A Pair of Bénédictine Cocktails With Mezcal
Split-base riffs on a stirred-and-boozy, Old Fashioned-style cocktail.
So you’ve got a bottle of Bénédictine, and you’ve made a Bobby Burns and a Vieux Carré and a Good Fellow. What else are you going to do with it?
The short answer: Sweeten everything.
Okay — not literally, you know, everything, everything. But a lot of different drinks with a lot of different spirits and bitters.
In “The Case for Bénédictine,” I made two primary arguments:
Bénédictine serves as a general-use, shelf-stable, spiced sweetener for cocktails. In this capacity, it resembles both sweet vermouth and syrups, in the sense that you can mix and match these sweeteners with a wide variety of elements. You can take a demerara gum syrup and make a very traditional bourbon- or rye-based Old Fashioned — or you can make a four-part, split-base Old Fashioned with mole bitters, adding layers of unusual flavors to the formula. You can take sweet vermouth and make a very traditional Manhattan with a rye whiskey base — or you can make a version that swaps out the rye for, say, a combo of aged rum and apple brandy. Bénédictine has a more distinctive flavor, thanks to its spice element, so its applications are somewhat more limited than a basic syrup. But it works roughly the same way.
The most versatile cocktail template for Bénédictine is actually the Monte Carlo, a sort of waypoint between the Manhattan and the Old Fashioned. This drink pairs half an ounce of Bénédictine with rye whiskey and bitters. As we saw already, the easiest way to vary that structure is to simply swap out the base spirit — trading rye for cognac, for example.
Longtime readers can probably see where this is going: This week, we’re going to take Bénédictine and make some split-base variations on the Monte Carlo, including one of my very favorite lesser-known, weird-but-easy-to-make cocktails.
These drinks take the underlying Monte Carlo formula and change it up by altering the bitters and combining multiple base spirits to create a more layered, more intriguing spread of flavors.
Both examples involve one of my favorite base spirits — a smoky, assertive mezcal, which turns out to pair surprisingly well with the sweet-spice warmth of Bénédictine.
Bénédictine Gesserit Witchcraft
Let’s go back to that Monte Carlo formula one more time: