Bourbon, Cynar, Fernet, and Sweet Vermouth, In an Easy-to-Batch Format

Scale, batch, and take this cocktail with you wherever you want to go. No chill required.

Let’s take one more moment to consider room-temperature cocktails. 

The primary use cases for room-temperature cocktails come from situations where you don’t know if you’ll have the ability to control a cocktail’s temperature: Camping or other outdoor events; a dinner at friend’s house where you want to bring a cocktail but it’s not possible or appropriate to take up kitchen space; a party at your own house where you want to pre-batch cocktails and have guests to pour their own drinks. 

Room-temperature cocktails are the solution when you need a batched drink that requires no chill. 

The drink we looked at last week used a nutty, bittersweet amaro (Nonino) as a base ingredient, in combination with a fortified wine (Cocchi Americano), and an easygoing aged brown liquor (Cognac), plus a couple dashes of orange bitters and a bit of water. 

As we learned last week, you can treat this recipe as a moddable formula that can be adapted in many ways, creating rich, flavorful, cool-weather cocktails that are great for batching, bottling, and carrying with you. 

So let’s do one more. 

In place of Amaro Nonino, this drink will use an amaro split as the base, combining a bit of Fernet-Branca with newsletter favorite Cynar. To that bitter pair, we’ll add an ounce of affordable bourbon (Evan Williams bottled-in-bond/white label), as well as an ounce of bold sweet vermouth (Carpano Antica Formula). 

You can use a different bourbon or a different sweet vermouth, of course, but I picked these two for a reason.¹

Evan Williams white label is surprisingly solid for a lower-shelf, inexpensive bourbon — it’s high-enough proof to carry the drink but mild enough in character that it doesn’t clash with the other ingredients. Carpano Antica Formula sweet vermouth, on the other hand, can be a bit pushy, but in this case I wanted a powerful vermouth/fortified wine that could balance out the intensity and richness of the dual amaro section. As always, these are casting decisions.

Unlike last week’s drink, there are no bitters, because this drink, like so many antiheroes, is already bitter enough. 

With its spirit/vermouth/amaro mix, this drink is more than a little bit Negroni-ish — or, more precisely, Boulevardier-ish — but with an inverted structure that emphasizes the herbal-sweet elements.

In a cinematic nod to the drink that inspired this cocktail, we’ll call this one…

The Paper Chase

• ½ ounce water 

• ½ ounce Fernet-Branca

• 1 ounce Cynar

• 1 ounce bourbon (preferably Evan Williams bottled-in-bond/white label) 

• 1 ounce sweet vermouth (preferably Carpano Antica Formula) 

INSTRUCTIONS 

1. Combine in a glass. No chill. No ice. This is a room-temperature drink!

2. Enjoy. 

If you want to make a batched version, just multiply and scale up — say, 6x each ingredient — and then bottle the mix. 

The Big Gal Loves a Blue Sky Scenario

 

1. In addition to being good in this drink, both the Evan Williams and the Fernet will come in handy for drinks we’ll be making over the next few weeks.