State of Mind
Style is personal. So why should your cocktail try to copy somebody else’s?
I teamed up with my friends at Ralph Lauren Fragrances to build a cocktail around their Ralph’s Club New York Parfum, and the fragrance did most of the talking. Black currant, cognac, oud wood. That’s basically a drink order.
So we built a Manhattan style sipper with cognac as the base, swapped the sweet vermouth for creme de cassis and a touch of dry vermouth, added a barspoon of absinthe and a few dashes of bitters, then finished it with an expressed lemon twist for brightness. Given the NY roots on this bottle, I’m calling it The State of Mind.
Cheers, y’all!
ingredients:
2 oz | 60 ml Cognac
½ oz | 15 ml Crème de Cassis
¼ oz | 7.5 ml Dry Vermouth
1 Barspoon | 8 ml Absinthe
3 dashes Tobacco Bitters
3 dashes Angostura Bitters
Lemon Twist Garnish
Absinthe Rinse
instructions:
Combine cognac, crème de cassis, dry vermouth, bitters, and absinthe in a mixing glass. Fill with ice and stir well for 15 to 20 seconds until the outside of the glass is frosty. Rinse a stemmed rocks glass with vermouth and strain cocktail over a large cube while expressing a lemon twist then garnish.
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I’m your huckleberry 🤠
I just got back from Montana with my friends at @traegergrills. It was strictly a grilling event but given what I do, of course I had to get behind the bar. I knew I wanted to incorporate local Montana ingredients like huckleberry, juniper (grown on site) and honey but also wanted to incorporate smoke from the grill. So I had the idea to make a bramble type cocktail.
For the smokey element, I smoked some local raw honey along with some juniper berries on the Traeger to just get a kiss of smoke. I then constructed the cocktail originally using gin like a traditional bramble, but the juniper botanicals overpowered the recipe so I switched to a reposado tequila and knew it was the perfect fit. They also had some locally made huckleberry liqueur which was the perfect last ingredient to top the cocktail and bring that sweet/sour/fruity element to the cocktail. Finally topped it with that smoked juniper berry branch to give it that botanical pop and tricking your brain into thinking you’re drinking a bramble when you’re actually drinking something closer to a margarita.
Given the ingredients and location, it was just fitting to call this the ‘Big Sky Bramble.’ Cheers y’all.
Big thanks to @i_drewcifer for the R&D help!
🎥: @tobojosh / @grillvaultbbq