Dashing Through the Snow

How my cocktails have changed over the years

My cocktail style changes all the time. As I get older and my palate matures or, to put it bluntly, I just like what I like, and I am okay with it, the way I make cocktails shifts. After learning the classics for the first time, I started down my cocktail journey. At this time, I was working behind a bar making hundreds of drinks a day, and these styles and phases that stick out to me are what I put on the menu at the time.

Early Phases

My first cocktails were bright! Citrusy and sharp. Great summer drinks. I often found heat (spicy) to be a welcome addition in these drinks—base spirits of tequila, rum, gin. All of these were usually basic sour variations.

The next phase, for me, meant stirred cocktails. Stirred cocktails are more challenging because you can't hide ingredients or balance errors as well due to the much lower use of sugar or the complete absence of it. Think brown and stirred drinks with a heavy amaro presence. This is also where my first intrigue with complex dashes came into play—more on this later.

Then I stopped inventing—the next chunk of time, I watched and listened. I would sit in the Tuesday bar meetings and have nothing to offer aside from making service better or new products to bring in. I was stuck in a "writer's block" of cocktail making.

Writer's Block

Now at this point, I was running the cocktail program at the Whistler in Chicago. The Whistler has a catalog of original cocktails that stretches back almost a decade with their takes on classic recipes. I started digging through the classics and tweaking them. This was not an easy task because nobody wanted to change how they had made a Martini, Manhattan, or Sazerac for years, but that was my focus.

The other side of that coin was that my classic recipes were, no pun intended, fluid. They involved questions. Most notably, "How do you like your [insert classic cocktail here]?" What I came to realize was that you could have ten people sitting at a bar drinking ten different manhattans. The recipe in the book doesn't fit everyone, not even close! Wine tastes like the wine in the bottle, and cracking open a beer is consistent beer after beer, but cocktails don't have to be the same over and over again.

Learning Japanese 

A new change came from slowly reading a whole ton of Japanese cocktail books. I would slowly translate each page with Google translate, taking a photograph, and highlighting each character. My cocktails changed from doing this. One thing that changed was my switch to metric measuring. For me, it was much easier to get exact and to use different measurements in my drinks. Measurements like 20 ml and 50 ml are hard to hit on a standard 1 oz/2 oz jigger, but can really change a drink.

My sour and sidecar style cocktails became smaller and delicate. Now instead of tasting what I thought was balance (read: everything tastes the same), I could pick out each ingredient on their own or have them all play together at once like a chord. This was the most significant breakthrough for me in drink-making—realizing that everything I knew about balance was incorrect because I was taught incorrectly. Classic sour specs like "two, three quarters, half" style builds work for making drinks that taste like lemonade and limeade. I wanted my drinks to balance like a knife you can hold up on your finger, not like a roly-poly toy that always rights itself.

For example, try the spec I use for a White Lady against the one you use. Just make sure you try mine first because the sugar in the conventional spec with throw your palate when you try this much drier version. 

White Lady
In a cobbler shaker
40 ml Gin
30 ml Cointreau
20 ml Strained Lemon Juice
Shake with ice/Strain-Chilled Coupe/No Garnish

Try a Sidecar the same way:

Sidecar
In a cobbler shaker
50 ml Cognac
20 ml Cointreau
20 ml Strained Lemon Juice
Shake with ice/Strain-Chilled Coupe/Half Sugared Rim

Here the often overlooked sugar rim (and the only actual sugar in the drink) comes into play! It is crucial for the cocktail's balance and allows the drinker to manipulate the cocktail with each sip.

For an easy start in Japanese cocktail books, try Cocktail Techniques by Kazuo Uyeda. It is printed in English. If you are looking for something a little deeper down that rabbit hole, shoot me an email!

After reading through Uyeda's book I re-examined all the recipes I had learned over the years, and again, had to learn the classics all over again.

Current Phase: Dashes

So now I find myself in a place where I don't experiment with new cocktails at all. I drink the same old classics, but I tweak them almost to the point that they become unrecognizable as their original form.

Dashes have become my recent fascination due to how they can change a drink entirely with just one or two hits. It reminds me of microdosing and how something so minuscule can change your entire day. The same is true here for a Martini with a few dashes of Maraschino, Orange Bitters, and Absinthe (I keep these mixed in equal parts ready to go in a dasher bottle). Or the simple addition of a dash or two of Absinthe to a Negroni (making it the Quill cocktail!) Oh my, what a difference. Dashes of Campari and Angostura in a Gin and Tonic or a couple of dashes of peated whisky and Chambord in a Rusty Nail or Godfather can change the original drink for the better!

Now I can drink the same thing daily, and it is always different. As a Martini drinker through and through, there are days I am not in the mood for the straight and narrow classic recipe. On those days, I throw in a little absinthe or a touch of yellow Chartreuse. Maybe that bitters mixture I mentioned earlier, or Angostura that I keep in a dasher bottle in equal parts with an amaro (great in an old fashioned as well). My drink shelf at home is full of dasher bottles with all kinds of experiments in them.

The complex dashes I was talking about in my brown and stirred phase show up in a drink I call Two Weeks Notice. Enjoy:

Two Weeks Notice
In a mixing glass with ice
50 ml Bourbon
20 ml Abano
10 ml Rammazotti
8 Dashes AMA Bitters*
Stir/Strain/Rocks Glass with Large Ice/No Garnish

If you have those ingredients around give this a go. It is an old favorite of mine.

*AMA Bitters (AKA Improved Bitters)
In a dasher bottle
30 ml Angostura Bitters 
20 ml Luxardo Maraschino
10 ml Absinthe (or anything anise)

Think of these as Old Bay or a seasoned salt compared to plain old kosher salt. Don't overdo it, and it's not good at everything, but sometimes it can be better than just Ango in the right circumstances.

How do you use dashes to change your cocktails?