COCKTAILS

December is fast approaching, and with it comes weekends filled with festive events. Whether you’re hosting your own soirée or have been entrusted with mixology duties at a friend’s gathering, a well-crafted cocktail can be the perfect way to entertain guests before the main event. Below, the T Australia team has curated a selection of drinks to suit every occasion.

Brulée Old Fashioned

For an after-dinner treat on Christmas eve, once you’ve successfully tucked the kids into bed.

Ingredients:

– 60ml Woodford Reserve Straight Bourbon Whisky
– 15ml créme de cacao
– 2 dashes Angostura bitters
– 1 dash chocolate bitters
– Orange slice dusted with sugar, to garnish

Method:

1. Combine ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir until chilled and diluted.
2. Strain into a rocks glass over a large ice cube.
3. Garnish with an orange slice dusted with sugar and torched until caramelised.

The Frosado

For New Years Day, when nothing else will do. 

Ingredients:

– 45ml Don Julio Rosado
– 30ml Giffard Pink Grapefruit Liqueur
– 20ml lime juice
– 15ml pink grapefruit juice
– Shaved or pebbled ice
– Pink salt rim
– Half a slice of pink grapefruit

Method:

1. Wet the rim of your glass and rotate the rim in pink salt.
2. Batch all liquid ingredients together.
3. Fill half the glass with shaved ice and pour in batched liquids.
4. Top up the glass with more shaved ice so the ice is sitting proud, above the glass if possible.
5. Garnish with pink grapefruit garnish slice.

Dale DeGroff’s Harry’s Original Martini

For when you need a kick after a heavy Christmas dinner.

Ingredients:

– 60ml Grey Goose vodka
– 15ml sweet vermouth (Cocchi Vermouth di Torino Vermouth)
– 15ml Noilly Prat dry vermouth
– 2 dashes gum syrup
– 2 dashes Ferrand Dry Curaçao
– 1 dash Bogart’s Bitters (Bitter Truth)
– 1 lemon zest coin for flavour

Method:

1. Assemble all ingredients except for the lemon zest coin in a mixing glass or martini beaker with cracked ice.
2. Stir well to chill and dilute.
3. Mist the inside of the chilled glass with the oil from the lemon zest coin.
4. Discard the spent zest and strain liquids into the glass.
5. Garnish with the coin-sized zest and serve immediately.

La Fine Fraise by Thibault Massina, creative director of Le Syndicat, Paris

For when you need a summery flavour that the whole party will love. 

Ingredients:

– 10ml cocoa liqueur
– 10ml strawberry syrup (see below for recipe)
– 15ml Blanche Armagnac, not aged Armagnac (if you don’t have Blanche, you can use vodka)
– One teaspoon lemon juice
– A drop Tabasco
– Sparkling water to top

Method for strawberry syrup (or you can use a store-bought one):

1. Take 300g strawberries.
2. Hull and cut them into quarters.
3. Put them in an airtight jar.
4. Add 300g white sugar.
5. Mix and let the sugar melt and absorb the water from the strawberries.
6. Filter through a sieve to recover the strawberry oleo.
7. Keep in a cool place.

Method for La Fine Fraise:

1. Put all the ingredients (except for the sparkling water) in a highball.
2. Fill the glass with ice cubes.
3. Stir once.
4. Fill with sparkling water.
5. Stir a second time.
6. Use a strawberry cut in two as garnish.

Seapea Fizz

For a lazy afternoon spent by the pool. 

Ingredients:

– 22 ml absinthe
– 22 ml simple syrup
– 22 ml fresh lemon juice
– 1 egg white
– Soda water, chilled, to top

Method:

1. Add all ingredients except soda water to a cocktail shaker and shake without ice for at least 20 seconds.
2. Add ice and shake for an additional 15 to 20 seconds.
3. Strain into a coupe glass and top with soda water.

More cocktail coverage from T Australia:

• The Minimal-Waste Cocktails Bringing Root-to-Stem Principles to the Bar Top
• The Negroni Sbagliato: An Overnight Sensation That Began as a Mistake
• The Geometry of The Cocktail

When it comes to cocktails, we’re living in a golden age of the garnish: At many bars, a martini is now likely to come with a veritable salad of imported olives, orange peels carved into spirals and anchovies on toothpicks. In certain corners of New York City, your drink might even feature a plastic dinosaur bobbing above its rim. But at home, a rococo approach is not the only way to surprise and delight. “You have to read the room,” says Erika Flowers, 33, who runs the bar at Compère Lapin in New Orleans, where the drinks are topped with thoughtful accoutrements like showers of grated nutmeg and pineapple fronds. In her mind, the purpose of a garnish is to turn the act of cocktail consumption into “a full sensory experience,” engaging the nose and the eyes as well as the taste buds. Here, three chefs and mixologists share their suggestions for embellishments that do just that – and are surprisingly easy to make, too.

Citrus-Peel Flowers With Sage

To dress up a margarita, tumbler of rum punch or another tropical drink, Flowers cuts one long strip of lemon rind with a metal citrus peeler and trims off any white pith with a paring knife. She then coils the peel into a roselike shape, threading a sprig of mint through the centre for a fragrant addition. To serve, she either sets the peel flower atop a mound of pebble ice or pierces the base with a skewer and balances it on the rim of a coupe glass. As a finishing touch, Flowers uses an atomiser to spray the garnish with a sage tincture that she makes by filling an airtight glass jar with the chopped herb and then steeping it in a high-proof spirit (vodka, she says, is most neutral) for two to four weeks, giving it a shake once a day. The herbaceousness of the spritz will add depth to a fruit-forward cocktail.

Charred Vanilla Pods

The next time you scrape the seedy centre out of a vanilla bean to make whipped cream or some other sweet, hold onto the pod. Fabián von Hauske, 34, a co-owner and a chef of the recently opened restaurant Matilda in Hensonville, N.Y., and of the forthcoming Bar Contra on New York’s Lower East Side, chars his emptied vanilla pods and uses them like swizzle sticks in his clarified citrus milk punch. The vanilla, he says, transmits its ultra-concentrated flavour to the cocktail, imparting a toasted-marshmallow note. To make the stirrers, place the pods directly on a sheet pan and leave them in the oven — set to the lowest possible temperature — overnight to dehydrate. They can then be stored in a dry, sealed container at room temperature for several weeks. “The whole idea of a milk punch is to bring flavours that are nostalgic to childhood,” he says. “Vanilla always helps [with] that.”

Crystallised Hibiscus Blooms

The next time you scrape the seedy centre out of a vanilla bean to make whipped Mercedes Bernal, 35, a co-owner of the restaurant Meroma in Mexico City, developed her crunchy hibiscus blossom garnish as a nod to the many spicy candied snacks of her youth. She buys whole dried hibiscus flowers and simmers them briefly in water to rehydrate them. After thoroughly patting dry each flower, she uses a pastry brush to coat them lightly with simple syrup, then distributes them on a parchment-lined sheet pan, which she places in an oven heated to 270 degrees for about 15 to 20 minutes, until the sugar is crystallised. Before they’ve cooled, she sprinkles each flower with the chilli-lime seasoning blend Tajín, or another blend that complements the cocktail. Bernal suggests adding ground fennel seed or citrus zest to the syrup coating to pair with a bright, acidic cocktail. The technique also works with fresh edible flowers: Just skip the rehydrating and brush the blooms with the simple syrup before dehydrating them until crunchy. They’ll last a few days at room temperature in an airtight container, but if they begin to go limp, Bernal says, you can simply redry them in a 270-degree oven. When the glass is empty, she points out, there’ll be something left to bite into: “You’re giving someone a snack with their drink,” she says.

More expert coverage from T Australia:

• Five Sydney Salons and Spas To Unwind in This Season
• Where To Eat, Drink, Stay and What To Do in Launceston
• Trend Report: Pale Blue Is Having a Moment

Toward the end of the night at Theodora, an elegant Mediterranean restaurant that opened in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighbourhood in February, diners at the polished concrete chef’s counter are often treated to the last thing they might expect in such a setting: a shot. It’s a ritual, explains Maggie Dahill, 27, Theodora’s beverage director, designed to encourage guests to feel part of a community. The shots, which the staff also partake in, change nightly and reflect the global inspirations of Theodora’s chef, Tomer Blechman, 46. Some are a perennial presence on the drinks menu, like a diminutive pour of Tubi, a citrus-based Israeli liqueur, or an ice-cold dose of vodka served with a skewered pickled mushroom in homage to the chef’s Latvian family. There’s a nonalcoholic option, as well. (On a recent night, it was a homemade fermented kumquat and rose soda.) “To some degree it’s less about the actual beverage and more about that moment of ‘cheers’ with somebody — that sense of connection,” Dahill says.

Theodora is one of a number of restaurants worldwide newly experimenting with miniaturised beverages. For some, the trend is inspired by the many cultures in which mid- and post-meal shots are a festive staple. For others — as is the case at Manhattan’s Tusk Bar, which opened in December and offers three different mini-martinis as oyster pairings (the option made with beet- and horseradish-infused vodka, for example, was designed to offset a hibiscus mignonette) — it marks a return to an earlier cocktail era. “Until World War II, cocktails were just two ounces of booze meant to be drunk very fast and very cold,” says David Wondrich, 63, the editor in chief of the definitive 2021 guide “The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails.” The 10-ounce martini that became popular after the war feels almost “unethical” to serve now, says Tusk’s bar director, Tristan Brunel, 35, who appreciates that the craft cocktail movement of the early 2000s shrank things back to three ounces of booze per drink. The Snaquiri, a two-ounce daiquiri shooter, popularised in New York in the mid-2010s by the influential Queens bar Dutch Kills, was smaller still, and the fun-size portion spread globally. In Tokyo, Gen Yamamoto, 45, has been serving an omakase of small-format cocktails for the past 11 years at his namesake bar. London’s Tayēr + Elementary introduced its 1.5-ounce One Sip Martini in 2019. And since opening in 2022, San Francisco’s For the Record has had a menu section devoted to cheekies — an industry term for beverages so small they shouldn’t even count. Now bartenders are shrinking their concoctions even further as they rethink what hospitality means after the pandemic.

Austin Hennelly, the 35-year-old bar director at Kato, a Taiwanese restaurant in Los Angeles, likens tasting bitter melon to “going down the drop of a roller coaster.” Sipping the fruit’s juice — which is the star ingredient in his Garden Tonic, a mocktail he considers the best drink on Kato’s menu — is, he says, “a little bit unpleasant and maybe a little bit scary, but it’s exhilarating, and then you just want to do it again.”

Bitter melon, which is actually a member of the gourd family, has long been a staple of Asian, African and Caribbean cuisines. The Chinese variety is a luminous cactus green with rounded ends and furrows. The Indian version is darker and covered in jagged spikes. Both types are almost always eaten cooked and have the firm bite of sautéed bell pepper with a grassy taste that gives way to a supremely bitter, medicinal tang — like a pain-relief pill that’s lost its coating. Now, mixologists are harnessing that extreme flavour to add punch and balance to cocktails.

At the Chinese-Irish lounge Jade & Clover in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the Bitter Sweet is a fresher take on the Jungle Bird, a Tiki classic, with bitter melon replacing Campari. “I juice it — skin, seeds and all,” says bartender Gelo Honrade, 40, who blends the slurry with pineapple and orange juices and Mekhong rum. The result: a sweet start followed by a finish reminiscent of cold-pressed kale. Like that of a Negroni, its pungent tail demands another sip to find the sweet hit again.

Natives of Okinawa, a Japanese island between the East China and Philippine Seas, are particularly enamored with bitter melon, or, as it’s called there, goya. Some credit the long lives of the locals to the bumpy gourd, which may have therapeutic properties, including, some studies have suggested, the ability to protect against cancer and diabetes; there’s even a holiday dedicated to the fruit. It was a 2019 trip to Okinawa that inspired the Italian spirit makers Benedetta Santinelli, 28, and Simone Rachetta, 47, to create Amaro Yuntaku, which is infused with bitter melon instead of the digestif’s typical blend of herbs, roots and aromatics. Manufactured in a distillery in Lazio, Italy, from Japanese ingredients, it’s currently only available in Europe, but the founders plan to expand distribution to the United States later this year. Santinelli explains that the name comes from the Okinawan word for “chatting,” which is shouted at the end of a meal to cue the waiter to bring drinks. “When the drinks come,” she says, “then you start the party.”

Bar Leone in Hong Kong is just one global cocktail bar coming to Sydney this month for The Maybe Cocktail Festival. Founder and mixologist Lorenzo Antinori’s bar pays homage to classic cocktail bars in New York and Italy and the concept behind Bar Leone is ‘cocktail popolari’, an Italian phrase that means ‘cocktails for the people’.

For the duration of the festival, April 9-14, bar talent from internationally acclaimed bars will take up residency at nine venues across Sydney including Maybe Sammy, Dean & Nancy on 22, Sammy Junior, El Primo Sanchez, Oxford House, RICO’S Taco, Kasbah , Busby’s, and Lady Hampshire.

To get us all in the mood, Antinori has very kindly shared a cocktail recipe for his much-loved Yuzu Negroni. Cheers! Or as they say in Italy, Salute!

Yuzu Negroni 

22.5ml O’ndina gin
22.5ml Suze Liqueur
15ml Americano Aperitif
7.5ml yuzu sake

Pour the ingredients into a mixing jug with ice. Stir well until the outside of the jug feels cold and then strain into an Old Fashioned glass over one large ice cube and garnish with lemon.

More delicious cocktail recipes from T Australia:

• An Elevated Spicy Margarita is Primed To Be The Drink of the Summer
• Holiday Buzz: Punch Bowl Cocktails for Your New Year’s Eve Soirée
• Five Cocktails to Help Beat the Heat

Frank Meier was the celebrated, “cracker jack” head barkeep at the Ritz in Paris, France. Born in Austria, he had worked in the hotel hospitality industry in both Paris and London from a young age, and was tapped to open the Ritz bar in 1920, serving there through World War II. The Seapea Fizz—which originally called for sweetened Anis “Pernod fils,” lemon, and soda water—is one of the most famous cocktails featured in his stylish 1936 book The Artistry of Mixing Drinks, although the recipe has been tweaked over the years.

There is an entire section of Artistry devoted to the fizz genre of cocktails, including the “New Orleans Fizz” that closely resembles the Ramos Gin Fizz, and a raspberry liqueur and sloe gin “Ruby Fizz.” The notation for this drink is “Seapea ‘C.P.’ — Special for Mr. Cole Porter, famous composer of lyrics and music.” Does that mean Porter drank this tailor-made cocktail at the Ritz bar in Meier’s presence? It’s highly possible.

The original recipe, which lacks much sweetener and could use a binding agent of some sort, might not have people singing “You’re the Top,” but keep in mind that anis liqueur was de rigueur in 1920s and 30s France and Meier would have used a soda siphon for dramatic effect when serving. Modern variations of the Seapea Fizz use absinthe instead of Pernod, and additional simple syrup. Also, the drink was just begging for an egg white (perhaps it was even accidentally left out? Anything goes…). Therefore, contemporary recipes call for it, which not only makes the cocktail taste better, but truly lends it the aesthetic quality of sea foam.

Year: 1930s
Origin: Paris, France
Inventor: Frank Meier
Premises: Ritz Hotel
Alcohol Type: Absinthe
Glassware: Coupe

Seapea Fizz

Ingredients

22 ml absinthe
22 ml simple syrup
22 ml fresh lemon juice
1 egg white
Soda water, chilled, to top

Method

Add all ingredients except soda water to a cocktail shaker and shake without ice for at least 20 seconds.

Add ice and shake for an additional 15 to 20 seconds.

Strain into a coupe glass and top with soda water.

More summer cocktail recipes from T Australia:

• An Elevated Spicy Margarita is Primed To Be The Drink of the Summer
• Holiday Buzz: Punch Bowl Cocktails for Your New Year’s Eve Soirée
• Five Cocktails to Help Beat the Heat