Is the Grasshopper a Good Cocktail?

Maybe not in its original form. But with a few improvements, it can be.

Perhaps the funniest description of the Grasshopper cocktail—or at least the grumpiest—comes from David Embury.

In his 1940s cocktail manual, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, he noted that the drink usually consisted of cream, crème de cacao, and crème de menthe, but sometimes blackberry brandy was added to the mix. “This,” he wrote, “results in a rather muddy-looking locust; but, with or without the blackberry, as a cocktail it is strictly vile.”

Embury was something of a curmudgeon when it came to sweetness in cocktails. His Martinis were bone dry. His sours were obnoxiously tart. As essential as his book remains, the majority of his recipes require restructuring to balance.

But in this case, I can see his point.

I wouldn’t quite call the Grasshopper “vile.” But in its most traditional three-ingredient form, it is a cloying sugar bomb, combining two aggressively sweet liqueurs (chocolate and mint) with heavy cream—and nothing else.

I say this as someone with a lifelong soft spot for chocolate-mint desserts: My favorite ice cream is and will always be mint chocolate chip, and at times I have requested chocolate brownies with mint icing instead of birthday cake.

But the Grasshopper is too much for me. Top minty, too creamy, too sweet.

And yet—it’s a drink that has persisted for a century or so, and perhaps even enjoyed a small renaissance in recent years. There must be something to it. What am I missing? Can the Grashopper be saved?

I think it can, though doing so requires a significant intervention, and even then it remains a creamy, rich, decadent, dessert-like drink that might not appeal to those with an Embury-like distaste for all things sweet. But for those who do enjoy such things, a well-made Grasshopper is a delectable cold-weather holiday treat.

So for this pre-holiday week, we are going to take a brief tour of Grasshoper recipes from older cocktail books. And then we are going to make an improved version that pares back the sweetness with adjusted proportions and the addition of some stronger booze.

Flips, Flipped

Over the last couple weeks, we have looked at various single-serve eggnogs. Eggnog is a subspecies of the flip, which is a cocktail with a whole egg. Eggnog adds cream or milk to the equation.

The Grasshopper, however, takes this idea and, er, flips it. It’s a dairy cocktail with cream—but no egg, like a Brandy Alexander.

To the heavy cream, the drink adds those two crème liqueurs, crème de cacao (chocolate) and crème de menthe (mint), or, perhaps a single liqueur that combines both mint and chocolate flavors.

One of the things I learned while researching this drink was that there is—or at least was—actually a bottle of chocolate mint liqueur called Grasshopper, which was, according to my 1971 copy of Playboy’s Host & Bar Book, was used to make Grasshopper cocktails. I can’t find evidence that this particular bottle is still made today, though I could certainly be overlooking something, but there are some chocolate-mint liqueurs on the market that I would imagine are similar. I can’t recommend them.

Instead, when making this drink, you should almost certainly use crème de cacao and crème de menthe from Tempus Fugit, which, along with Giffard, produces some of the finest single-flavor liqueurs on the market, and at fairly reasonable prices too.

Still, even those high-quality bottles result in a Grasshopper that is quite sweet, especially when the only tempering ingredient is cream.

That’s true of basically any halfway sensible ratio or proportion for combining them. And looking through old cocktail recipe books, it’s clear that bartenders have tried a lot of different specs.

Embury does not provide a recipe in his brief on the drink. However…

• That 70s era Playboy bar book I mentioned calls for equal parts of all three ingredients, as does David Wondrich’s write-up in the Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails.

• Ed Bergman’s Professional Skills of Bartending, a bar manual from the early 1980s, specifies 2 parts each for heavy cream and crème de menthe, and 1 part crème de cacao, making for a much more minty drink.

• My 60s era Time Life Foods of the World guide to Wine and Spirits calls for a quite particular ratio of 3 parts crème de cacao, 5 parts crème de menthe, and 1 part heavy cream.

• The good folks at Liquor.com, in contrast, call for a 2:1:1 ratio—with the cream getting the larger portion.

As you can see, there are a lot of different theories about how to balance the three core elements in this drink. Equal parts seems like the most standard, but if I have to pick one it’s the 2:1:1 ratio, which dials back the sweetness relative to the cream.

However, I don’t think any of these ratios really fixes the fundamental problem with this drink, which is that heavy cream plus two different types of flavored sugar-booze is cloyingly sweet. There’s nothing to offset or ground the sweet elements. It’s a drink without a foundation.

So we’ll have to give it one.

Staying on Brand(y)

For that, we will have to go back to Embury, and his note about the variation served with blackberry brandy.

Now, I don’t have any blackberry brandy, and I doubt many of you do either. But Wondrich’s Grasshopper entry in the Oxford Companion notes that some contemporary use Cognac, which, of course, is a French brandy.

And sure enough, it turns out that adding a strong, unsweetened spirit like Cognac considerably improves this drink. A basic equal parts ratio—say, ¾ ounce each, shaken over ice and strained into a coupe—for all four ingredients is a big step up. This gives you a fairly standard contemporary rendition of the Grasshopper.

It’s far from vile. But even still, it is quite sweet and quite minty and not precisely to my taste. And thus I wanted to tweak the ratio a little bit more.

Video Killed the Ratio Star?

As I have written before, the best way to think about tweaking a cocktail ratio is to imagine yourself standing at one of those giant audio mixing boards you see in recording studios (older ones, anyway, I know a lot of this stuff is done on screens now). You boost the elements you want more of, while reducing the flavors you find overpowering. You’re conducting an orchestra, and you’re looking for a pleasing chord.

What I wanted was a drink was stronger, less sweet, and less minty. So, starting from four equal parts of ¾ ounce, I pared back the crème de menthe to a half ounce, then nudged the Cognac up to a full ounce—and then, on another try, to an ounce and a half.

That came pretty close to what I was looking for.

• ½ ounce crème de menthe

• ¾ ounce crème de cacao

• ¾ ounce heavy cream

• 1 ½ ounce Cognac, such as Pierre Ferrand 1840

But I couldn’t get Embury’s mention of blackberry brandy out of my head. Like I said, I don’t have any at home, and I doubt many readers do either. Quite possibly none of you do.

Yes, you can still find it these days. But it’s fairly obscure stuff.

I do, however, keep a delicious fruit brandy in my regular rotation, and I suspect—and hope—that many readers do too: Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy, one of home bartending’s most underrated bottles. So I decided to swap that into the Cognac slot.

This worked even better than I anticipated. The apple flavor is distinct but subtle, and the 100-proof brandy helps keep the liqueur duo in check. It’s creamy but not overly so. The crème de cacao and crème de menthe fall in line, as the supporting players they were meant to be. It’s sweet, sure, but not too sweet. It might not have pleased Embury. But in no way is it “vile.”

This revised recipe is probably far enough from the core idea of a Grasshopper that I should give it a new name. But Embury tells us there’s a history of using fruit brandy to fix this drink. And it’s so close to the idealized version I have in my mind that I’m just going to (more or less) stick with the original moniker.

Apple Brandy Grasshopper

• ½ ounce crème de menthe

• ¾ ounce crème de cacao

• ¾ ounce heavy cream

• 1 ½ ounce Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker.

2. Add ice, then shake hard for about 15 seconds.

3. Strain into a glass. (You may want to double strain with a fine mesh strainer to remove all ice chips.)

4. Garnish with grated nutmeg, grated cinnamon and/or a cinnamon stick.

Further Modifications

The main element to adjust in this version of the drink is the base spirit.

In addition to apple brandy and Cognac, I had very good luck with a Bas Armagnac version, using Marie Duffau Napoleon, which is lower proof and subtler than Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy but grassier and earthier than most Cognacs.

You could almost certainly swap in other spirits too: I could imagine versions of this with dark rum, bourbon, Scotch, maybe even an aged Bols Genever if you’re feeling experimental.

To really deconstruct the drink, you’d need to hack away at the crème de menthe and cacao, perhaps by employing a minty Fernet-Menta, or a sweeter amaro like Averna in place of the chocolate. No doubt there’s some earthy Cynar-ized version, too. And I would bet someone could make a tasty drink using the shake-with-coffee beans trick we looked at last week, although at this point we’re talking about distant cousins of the Grasshopper.

The point of this particular column was to play around with the drink in opposition to Embury’s disgust, so I didn’t stray too far from the established spec. But if you’re making your own variation, there are no rules. Who cares about historical fidelity if it’s good?

Happy holidays, all.

The Big Gal and Little Cuz Are Learning to Share a Couch