The Case for Bénédictine

An herbal-sweet, shelf-stable liqueur found in a surprising number of cocktails.

Stocking a home bar is always a challenge. Sure, you probably have a bottle of bourbon or rye, a bottle of gin, and some vermouth in the fridge.¹ But after that, decisions become somewhat tougher. There are tricky tradeoffs that involve space, cost, and usage. 

The most difficult decisions involve modifiers — typically liqueurs or amari (essentially bittersweet liqueurs) that are primarily used to give cocktails distinctive flavors. Campari is a must if you like Negronis, and Luxardo Maraschino appears in a surprising number of classic cocktails. But after that, how many bottles of unusually flavored booze do you really want to keep on your bar? Green Chartreuse is delicious but expensive. Giffard and Tempus Fugit make whole lines of high-quality, uniquely flavored liqueurs — banana, chocolate, apricot, Pamplemousse, even a weirdly delicious piment chile liqueur. Yet even make-everything cocktail maniacs go through these bottles pretty slowly.² I am second to none in my admiration for banana liqueur, but I doubt I use more than a bottle a year. 

So today I want to make the case for one of the most useful, versatile, and all-around delicious modifiers: Bénédictine. 

Bénédictine was the sole non-water ingredient in last week’s Benny & Hot. That drink showed off the drink’s sweet-herbal-spice characteristics by amplifying the aromatics with hot water. But in most cases, Bénédictine is used as a modifier — an herbal-sweet addition that gives a cocktail gently sweet complexity. 

I don’t have survey data — although I’d really love to have a commission a poll about cocktail knowledge — but I would guess that the most well-known cocktail that uses Bénédictine is the Vieux Carre. In that drink, Bénédictine serves as an herbal-spiced “top” to a Manhattan that’s been rejiggered to use both rye and cognac. Frankly, it’s worth picking up a bottle of Bénédictine just to make a Vieux Carre, because when you make it right, it’s one of the best cocktails in the classics playbook — arguably even better than the Manhattan itself. And once you do that, you can make other Bénédictine-inflected drinks like the Bobby Burns. 

But today I want to argue that the primary template for using Bénédictine lies in another, slightly less well-known cocktail: the Monte Carlo. 

We looked at the Monte Carlo last year, but for those who are new to the drink, it’s a sort of midpoint between the Old Fashioned and the Manhattan that uses a half ounce of Bénédictine as the sweetener in a whiskey-based drink. It’s complex, satisfying, and incredibly easy to put together, with no homemade ingredients or difficult-to-source bottles.

Even better, once you know how to make it, you can use it as a template for making other similarly structured drinks. 

So today we’re going to look at Bénédictine’s backstory and properties. And then we’re going to look at two different easy-to-make, three-ingredient, stirred-and-boozy cocktails that use the same formula as the Monte Carlo. 

The Monk Liqueur That Probably Isn’t Made By Monks