
As the amaro category becomes more and more crowded in the U.S., many of the unfamiliar imports coming in from Italy can start to taste somewhat same-ish. So when one stands out in flavor character, it makes a big impression. Such is the case with Chiot Montomaro made by Bordiga in Cuneo, in the Piedmont area of Italy near the French border. The recipe, which purportedly goes back to 1888, is made with infused and distilled flowers and alpine herbs. The flavorings are subtle and soothing, the overall liquid gently relaxing, with notes of artichoke and rhubarb mingling among the airy mountain botanicals.

Michelada Roja at Atla | Talia Baiocchi, Editor in Chief
I’ve always had a fraught relationship with the Michelada. I crave it on paper, order it frequently and almost always end up with half a glass left. It’s either too watered down or too warm, too spicy or not quite spicy enough. But I’ve finally found my ideal. At Atla, the drink begins with a superior homemade hot sauce, but it’s the unconventional use of sour beer—Evil Twin’s Geyser Gose, to be specific—that makes it crushable and refreshing in a way that the Michelada always yearns to be, but rarely is. It’s a Michelada that gives you wings. For the first time in the my life I finished a whole one—and then promptly ordered another.

Port and Tonic | Allison Hamlin, Partnerships Manager
Recently, deep into the evening during a dinner party I was hosting, someone asked if I had any port. I did, and I’ll bet you do too. It’s the kind of thing that just shows up in the back of your cabinet one day and no one knows how it got there or when it arrived (sorry, port). It will probably remain there, governed by the laws of liquor cabinet physics, until the end of days. Which is why you should definitely pour it on top of a lot of ice (in your used wine glass is totally fine), top it with tonic and spritz a twist of lemon over top. It’s perfect low-lift, sessionable solution to extending the party indefinitely.

Vigna Nica Mamertino Rosso 2015 | Lizzie Munro, Art Director
When I booked a last minute flight to Palermo last week, the first thing I did was check in with Katie Parla, author of Tasting Rome and Food of the Italian South, who can recommend the best of food and drink across most corners of Italy. In Palermo, she highlighted the wine shop Enoteca Picone, where you can drop by, snack on tomato sandwiches and potato chips and sample a wide selection of Sicilian wines by the glass (and by the pour, until you decide what you’d like to drink). I settled on a Mamertino rosso from Vigna Nica winery in Messina, located at the northeastern tip of the Island. A blend of nero d’avola, nocera and nerello mascalese, sourced from a three-hectare plot (“nica” means “little”), it’s packed with cherry and blackberry, has plenty of grip and notes of sage leaves and orange peels. It’s a no-frills red, served with a little chill, and it was just the thing I craved on my first day in Sicily.

Fruktstereo Cider Revolution | Megan Krigbaum, Contributing Editor
The total onslaught of new ciders (both American and those from abroad) in the past few years has made the category a little too daunting for me to really delve into. But then this came my way, so I opened it the other night. Since 2016, Karl Sjöström and Mikael Nypelius, friends and restaurant industry vets, have been importing natural wines from all over Europe into Sweden, as well as making pét-nat-style fruit ciders using produce (apples, pears, plums, cherries) from Sweden’s Skåne county—much of which they harvest themselves from abandoned orchards. If brett-y, sour Basque-style cider is what you’re going for, this blend of apple and pear is not that. It’s crisp and tart, like quince and Granny Smiths, with easy-going bubbles and only 5.6 percent alcohol that make drinking an entire 750 mL bottle of it completely within reason.

The post What We’re Into Right Now appeared first on PUNCH.