For St. Patrick’s Day, an Irish Whiskey/Cocchi Americano Cocktail, Choose Your Own Adventure Style

A subtle, complex Irish whiskey Manhattan, at least five ways.

Every year around St. Patrick’s day I write up a cocktail built around Irish whiskey. We’ve used Irish whiskey to make riffs on the Sazerac and the Manhattan. We’ve even made an Old Fashioned that tastes like soda bread.

I had another one planned for this year, but then I realized that the St. Paddy’s Day edition of this newsletter would fall right after my case for Cocchi Americano.

My argument for Cocchi Americano was that it’s versatile, that it’s a utility player, that it goes above and beyond, that it solves problems.

And I realized: If I am going to make the case for Cocchi Americano’s all-around suitability right around St. Patrick’s Day, then I should probably find a way to make a drink that combines with Cocchi Americano and Irish whiskey.

I am not aware of any such drinks in the annals of cocktail recipes. Perhaps—probably—someone has mixed these two ingredients before.

But I cannot think of any particularly well known, well-traveled cocktail that call for both. Frankly, there aren’t that many well known Irish whiskey cocktails, period. So to combine the two, I would have to invent my own.

As it turns out the two go marvelously together. In some ways it’s an obvious pairing: Irish whiskey is light, fruity, and creamy, with a gentle spice profile and an appealing smoothness. Cocchi Americano is sweet and subtly bitter. As we learned last week, it complements lighter, fruitier whiskeys quite well.

So this week we are going to make at least one cocktail that mixes both Irish whiskey and Cocchi Americano. It’s a sort of a stirred-and-boozy, slow-sipping Manhattan riff that drinks like an Old Fashioned. With just three ingredients (plus bitters), it’s relatively simple to make. It’s also one of my better original creations, if I do say so myself.

I say at least one because we are going to turn that drink into a sort of choose-your-own-adventure style cocktail, with Irish whiskey and Cocchi Americano, plus one other ingredient of your own choosing—a third bottle that acts as a sort of accent that adds a layer of complexity to the drink’s core flavor arc.

Yes, I have a clear favorite, a final recommended ingredient for this recipe. But if there’s one thing that I want all readers of this newsletter to take away, it’s that recipes are just guidelines. A good recipe might make a good drink. But it’s also a framework for making cocktails in your own style, using whatever you have on hand.

So we’re actually going to look at five different iterations of this drink, using different accents/modifiers. (Perhaps unexpectedly, none of them are Cynar.) And we’ll discuss how to pick from whatever you have on your own bar cart to make many more iterations.

This drink bolsters the case for Cocchi Americano as an all around utility player, showing how well it mixes with Irish whiskey, which can be fussy in cocktails, as well as an array of other ingredients. It also serves little lesson in effective matching and pairing of ingredients. And it demonstrates how you can take classic formats and adapt them to unusual ingredients to make new, novel, and tasty drinks of your own.

The Luck of the…

Let’s start by talking about Irish whiskey. This will help us understand how it works in cocktails.

Irish whiskey has a light, sweet quality, plus a creamy mouthfeel that makes it almost like a fluffy baked good. The spice notes are light and almost Christmasy—toffee, caramel, cinnamon, cardamom. It’s generally smoother and fruitier than American whisky, with more distinctly nutty overtones. And unlike Scotch, there’s little to no peat or smoke. It’s flavorful, but it goes down easy.