DISSECTING A COCKTAIL

In 2009 bartenders Kirk Estopinal and Maksym Pazuniak released a very small cocktail book titled Rogue Cocktails. The book has a short list of drinks from a few different bartenders and almost all of the recipes are head-scratchers. Four years after its release, a friend lent me the book and I made sure to copy every recipe down in my personal cocktail pamphlet.

The drinks didn’t all make sense on paper but were intriguing nonetheless. Certain cocktails needed “5 swaths of lemon peel” or three different types of amaro with “15 drops of 50/50 bitters.” Long before the days of using Instagram to find strange and envelope-pushing drinks, Rogue Cocktails was the place to look.

One of my favorites is the “art of choke,” by bartender Kyle Davidson at the legendary Chicago bar, The Violet Hour. The combination of rum, Cynar and green Chartreuse caught my eye. That and the fact that I had never seen a recipe for a cocktail with juice that was stirred. “You can do that?” I thought. I recently listened to a podcast where Davidson explains how he created the cocktail while on a bartender swap with the New York City bar, Death & Co.

“The real estate in New York is different than Chicago, and the folks at D&C were doing serious volume. The service bar would get so overwhelmed that even the best bartenders would have to pass tickets over,” he said. “Stephen Cole, who is the best service bartender I’ve ever worked next to, can handle anything, but even he had to pass me a ‘dealer’s choice’ ticket of a rum and bitter. The first iteration was 2 (ounces) of white rum, 1 (ounce) of Cynar, with a green Chartreuse rinse and a mint leaf on top. And I thought, ‘Hey, there might be something here.’” Davidson quickly wrote the specs down in his own little pamphlet and continued serving drinks. He admits that he doesn’t remember how he arrived at the final specs but does remember being a little nervous about adding fresh juice to a stirred drink. As they say in Rogue, the final result proves, “There is no right way to make a cocktail, but there are many wrong ways.”