LOL, It’s An Appletini
Bringing back the X-tini classic, in not-so-classic form.
This week, I returned to Josh Barro’s excellent podcast, Very Serious, for another great conversation about making cocktails at home. Topics include: organizing a home bar, Espresso Martinis and Appletinis, and where to start with non-alcoholic cocktails. Barro knows his drinks. He’s also a great interviewer who helps contain and channel my digressions. It’s a fun, funny, wide-ranging conversation, and I invite you to listen.
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Among my strongest beliefs, at least when it comes to cocktails, is that while not every popular cocktail is good, every popular cocktail contains a good idea. Cocktails that persist — drinks that are ordered for years or even decades, that become standards at bars across the country or even the world — do so for a reason.
The trick, then, for a maker and lover of drinks, is to discover that reason, to understand a drink’s fundamental appeal, and to find a way to emphasize that appeal — even if it means departing from the original recipe.
Hence, this week’s cocktail, the Appletini.
In its heyday, many years ago, the Appletini was a menu standard at chain bars and neighborhood joints alike. It spawned imitators and iterations galore: To this day, you can still find bars with “X-tini” menus selling all manner of fruity, flavored concoctions given the ‘tini label.
The Appletini, though, was the king of this category, the drink that all the other X-tinis aspired to be. And over time, it became a reference point, a symbol, a marker of a less serious and less tasty era of drinking, before the craft cocktail revolution came along and showed imbibers what’s what. The Appletini was an eye-roll of a drink — silly at best, trashy at worst.
But over time, the drink has made its way back to bars. This is partly a result of cocktail enthusiasts growing tired of the moody seriousness that held sway over the early years of the craft cocktail revolution. Drinking should be fun! And it’s partly because of the current enthusiasm for all things 90s-retro. Giant pants are back!1
But the return of the Appletini is also a byproduct of contemporary bartenders applying serious techniques and ingredients to seemingly unserious drinks. They’ve been trying to find the essential appeal of the Appletini.
Frankly, it’s not too hard to understand. It’s built right into the name, which, if nothing else, is a triumph of clear branding and marketing: People know what Martinis are. And they know what apples are. The Appletini was a drink that purported to combine the two.
I say purported because the drink had two problems. The first was that it wasn’t really a Martini. The second was that most versions contained no real apple at all.
The original drink was created during the Clinton administration at Lola’s in West Hollywood. It was a combination of vodka, inexpensive sour apple liqueur, and a bit of sour mix.2 And while Lola’s reportedly used Granny Smith apple slices as garnish, most versions of the drink served in other bars were totally fruit free.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. The original idea was good, even if the underlying drink was not. So. What if you made an Appletini that was…actually a Martini? And used some sort of fresh or high-quality apple element?
After surveying a number of modern twists on the Appletini and performing a number of experiments, I’ve figured out how to do just that.
As it turns out, it’s a relatively simple drink to make at home, with just four easy-to-procure ingredients.
To make it even easier, we’re going to batch this drink using an easily scaleable formula that produces a bottled drink that you can keep in your freezer and simply pull out and pour, meaning there’s no prep when you want a drink. It’s the batchable, adaptable, freezer-door Appletini you didn’t know you needed.
The Secret to Success Is to Start By Failing
Like I said, I’m far from the first person to try to spruce up the Appletini with modern techniques and ingredients. Punch published a whole article on “Rescuing the Appletini” all the way back in 2020. So this project has been going on for some time.
But many of the rescue attempts seem to me like either too much work for a home bartender or too much of a departure from the original idea. The signature recipe from the Punch article was a drink from (now sadly closed) high-concept New York bar Existing Conditions built out of clarified lime juice, blanc vermouth, blanche Calvados (a clear apple eau de vie/French apple brandy), and something called “shagbark hickory syrup,” which was apparently made from bark found in the bar owner’s back yard.
I was lucky enough to go to Existing Conditions during the few years it was open, so I have no doubt that this drink was delicious. But sorry, no. Just no. Even if you somehow could sneak into the owner’s backyard and acquire some of his special bark yourself, this is just not going to work at a home bar.