One Of the Best Cocktails I’ve Had All Year Is a Negroni Riff You Probably Can’t Make

What to do when you encounter a cocktail recipe that seems too difficult to make at home.

Our unofficial Negroni Month continues this week with a new cocktail that most readers probably haven’t encountered before. 

It’s the Rhythm Rug, a clever concoction from the fine folks at Death & Company: It’s a grassy, dry, piney, subtly bitter riff on the lesser-known Negroni cousin, the Old Pal. 

I try dozens and dozens of new-to-me cocktails every year, and this is one of the very best I’ve had in 2024. It perfectly straddles the line between novelty and comfort, surprise and satisfaction, cleverness and crushability.

There’s just one problem: You probably can’t make it at home. 

That’s not because it’s technically difficult to make. There are no elaborate infusions or production methods.

Instead, it’s because the required ingredients — Rhum J.M., Singani 63, Strega, dry vermouth, Antica Torino Amaro Della Sacra — are just too specific and too arcane.¹ 

Sure, if you’re a tiki geek you might have a bottle of Rhum J.M. And uless you’re a diehard Martini hater, you probably keep dry vermouth around, at least on occasion. 

But Singani 63 and Strega aren’t exactly must-haves for normie home bartenders. Even serious cocktail nerds might not keep them in stock all the time. 

Amaro Della Sacra, meanwhile, is quite obscure and difficult to find. I haven’t done a comprehensive survey, but I’m only aware of one store in the DC area that sometimes keeps it in stock. I only picked up a bottle on a whim last year because I’m an amaro fanatic. 

Yes, yes — I know that some readers of this newsletter have quite large, well-stocked home bars. 

Even still, I would not be surprised if there is not one single subscriber who already has all five ingredients necessary to make this particular drink. 

At minimum, I feel very confident in assuming that the vast majority of readers do not have the bottles already, and thanks to distribution issues, some readers would have a difficult time acquiring all of them even if they wanted to. 

So why am I devoting a newsletter to this seemingly impossible cocktail? 

For one thing, it’s delicious, and the more adventurous amongst you might seek out the relevant bottles, especially if you live in a good spirits market like New York or Washington, D.C. 

For another, it’s Negroni Month — this newsletter’s expanded celebration of Negroni Week — and this is a great, weird Negroni-esque drink that shows how far you can stretch the format. 

But mostly I’m featuring it because this drink captures a challenge that home bartenders face all the time. You’re paging or scrolling through cocktail recipes, and you discover a tantalizing, fascinating-on-paper recipe that you’d like to make, but you don’t have the ingredients, and you probably never will. 

Faced with this problem, you can either ignore it and keep searching for a recipe that’s easier to make — or you can break it down, learn from it, and put together a new drink using ingredients you already have. You can’t make the original drink, as it exists on paper. But you can put together something in its image, a sibling or cousin with much of the same character. 

That’s what we are going to do today. 

• First, we will look at how you get from the classic Negroni to the Old Pal to the Rhythm Rug. 

• Then, once we have established how the Rhythm Rug was constructed, we will use those principles to deconstruct it.

• Finally, with a little bit of friendly guidance from our robot pal ChatGPT, we’ll reconstruct a new drink along the same lines. 

To be extremely clear, we will not be making a 1:1 replica of the Rhythm Rug. The goal is not to make a drink that is indistinguishable from the original.

But we will be using its construction as the basis for designing a cocktail using ingredients from the 41 bottle bar, something that captures the spirit of the drink, the general vibe and sensibility, if not every quirky nuance. 

Familiar Form, Novel Elements

The Rhythm Rug has all the characteristics that have made Death and Company such a force in the world of cocktails. 

The second book from the bar chain, Cocktail Codex, was an extended argument for the idea that virtually all cocktail take one of six primary forms. So the bar’s cocktails tend to take the form of…

• A familiar drink structure

• Often with a split base (two “primary” ingredients) 

• That pairs two spirits in a surprising or unexpected way

• Plus a novel and/or hard to find ingredient, or perhaps two, often in a small portion, to accent the drink 

The prototypical Death & Co drink, then, is fundamentally something like a Manhattan or a Daquiri in structure, but with a bunch of weird, clever spirit swaps and an ingredient that even hardened spirits nerds might not be familiar with. 

That more or less sums up the Rhythm Rug, as you can see below. 

Rhythm Rug 

• 1¼ ounces Rhum J.M. VSOP rhum agricole

• ¼ ounce Singani 63  

• ¾ ounce Dolin dry vermouth

• ½ ounce Antica Torino Amaro Della Sacra 

• ½ teaspoon Strega liqueur 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. 

2. Add ice, then stir until chilled. 

3. Strain into a rocks glass over a single large piece of ice. 

4. Garnish with an orange peel. 

If you’re new to cocktails, a recipe like this probably looks pretty strange and intimidating. 

But if you break it down into more general components rather than specific ingredients, you can see that it’s it’s just a gussied up Old Pal. And the Old Pal is just a variation on the Negroni (or the Boulevardier) with whiskey and dry vermouth instead of gin and sweet vermouth, like so: 

Negroni → Old Pal 

BASE: Gin → whiskey

SWEETENER: Sweet vermouth → dry vermouth 

BITTERSWEET MODIFIER: Campari → Campari 

You can perform a similar sort of transformation/evolution to get from the Old Pal to the Rhythm Rug. 

It’s just one more evolutionary hop.

Old Pal → Rhythm Rug 

BASE: Rye whiskey → Rhum JM + Singani 63 

SWEETENER: dry vermouth → dry vermouth 

BITTERSWEET MODIFIER: Campari → Amaro Della Sacra + Strega 

See? It’s not so intimidating after all. 

It’s just a very fancy, very clever elaboration and complication of an old, simple cocktail idea. 

It is still a challenge to make, because you probably don’t have the ingredients. But now that you have some sense of how it works, you can start to put together a replacement. 

Recasting a Movie 

This is, as I have often said, an exercise in casting: Imagine you’re producing a remake of a movie, or putting on a new version of a play. 

But you don’t have access to most of the original actors. So your job is to find different actors — actors who are actually available — to play those parts. 

Only instead of casting actors, you’re casting bottles of booze.