It’s another Whiskey Wednesday! I picked up some Rittenhouse this afternoon and wanted to try it out. This cocktail seemed very familiar to me, though I can’t quite place it. (It does seem kind of like a Brooklyn.) The rosemary is essential here, as it really gives a wonderful nose to the drink. I might even be starting to enjoy Cynar under the right circumstances.
I was heating up some leftovers of this amazing soup for dinner, so I decided to find a tequila drink to go with it. If you search for “tequila cocktails” most of what you get back is some kind of margarita. BORING. I looked in the Death & Co book and happened upon this, which was apparently made up on the spot when a regular asked for something using his favorite things. Well, to quote the book: “The problem was that he likes a lot of weird shit.”
This is definitely a weird, weird drink. I used Punt e Mes instead of Carpano as suggested, which may have made it slightly more bitter than advertised. Still, this was all over the place. Bitter, smoky, with a bit of a sweet chocolate after taste.
Scotch cocktails are sort of a strange category. Sometimes it feels weird to mix a single malt with anything else, but I like to do it sometimes instead of relying only on blendeds. This is a pretty popular one to get at Whisler’s in my group of friends.
Teardrop is a beautiful bar in Portland, a short walk from my Air BnB when I was visiting for a work conference last year. I watched a bunch of business people order Piña Coladas, which was somehow very satisfying to me.
This is the first time I’ve made this one. The description in the menu is “earthy & cooling, with a tropical bounce”. Mine was off the mark but I could see where it was going. Their recipe uses pineapple gomme and I don’t have any gum arabic just lying around the house, so I just used some pineapple juice instead. To make up for the missing sweetness I upped the amount of Bénédictine I would normally use. Looking at it now I might have been better off adding some extra simple instead. This turned out a bit too earthy. I’d like to try making my own gomme syrups at home, and use less genever next time.
Pour into rocks glass and stir.
This is a simple drink to make but doesn’t taste like it. This version of the recipe comes from Half Step, a bar on Rainey Street in Austin. The low-light, super classy cocktail bar has live jazz on certain nights and can seem incongruous next to the general hipster vibe of Rainey.
I used Red Handed, a Texas bourbon from Treaty Oak, just to be contrary. Bénédictine is a fairly sweet herbal liqueur that I see a used a lot to brighten up bourbon and whiskey cocktails. It’s also one that’s difficult to substitute for, so I recommend getting a bottle if you see a lot of recipes you like that use it.
