Bénédictine Is an Underrated Tiki Ingredient
Bénédictine Tiki Summer!
Links About Drinks
The Pinnacle awards aim to be a Michelin guide for bars. One of the Paris award winners is the tiny, tiny cocktail bar Backdoor 43, which is basically just a cocktail closet. Fun!
Speaking of awards: This year’s James Beard awards recognized Chicago’s Kumiko for Outstanding Bar. It’s been many years since I’ve been to Chicago, but Kumiko will be on my list next time I make a trip.
Bon Appétit profiled Simon Ford, a former barkeep and the name behind Ford’s Gin.
Are we in for a summer of Guinness-topped cocktails? Like I said last week, I do enjoy a beer-topped cocktail when it’s warm out…
This is not technically a link, but I just wanted to note that the new Wes Anderson movie, The Phoenician Scheme, is a great drinking movie. There’s an early sequence in which a character sips Strega, a whole scene built around the Champagne Cocktail, and a closing shot that lingers over a bar shelf stuffed with European apéritifs—I spotted Byrrh Quinquina and the elusive Amer Picon, among others—while they drink whiskey to close out the day. It’s fitting, really, given that the movie is about what it means to live a good life.
Bénédictine Is an Underrated Tiki Ingredient
I have long argued that the herbal-spiced sweet liqueur Bénédictine is a must-have for any home bartender. There are many reasons for this—it’s versatile, it’s delicious, it’s unusual yet accessible, and it’s a required ingredient in many important classic and historic cocktails.
But the most important reason why home bartenders should always keep a bottle of Bénédictine on hand is that it is a shelf-stable, store-bought sweetener that keeps for a very long time. Unlike syrup, which needs to be made in advance and kept in the fridge, and unlike vermouth, which needs to be refrigerated and then only keeps for a month or so, Bénédictine requires no prep and no refrigeration, and will stay tasty sitting out on your bar cart.
Despite the protestations of the “not too sweet” crowd, nearly every cocktail employs some sort of sweetener, and when you haven’t prepped syrup and your vermouth is elderly, your trusty bottle of Bénédictine is there to answer the call.
For most home bartenders, that call is most likely to come during colder weather. The most famous application of the bottle is probably as the herbal-spice grace note in the Vieux Carré. But you can put it in Manhattans or Martinis. And it comes in handy in one of my personal favorite lesser-known drinks, the Monte Carlo—a sort of spicy rye Old Fashioned that uses Bénédictine in place of syrup—and its many offshoots and variations, like the Dead Rabbit’s Irish whiskey Old Fashioned. These are the sorts of cozy drinks best enjoyed on cold, gray days, in front of a fire, wearing a heavy cable-knit sweater.
To put it mildly, that is not the sort of weather we’ve been experiencing on the East Coast for the past week. In Washington, D.C., temperatures soared into the upper 90s. The streets baked. Air conditioning systems struggled to keep up. I was somewhat grumpy about it.
I know that some readers of this newsletter actively identify as Vieux Carré Guys, and I have tendencies in that direction myself. But this was no week for a Vieux Carré.
No, this was a week for juicy, icy, crushable tiki drinks. And while the worst of the heat wave is hopefully over, summer will surely bring plenty more tiki weather.
What use is a bottle of Bénédictine when it feels like the inside of an Ooni pizza oven outdoors? More than you might think.
So for this week’s newsletter, I want to make the case for Bénédictine as a tiki cocktail ingredient, using two lesser-known but thirst-quenchingly delicious tiki drinks as examples.
A spicy, cozy, European liqueur like Bénédictine might not seem obvious as a tiki ingredient. But if you understand the fundamental properties of tiki drinks and how they work, it’s a natural fit.
Folks, it’s time for Bénédictine Tiki Summer to begin.
Tik-i Tok
What is tiki? Tiki cocktails are notoriously complicated, with some calling for nearly a dozen ingredients, multiple types of specific, sometimes obscure, rum, and layers of sweeteners, plus juices, particular liqueurs, and so on and so forth. Looking at tiki recipes, you could be forgiven for thinking that they are unclassifiable Jenga towers of ingredients—the Dagwood sandwiches of the cocktail world.
But dig into the drinks and the history behind them and you’ll find that the foundation of tiki is really just the Daiquiri—rum, lime juice, and sugar—plus some sort of spice element. The most essential tiki drink, the one that defines the form and explains nearly every other tiki drink, is Planter’s Punch. And while Planter’s Punch can take a variety of forms, the drink is really just a Daiquiri—yep, rum, lime, and sugar—plus a spice element like Angostura bitters or Allspice Dram.
Now think about Bénédictine. It’s a sweet liqueur that, as I noted, can work a lot like sugar or syrup does in an Old Fashioned (again, see the Monte Carlo).
Except that it’s also herbal and intricately spiced. It’s a sweetener that already has that essential tiki spice component built in.
Frankly, it’s surprising that it doesn’t appear in even more tiki drinks.
Rum(Ble) Time
Tiki may be known for those dozen-ingredient Dagwood sandwich drinks I mentioned earlier. But it does include some less intimidating recipes as well, like our first drink, which is a dead-simple three-ingredient construction.
You can probably guess that two of them are rum and Bénédictine.