An Irish Whiskey Sazerac Riff With a Bit of Scotch

Decoding the structure of a delicious, delicate Saint Patrick's Day-friendly cocktail.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! 

For this year’s Irish whiskey holiday — that’s what it is, right? — we’re going to make one of my favorite Irish whiskey cocktails, the Cooper Union. 

The Cooper Union was created by one of this newsletter’s heroes, bartender Phil Ward, during the early days of Death & Co. Like most of Ward’s creations, it’s deceptively simple — an easy-to-make mix of high quality Irish whiskey, St. Germain elderflower liqueur, and orange bitters, laced a rinse of boisterous Scotch. If you have the ingredients on hand, you can mix this up in a minute or two. 

And yet despite its simplicity, it is truly exquisite, with an earthy, aromatic nose, and a perfectly refined balance of flavors in the glass. It’s pleasantly flavorful but not too aggressive, delicate but not too sweet — a contemplative cocktail that helps you appreciate and understand the particular qualities of the ingredients and how they work together. 

If there is a drawback to this cocktail, it’s that it is somewhat spendy to make, since it calls for quite specific, relatively expensive bottles of both Irish whiskey and Scotch. 

Fortunately, this is a semi-solvable problem. I say “semi” solvable because you will not perfectly replicate this drink with cheaper ingredients. If you want to drink a Cooper Union — and you should! — you will need to make it using the ingredients in Ward’s original recipe. 

But if you understand how this drink is constructed, and the cocktail lineage it participates in, you can create a similar drink on your own using less expensive bottles. It won’t be the same drink, but it will participate, conceptually, in the same idea — a 4:1 ratio in which a spirit base is sweetened by an unusual liqueur. 

So for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day newsletter, we are going to start by breaking down the Cooper Union, then look at several other recipes that rely on similar structures, and then, finally, we’ll construct a related drink or two using the principles we’ve learned. 

Conveniently for readers who have been following along the last several weeks, both Drambuie and a Benedictine are involved. 

One Flew Over the Cooper’s Nest

Typically in this newsletter, we start with the concept, then work our way toward the recipe. This week, however, we’re going to start with the recipe, then back our way into the concept. 

Cooper Union

• 1 dash orange bitters

• ½ ounce St. Germain Elderflower liqueur

• 2 ounces Irish Redbreast 12 whiskey 

• ½ teaspoon Laphroaig 10 Islay Scotch, to rinse 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. An hour or more before you plan to make your drink, lightly rinse a rocks glass with water, then place it in the freezer to chill. (Okay, this isn’t totally necessary, but this drink is MUCH better in a chilly glass. Sazeracs and Martinis are MUCH better in chilled glassware.)

2. Once you’re ready to make the drink, combine all ingredients EXCEPT Scotch in a mixing glass. 

3. Add ice, then stir until chilled. 

4. Coat the inside of your pre-chilled rocks glass — it should be frosty to the touch! — with the Scotch. You can do this either by putting the Scotch in a small mist bottle and spraying the inside of the glass OR by putting the Scotch in the bottom of the rocks glass and then rolling the glass on its side so that it coats the inside walls. 

5. Strain the primary mix into the chilled and coated rocks glass. There should be no ice in the serving glass. 

6. Garnish with a twist of lemon peel. 

The Death & Co. book categorizes this drink a Sazerac variation, and you can see why: It’s served low, without ice, with a rinse of intense liquor that gives it a spiky, aggressive aroma, even though the drink is quite easygoing overall. There’s a twist of lemon as garnish. 

But Sazeracs, as we know, are really just slight riffs on the Old Fashioned.

Like the Old Fashioned, the core ingredients are whiskey, sugar syrup sweetener, and bitters. The Sazerac merely adds an aromatic rinse of absinthe. And unlike the Old Fashioned, Sazeracs are served without ice. (I have been served Sazeracs with ice, even at restaurants and bars that should know better. Please do not do that!)

The Cooper Union departs from this a little, mostly by using St. Germain elderflower liqueur, which was quite new when Ward created the drink, as the sweetener. The inclusion of this ingredient isn’t too unusual: At one point, St. Germain was so pervasive in fancy-shmancy cocktails that it was dubbed “bartender’s ketchup.” But it’s probably not what first comes to mind when you think of a Sazerac variation. 

The use of flavored liqueur as the drink’s sweetener does, however, put the drink into a template that should by now be familiar to readers. 

If you look at the structure of the Cooper Union, you can see that it also relies on the same structure as the drinks we’ve been looking at over the last month or so — the Monte Carlo and its various offshoots, as well as the Rusty Nail. 

It’s an Old Fashioned-adjacent drink where the primary sweetener is a half ounce of flavored liqueur. That structure also captures another drink we haven’t talked about in a while — the Fancy Free, which is basically just an Old Fashioned sweetened with maraschino liqueur. 

These drinks depart from each other at the margins and in the details. But fundamentally they are all constructed from the same basic 4:1 (spirit:sweetener) + bitters template, which looks like this:

• Some sort of bitters

• ½ ounce liqueur as sweetener

• 2 ounces spirit base (sometimes split between multiple spirits) 

So, my spec for a Fancy Free looks like this:

Fancy Free 

• 1 dash orange bitters

• 1 dash Angostura bitters

• 1 tsp rich (2:1) simple syrup (optional)*

• ½ ounce Luxardo Maraschino liqueur

• 2 ounces Rittenhouse Rye

*Rich (2:1) simple: Combine two parts sugar with one part water, by weight, in a blender. Blend for 2-3 minutes on high, until fully integrated. Bottle and store in the fridge; keeps a month or more.

Sure, you can point out some differences — the optional added syrup, the lack of rinse — but the core 4:1 structure is the same. The alterations are all little tweaks on top of that core structure. 

The same goes for the Jacko’s End, another excellent Phil Ward drink we looked at recently. 

Jacko’s End

• 2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

• ½ ounce Bénédictine 

• 1 ounce apple brandy (preferably Laird’s Straight bottled-in-bond)

• 1 ounce mezcal (preferably Del Maguey Vida) 

In this drink, the sweetener is Bénédictine, and the spirit base has been split between mezcal and apple brandy. But it’s still predicated on a 4:1 base spirit:liqueur ratio. 

The Rusty Nail works the same way: In my preferred version, it’s built with a 4:1 ratio of Scotch to Drambuie, plus a bit of bitters to pull it together. 

You see these sorts of recurring ratios all the time in cocktails. It’s a little like when car manufacturers build a bunch of different models using the same drive train and form factor. It’s not the same car! But from an engineering perspective, it’s…well, it’s kind of the same car, with some different bells and whistles. 

Fantastic Four to One 

If you’ve got all the ingredients required to make a Cooper Union on hand, it’s a fairly easy drink to put together. 

The main problem with making the Cooper Union at home is the one I noted at the top: It calls for a relatively expensive bottle of Scotch (an aggressive Islay, Laphroaig 10, which runs about $60) plus an expensive bottle of Irish whiskey (Redbreast 12, which runs about $70). These are both versatile, delicious bottles — Redbreast 12 appers in several drinks in the first Death & Co. book, and Laphroaig 10 is my go-to for bold Scotch — but not everyone will have them at hand. 

And while you might have St. Germain around, since it’s so versatile, my impression is also it’s one of those highly specific bottles that a lot of home bartenders keep meaning to pick up, but never quite get around to. 

So this is the sort of recipe you might just pass over with a shrug.

What I’m here to tell you is: You don’t have to do that!

You can still make an Irish whiskey cocktail in the 4:1 ratio, served Sazerac style, even if you don’t have these specific bottles. Indeed, I have done this, and I will now show you what I did.

In theory, you could use something other than Irish whiskey as the base spirit. But since this is St. Patrick’s Day weekend, we are going to stick with an Irish whiskey base. However, you can use something quite a bit less expensive than the Redbreast 12 that Ward’s recipe specifies: I quite like both Jameson ($25 or so a bottle) and Powers Gold ($30 range). 

And then you just take that 4:1 template and mix and match your own Cooper Union style drink. 

If you just think of the Cooper Union recipe as a listing of ingredient categories rather than specific bottles, you can see it like this:

• Bitters

• Sweet flavored liqueur, like the ones used in other 4:1 drinks (Drambuie, Bénédictine, maraschino liqueur) 

• Irish whiskey (it’s St. Patrick’s day, so we’re sticking with Irish) 

• Highly aromatic spirit to coat the glass — anything with a powerful nose that accents the other ingredients. 

This gives us a number of options.

If you have Drambuie to make a Rusty Nail, for example, you could use that to make an Irish whiskey based variation, served Sazerac-style like the Cooper Union with a mezcal rinse. 

For those of us keeping up with current events, we’ll call that one…

State of the Union

• 1 dash orange bitters

• ½ ounce Drambuie

• 2 ounces Irish whiskey, such as Powers or Jameson

• ½ teaspoon mezcal, preferably Del Maguey Vida, to rinse

INSTRUCTIONS

1. An hour or more before you plan to make your drink, lightly rinse a rocks glass with water, then place it in the freezer to chill. 

2. Once you’re ready to make the drink, combine all ingredients EXCEPT mezcal in a mixing glass. 

3. Add ice, then stir until chilled. 

4. Coat the inside of the pre-chilled rocks glass — it should be frosty to the touch! — with the mezcal. 

5. Strain the primary mix into the chilled and coated rocks glass. There should be no ice in the serving glass. 

6. Garnish with a twist of lemon peel. 

This gives you a drink that sits somewhere between a Cooper Union and Rusty Nail, with the honey-spiced Drambuie flavoring the mellow, smooth Irish whiskey, and a coating of mezcal adding a smoky nose to the mix. 

True, Del Maguey Vida mezcal isn’t the cheapest bottle, but it’s definitely less expensive than the Laphroaig, and I would guess that more of this newsletter’s readers already have some mezcal on hand. 

Another way to adapt the Cooper Union would be to make what amounts to an Irish whiskey version of a Fancy Free — but served Sazerac-style, with bittersweet Campari as the intensely aromatic rinse. 

Since we just got through with the Academy Awards, that gives you a drink I’ll call…

Cooper’s Oscar

• 1 dash orange bitters

• 1 dash Angostura Aromatic bitters

• ½ ounce maraschino liqueur, preferably Luxardo 

• 2 ounces Irish whiskey, such as Powers or Jameson

• ½ teaspoon Campari, to rinse 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. An hour or so before you plan to make your drink, lightly rinse a rocks glass with water, then place it in the freezer to chill. 

2. Once you’re ready to make the drink, combine all ingredients EXCEPT Campari in a mixing glass. 

3. Add ice, then stir until chilled. 

4. Coat the inside of a pre-chilled rocks glass — it should be frosty to the touch! — with the Campari.  

5. Strain the primary mix into the chilled and coated rocks glass. There should be no ice in the serving glass. 

6. Garnish with a twist of lemon peel.

I’m Here to Make Improvised Cocktail Recipes and Chew Bubble Gum and…

In some ways, the main thing I want to impress upon you this week is that if you possibly can, you should find a way to make a Cooper Union. It’s a delicious, incredibly refined cocktail that uses high-quality ingredients in a simple structure to great effect. 

But the other thing I really want to do is encourage you not to completely dismiss recipes like the Cooper Union because they use expensive or unusual bottles that you don’t have. 

You can take that drink recipe and learn from it, especially if you have a sense of how it works in relationship to other drinks. And then, even with a modestly stocked bar, you can probably put together something Cooper Union-y that is interesting and tasty on its own, even if it’s not quite Phil Ward’s original.

Home bartending is always an exercise in working within limitations, but with a little bit of know-how and creativity, you can take those limitations and use them to your advantage. 

Large Dogs Not Wearing Green