Get Weird With a Cynar Smash
A pair of unusual smashes featuring Cynar and Fernet-Branca.
The first thing you should aim to do when learning to make cocktails is master the classics. You want to make superior and exacting versions of well-known drinks, which will help you understand the foundations upon which most other cocktails are built.
The second thing you should do is learn to make subtle twists on classic structures, layering complex flavors onto familiar formulas and tweaking them with unexpected techniques.
And then, once you’ve mastered the basics and the basics-plus—well, the third thing you should probably to do is go a little wild. Just start combining ingredients, flavor-pairs, techniques, and methods. Crunch two drink ideas that shouldn’t go together into the same glass. Make your Negroni into a sour, then add grapes. Make a Manhattan—with aquavit, peaty Scotch, and orange liqueur. Make a cocktail that tastes like pecan pie, or two. Find things in your fridge that probably shouldn’t go in cocktails—and then put them in cocktails. Put an egg in it. Get weird.
This doesn’t always work. There are limits. But sometimes it’s worth trying something because you’ve never tried it before, because you’re not sure anyone has ever tried it before, because it’s right there, and you can.
Who knows what the result will be? Cocktail science isn’t always an exact science. You may need multiple attempts to get it right. I’m working on several drink ideas right now that haven’t quite found themselves. Maybe they never will.
But when one of these weird ideas does come together, it’s a beautiful thing.
Now, most of the time, you still need to ground your weirdness in something resembling a standard structure or idea—you can break the rules, but you shouldn’t pretend they don’t exist.
So this week I’m going to encourage you to get a little weird with your smash—first with a lesser-known modern rendition that slots in minty, bitter, intense, and intensely polarizing Fernet-Branca, and second with a newsletter original that features Cynar… and mango.
It’s a Cynar Mango Smash—and it is definitely pretty weird. It’s also strangely satisfying and summery.
Fer the Love of Fernet
Our first drink, however, is a smash built with Fernet-Branca. It’s dark, odd, and icy. It looks like this.
This is a drink with a recipe that has been going around the internet for more than a decade. But for many years, whenever it would pass through my feeds, I would just keep scrolling. That’s because I was a Fernet-Branca skeptic—perhaps even a hater. But I wanted to learn to like Fernet-Branca, since it seemed to check all of my personal boxes: bitter, herbal, intense, polarizing, and favored by a certain sort of bartender/Fernet Guy that I relate to a little too much.
It took a while, but with the help of some good drinks and good bartenders, I eventually solved my Fernet-Branca problem. That, in turn, helped me appreciate aggressive, somewhat weird, but uniquely tasty drinks like this.
Like I said, the recipe has been passed around the internet for years, but I was reminded of this cocktail recently while perusing Philip Greene’s excellent new cocktail book Sours, which closes with an entire section on contemporary smash variations.