Boozehound - Jason Wilson [19]
Okay, I thought. Here we go. Here’s the perfect chance to turn someone on to something new—a new taste, a new flavor. So I said, “You know a Manhattan, right?” He nodded his head in cautious affirmation, suggesting he had some faint notion of a drink called a Manhattan. “Well, this is sort of like a Manhattan except this is a mix of rye whiskey …”
“Ugh,” he cut me off. “Rye whiskey, fuck that.”
“Well, maybe you could try your martini with gin then?” I said, hopefully.
“No way. I hate gin!”
His taller friend slapped him on the shoulder and finally spoke. “Fuck this place,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. No wonder there’s no fucking girls in this fucking place.”
A Round of Drinks:
Beyond Martinis and Manhattans
H. L. Mencken famously called the martini “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.” The sonnet, as anyone who took freshman English may remember, is a poem with a specific meter, a structure of exactly fourteen lines and a strict rhyme scheme. This being the age of free verse, no one writes sonnets anymore. Which is just as well, since almost no one reads poetry anymore.
I’ve been tasting a lot of silly drinks lately, and I believe we have entered the age of free verse in cocktails. Creativity is to be admired, and it’s certainly exciting to fancy oneself a “bar chef” or a “mixologist” or even a “molecular mixologist.” But as I said to several mixologists when I began this job, “Let’s make a deal: I promise not to pretend I’m going to win a Pulitzer Prize for writing about booze. And in exchange, this is what we will call people who make drinks for a living: bartenders.”
Sometimes I think we’re all losing our minds. Here are some ingredients I’ve seen on recent cocktail menus: rose hips, yuzu juice, truffle oil, tarragon soda, Szechuan peppercorns, tonka bean syrup, cherrywood-smoked white pepper meringue, dehydrated lotus roots, cotton candy floss. Mencken would not be amused.
A lot of contemporary cocktails bring to mind Robert Frost’s assertion that writing free verse poetry is like playing tennis without a net. Or, in the words of one wise friend, befuddled by an upscale cocktail menu, “Dude, every once in a while can I just get something to drink?”
That same friend asked me to tell him honestly—as a normal human being—what my favorite cocktail is. I thought about a drink with ingredients that don’t require a visit to an expensive gourmet shop, an act of Congress to import, or the hiring of a private detective to track down.
That’s easy, I said. No contest. The Manhattan.
With apologies to Mencken, the Manhattan is more complex than the martini and more flavorful. Like a strong poetic structure, the Manhattan’s recipe is more of a starting point than a rote list of ingredients. It is both universal and highly personal. The Manhattan encourages modifications, riffs, virtuoso performances.
And it is deceptively simple. In its most basic form, the Manhattan is two parts whiskey, one part vermouth, a few dashes of bitters, and a garnish. But that is simply an outline. As any art school student is told, you have to know the rules before you know how to break them. Consider the following as you customize:
Will you use bourbon or rye? The original nineteenth-century Manhattan was meant for rye, which is brasher and spicier, but I just as often reach for smoother, sweeter bourbon.
What vermouth will you use? The basic choice is an Italian vermouth, or sweet vermouth, such as Martini & Rossi or Cinzano. But there are so many excellent Manhattans that replace vermouth with a bitter Italian amaro such as Averna, Cynar, Punt e Mes, or Ramazzotti. Likewise, you can experiment with other types of vermouth. A Perfect Manhattan calls for a little dry vermouth. A Bianco Manhattan calls for bianco vermouth, which, with its vanilla and floral notes, is totally different than dry vermouth.
Do not omit the bitters. I cannot stress this enough. The most common cause of a bad Manhattan is a poor bartender who leaves out the bitters. Most often I go for a couple of dashes