Bartenders take inspiration from just about everything. Our recent stories are proof: They’re making cocktails in response to questions like What would the center of the galaxy taste like? and How do you make caviar and Champagne, minus the caviar and Champagne? For the most popular drinks of the past month, everything from a color (yellow) to a hometown (Watsonville, California) played muse. Here are those drinks, plus the rest of the recipes you deemed best in September.
Flaming Dr Pepper
The Flaming Dr Pepper was created in 1986 by 19-year-old Dave Brinks, who was helping run the Gold Mine Saloon, his mom’s laid-back neighborhood bar just off of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. At The Rockwell Place in Brooklyn, Alex Kveton has reimagined the shot as a rum-based cocktail whose ingredients give the impression of its namesake soda. Like the shot, Kveton’s drink includes a fire element: an Everclear-soaked sugar cube set ablaze before serving.
Read More →Yellow
A forgotten French classic, the Yellow appears on the menu at Cravan, a cocktail bar in Paris with a penchant for French contributions to the canon. It also appears in Cravan owner Franck Audoux’s book, French Moderne, where he explains that the combination of gin, Suze and yellow Chartreuse was a popular mixed drink enjoyed along France’s Côte d’Azur, and takes its name from the color of its star ingredients. Here, Audoux adds another yellow element—lemon juice—to bring the drink into sour territory, for a cocktail that reads like a more-mellow Last Word.
Read More →Paloma Sour
At Kenwood Tavern, the menu rotates often, but a fruit-based sour is generally always available. In this Paloma Sour, which is topped with egg white, the soft texture creates a counterbalance to the sharp notes of grapefruit, lime and reposado tequila. An edible flower is perched atop the egg white foam, an ideal finishing touch to a refreshing remix.
Read More →The Dreamer
Making the top 5 for the second month in a row, this cocktail is an ode to Watsonville, California, where Manny Hernandez, a cantinero at Stokes Adobe, lives. Hernandez marries ingredients that represent the diverse produce grown there—from the raspberries in the syrup to the aloe in the liqueur—with a spirit, mezcal, that has “a connection to my identity and honors the cultural roots of the many Mexicans working in California fields,” he says. The drink’s name, too, is symbolic: “The ingredients in this cocktail represent the dreamer who works hard for family and community.”
Read More →Don’s Mai Tai
Everyone knows the Mai Tai—a Trader Vic creation from the 1940s built on rum, lime, orgeat and Curaçao. But far fewer are familiar with the Don the Beachcomber drink of the same name. It’s altogether different from Vic’s, reading more like a Zombie variation than anything else, with its many ingredients combined in the style of Donn Beach’s rhum rhapsodies. At Satan’s Whiskers in London, Daniel Waddy and his fellow bartenders are bringing Don’s Mai Tai out of the recesses of tiki history, featuring the “small-format Zombie” on their ever-changing menus when the mood strikes.
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