A St. Patrick’s Day Old Fashioned

And: How to build your own cocktail.

Happy St. Patrick’s day! Typically, the main weekly newsletter goes out to paid subscribers only. But this week, I’m making an exception to celebrate a great drinking holiday. 

Today, we’re going to make a cocktail that riffs on an Irish food staple. It’s an original drink that you won’t find anywhere else, and it’s pretty tasty. But I’m not just going to tell you how to make it for yourself. I’m going explain how I built it, walking you through the steps of designing an original drink designed around both a holiday theme and a classic cocktail construction.

One reason it’s important to master the classics is because they’re delicious drinks that will never fail you. Another is that they’re the building blocks for making new cocktails, like this one. 

Sure, you can always just follow recipes; I certainly do a lot of that myself. It’s an easy way to learn new flavor and ingredient combinations, and the drinks are often quite good. But you can also learn to build new cocktails, or at least new iterations, from scratch, simply by learning to combine a few easy techniques, many of which we’ve already covered in some form or another. 

Caraway Cocktails? 

This particular cocktail started, as many of my originals do, with a conversation with my wife. 

This was back in January, and we were in the kitchen, talking about recipes, flavor combinations, and techniques. She’s a bread maker extraordinaire, and she often uses caraway to flavor her loaves. It’s one of her favorite flavors. 

So she wondered: Were there any cocktails that used caraway? 

I said I didn’t know any off the top of my head. I wasn’t even quite sure how I would use it. It wasn’t a flavor I had cataloged or slotted into any particular use-case. What did caraway combine with? 

So she reminded me: Most every year, she makes an Irish soda bread for St. Patrick’s day. It’s a caraway-inflected raisin bread that, in normal times, we take to a friend’s St. Patrick’s party. Would it be possible to make a cocktail that somehow tasted like Irish soda bread, or, at the very least, drew inspiration from the same set of flavors? 

That was the start of the idea. And we’ve been working on it on and off for the last couple months. Two months later, just in time for St. Patrick’s day, I think we’ve finally perfected it. At the very least, it’s pretty tasty.

What Booze Tastes Like Bread?

The first challenge was to figure out how to get caraway flavor into a cocktail. Normally, caraway lives in the spice drawer; it comes in the form of tiny brown seeds. 

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to infuse spices into booze. High-proof liquor, especially, picks up spice-rack flavors quite easily; all you have to do is infuse them for a little while — although infusions can be somewhat time sensitive. The next question was: Which liquor?

This was a drink inspired by bread, and since bread, beer, and whiskey are all, in some sense, different forms of the same thing — or, at the very least, all products derived from grains — I landed on whiskey pretty quickly.

The first whiskey that came to mind was rye. After all, rye is also a kind of bread, and rye bread is sometimes even flavored with caraway.

This was not a bad idea, and it worked pretty well for a while. But in retrospect, there was at least one other obvious choice I could have landed on. We’ll come back to this in a little while. 

So I started by combining 12 ounces of Old Overholt rye, my go-to for cheap infusions and batched drinks, with a teaspoon of caraway seeds...and then let them sit. The first day, it was clear the caraway notes were starting to come through. The second day those notes were quite strong. Something came up on the third day. And by the fourth day, the caraway had taken over. It wasn’t quite awful, but the balance was out of whack. So I started over, planning a two-day caraway/rye infusion. 

A Raisin For Being

In the meantime, I had to think about other flavors, especially the raisin. 

I could have infused the raisins in another liquor, or done a raisin-caraway combo, similar to the way I combined apples with spices in the Thanksgiving Sour. But for the raisin flavor in this particular, I wanted something simple and inexpensive, something that wouldn’t take weeks or even days to make, and something that could potentially be used in other drinks. And fruit flavors, which are already quite sugary, go quite well in syrups. 

At the time, I was making a batch of demerara gum syrup using an immersion circulator. As it happens, the immersion circulator is pretty useful in making infused syrups as well.  So I simply made demerara gum syrup, exactly as described in a previous edition of this newsletter, but with one modification: I toasted 1/4 cup of raisins on a skillet on medium for about 10 minutes, until they were cooked but not burnt, then tossed them in the bag with the sugar, gum arabic, and water. (The goal of toasting was to bring out a little more flavor by lightly carmelizing the skin of the raisins before infusion. Crispy golden brown chicken skin tastes incredible because it’s been caramelized; raisins are no different.) At the end of the process, I strained out the raisins. 

Several hours later, I had a rich but not overpowering, sweetly fruity raisin syrup. I tried it in a basic bourbon Old Fashioned; it was delicious. The raisin flavor problem had been solved. 

What Should a Drink Be? 

This led to the next question: What sort of cocktail should I make? 

And by “what sort” I meant “What archetypal cocktail structure should I use?” When designing a new cocktail, the best place to start is an old cocktail, or at least, an old cocktail structure. Because, as I have said before and will keep on saying, classic cocktail structures are durable, variable, and repeatable. 

Just as an engineer designing a bridge is likely to start with bridge engineering principles and classic structures that have stood the test of time, cocktail design work is largely (not entirely) a matter of understanding what has worked in the past and figuring out how to adapt that to your current project. (The good news is, you don’t need to perform an environmental review.)

For this cocktail, I wanted to make something relatively simple, and relatively basic--something that would combine spice and raisin flavors without adding too many extraneous notes. That pretty much ruled out a sour. And while I considered a Manhattan-style drink with PX Sherry — a quite sweet sherry with a delightfully nutty flavor profile — in the end, I didn’t want to deal with a fortified wine of any kind, since sherry also brings a bunch of other notes that can be hard to compliment. This drink practically to be an Old Fashioned. 

This left me with the question of what to do about the bitters that are an essential part of the Old Fashioned formula. Here, instead of turning to the usual Angostura, I decided I wanted something a little bit nutty. Irish soda bread doesn’t always have nuts in it, but sometimes versions use walnuts, and nuts tend to pair quite nicely with raisins. Happily, Fee Brothers makes an excellent Black Walnut bitters, and I already had a bottle. 

Typically, I use these in rum-based drinks, but, I thought, what’s the worst that could happen? As it turned out…

Back to the Whiskey

Well, the worst didn’t happen. But as I was working on this drink, other things happened — I do, in fact, sometimes do things other than make cocktails — and I completely forgot about the second bottle of rye I’d started infusing. The first one had been overpowered after four days. By the time I went back to this one, it had been weeks. 

This time, the caraway wasn’t just strong. It wasn’t just overpowered. It was...something far weirder. The caraway flavor was incredibly powerful by this point, but it also had a blackened, bitter edge. It was wildly unbalanced and would be hyper assertive in any cocktail. I had no idea what I’d do with it.

This sort of thing happens sometimes, especially when working on projects with a long time horizon. Life gets in the way. Time escapes. You just forget. This is especially true if you are already slightly disorganized, living through the terrible tail end of a pandemic, and not actually in the business of making cocktails full time. Just, you know, hypothetically. 

But it also happens to booze-making professionals whose entire job is to manage a product’s development over time: If you read interviews with whiskey distillers, you’ll hear plenty of stories about finding old barrels that had been forgotten somewhere in the back of an aging facility. Sometimes these barrels are over-aged, undrinkable disasters. But sometimes they turn out pretty great. And every now and then, the project that looks like a disaster turns out to work...just not in the way you expect. 

Which is why, whenever I end up with these disaster bottles, I try to save them. At least for a little while — a few weeks or so, until my next round of bar organization and housekeeping — because sometimes they turn out to be useful. 

So I bottled up the long-aged caraway rye, and started yet another infusion, intending to actually pull this one out after two days. I did, and it worked really well. 

But while I was waiting, I showed the mistake bottle to my wife, who took a whiff, made a face, and said that as much as she loves caraway, this was too much. It was so overpowering, she said, it almost came across like bitters. 

And there was the idea. Instead of using this as the primary base of a cocktail, I could use the long-infused bottle in tiny amounts to add flavor to other whiskey — including, I realized, the one I probably should have started with, given the inspiration for this drink: Irish whiskey. And as it turned out, a single teaspoon of long-infused caraway rye worked great with a couple of ounces of Irish whiskey, which tends to have a cakey-vanilla flavor and a smoother profile than U.S. whiskey or Scotch. Suddenly, it tasted like soda bread.

So in the end I made two versions of this drink. 

The first was the one I started out to make, a rye-based, caraway infused raisin-syrup Old Fashioned with black walnut bitters. I also added a single dash of smoked orange bitters, which helped tame some of the rye spice and also gave it a sense of having been cooked — appropriate for a drink trying to capture the idea of fresh bread. (You can substitute Regan’s or some other orange bitters, and while it will cut some of the spice notes, it won’t give you quite the same smoke effect.) After initially experimenting with several citrus garnishes, I eventually settled on a maraschino cherry for garnish. I typically don’t love cherries with Old Fashioned-style drinks, but the sweetness made it a little more dessert-like, which seemed right for a drink inspired by a raisin bread. 

It’s the sort of drink that, if you saw it described on a cocktail bar menu, might come across as quite elaborate and complex — raisin infused syrup! caraway infused rye! — but once you know a little bit about cocktail structure turns out to be just another relatively ordinary three-part construction with a little bit of additional flavoring. 

Admittedly, you can’t make this drink tonight. But if you start now, you can make it in time for the weekend. 

Irish Soda Bread Old Fashioned

• 2 dashes Fee Brothers Black Walnut Bitters

• 1 dash Cocktail Punk smoked orange bitters 

• ¼ ounce raisin syrup* 

• 2 ounces two-day caraway infused Old Overholt**

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. 

2. Add ice, then stir until chilled.

3. Strain into a rocks glass, over a single large piece of ice.

4. Garnish with a Luxardo maraschino cherry. 

Carney Stone 

This is the cocktail that came out of my mistake.

For this version, you don’t need the smoked orange bitters, since you get a burnt/smoked effect from the long rye infusion. Do make sure to use Clontarf for the whiskey; although I do enjoy other Irish whiskeys, some brands, particularly Jameson, won’t interact very well with the caraway. 

This drink, of course, takes a little longer. OK, a lot longer. But if you start now, you can have a long-infused caraway rye ready for next month — or next St. Patrick’s Day. It’s never too early to start planning your next holiday cocktail. 

• 2 dashes Fee Brothers Black Walnut Bitters

• 1 tsp long-infused caraway rye***

• ¼ ounce raisin syrup* 

• 2 ounces Clontarf Irish Whiskey

INSTRUCTIONS

• Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. 

• Add ice, then stir until chilled.

• Strain into a rocks glass, over a single large piece of ice.

• Garnish with a Luxardo maraschino cherry. 

*For the raisin syrup: Toast 1/4 cup of raisins in a pan over medium heat for 5-10 minutes. 

In a blender, combine 32 grams gum arabic, 400 grams demera sugar, 200 grams water; blend for three minutes. Combine sugar/gum/water mix with raisins in a sealable Ziploc-style bag, and heat in a water bath at 145 degrees using an immersion circulator; heat for about two and a half hours. For more detailed syrup instructions, refer to the 1/22/2021 newsletter; the only difference is that you add toasted raisins to the syrup during the cook, then strain out the solids before bottling.

**Two-day caraway infused Old Overholt: Combine 1 tsp caraway seeds and 12 ounces Old Overholt (red cap) rye in a glass bottle, such as a mason jar. Store in a cool, dark place for about 48 hours. Then strain out the caraway seeds and re-bottle the liquid. Keeps for several months.  

***Long-infused caraway rye: Combine 1 tsp caraway seeds and 12 ounces Old Overholt (red cap) rye in a glass bottle, such as a mason jar. Store in a cool, dark place for at least four weeks. Then strain out the caraway seeds and re-bottle the liquid.