Is This Death & Co.’s Most Underrated Cocktail?

A gin-based tiki drink...with beer.

Many years ago, before the internet had fully reshaped the news business—when blogging was considered a secondary tributary for young whippersnappers, and writing online was thought of as a low-value backwater because print was obviously superior and eternal—I heard a journalist friend relay the idea that, at some point in the future, news would not come from anywhere in particular.

Sources, publications, magazine mastheads, news brands—these things would cease to matter. News—at least the big, important news—would just be in the air. Basic storylines would simply be known, through some sort of obscure cultural osmosis. People wouldn’t know exactly how they knew what was happening in the world. They would just…know.

At the time, this was a fairly novel theory of how news and information would transmit in the digital era, and it captured the way that information becomes almost omnipresent when untethered from physical objects like books, magazines, and newspapers.

One could argue about exactly how true this is with news—sources and sourcing still matter, if only because news does originate somewhere. Substacks, at least, still have definitive voices and brands. But it’s at least directionally correct.

And it’s certainly true with cocktails, which, like nearly all crafts and hobbies, have massively benefited from online information dissemination.

You might learn something from a particular web forum, Instagram account, YouTube channel, or even, perhaps, an idiosyncratic cocktail-obsessed Substack. But a lot of cocktail knowledge has seeped out into the wider world quasi-invisibly. It’s just…known. Somehow.

This is certainly true with the ideas, concepts, and recipes of the first Death & Co. book, Modern Classic Cocktails, which is one of the most influential books on mixed drinks published this century.

By now, the book’s recipes and concepts have become part of the atmosphere on planet cocktail. The novelties and obscurities contained within its pages—which initially seemed so daunting to so many—have become conventions and classics and accepted wisdom.

Just about every cocktail aficionado knows the Oaxaca Old Fashioned, the most famous drink in the book, and the Naked and Famous, which, all these years later, has been dubbed the drink of the summer. The Conference is rightfully understood to have played a key role in the explosion of “split-base” cocktails that combine multiple base spirits. The book boasts more than 500 recipes, most of them house originals, and you can find nearly all of them—perhaps literally all of them—online, sometimes with obsessive, painstaking, idiosyncratic, highly personal notes on ingredients, preparation, comps, and theory. Occasionally even beyond this newsletter.

Most of the recipes are organized by category, with multiple drinks listed on each page. But a few, like Phil Ward’s Oaxaca Old Fashioned, are given full-page features—little spotlights to highlight their importance.

Many of those spotlight drinks have traveled far and wide, becoming staples on cocktail menus across the country and inspiring new riffs or conceptual updates.

But there is one that hasn’t quite made the leap. And that’s the subject of this week’s newsletter.

It’s the Strange Brew, a tiki-ish, gin-based beer cocktail from bartender Thomas Waugh. Yes, you can find discussions of this drink online, and I turned up a mention of the drink in an old Thrillist article on Death & Co., celebrating the bar’s 10th anniversary.

But it’s not a drink that has obviously inspired waves of imitators or follow-ups. It’s not a drink that you regularly see on cocktail bar menus. It’s not a drink that otherwise cocktail-obsessed people talk about, really, or obsess over, or try to understand.

It’s not a drink that’s just…in the air.

In this week’s newsletter, I want to argue that it should be. Because it’s a great drink—strangely delicious, relatively easy to make at home, and somewhat uniquely balanced and structured.

And because it’s a juicy, crushable beer drink served over ice, it’s also fantastic on a hot summer day. And everyone on the East Coast is in for some very, very hot days this week.

So we are going to look at the recipe, break down how it works, and think about variations and substitutions.

And as we do, I’m going to try to classify this somewhat odd drink, because at heart, taxonomically, I think it is really, secretly, sneakily just a strange species of Jungle Bird. And since the bitter-tiki Jungle Bird is one of my all-time favorite cocktails, that’s a very good thing. We need more Jungle Birds!

Beer Science

In some ways, you can understand why this drink flummoxes some people—and why, perhaps as a result, it hasn’t passed into common knowledge. For one thing, it calls for pineapple juice, and the best way to make drinks with pineapple juice is to juice your own pineapple. (I promise it’s easier than it sounds.)

For another, it uses an ingredient that may be difficult to find—Green Flash IPA, a California beer whose parent company changed ownership a few years ago. I still have a couple of old bottles left that I bought specifically for making this drink. But that’s not really a solution. You can, however, use most any IPA—ideally an intense, hoppy, extra-bitter West Coast IPA.

But mostly, it’s just a head-scratching combination of ingredients and styles that doesn’t fit cleanly and neatly into any well-known category. Like I said—it’s a gin-and-beer-based kinda-sorta-tiki drink. Which is no one’s idea of…well, anything.

What do you make of a cocktail with all these ideas and elements stuffed together? Who is this drink even for?

Gin people tend to be Negroni and Martini nuts. Tiki heads have rum on the brain. And, aside from my pal Jacob Grier—who literally wrote a book on beer cocktails—I have never encountered anyone, online or in real life, who is really, really fanatical about beer cocktails. I’m not even sure Grier thinks of himself as a hardcore beer-cocktails guy these days. The last drink I had with him was a small sip of Cynar mixed with Fernet.

But the thing is, all of these types of drinks and categories are good. And this cocktail brings the sensibilities of all of them together, mixing the juicy, spicy sweetness of tiki with the floral bitterness of the Negroni and the effervescent crushability of a cocktail made with beer.