The Fruited Manhattan

An apricot-accented spin on the classic.

When you need a cocktail, you can always count on the Manhattan.

The Manhattan is reliable, durable, trustworthy, competent, and even, when especially well-made, a little bit classy. It’s a tired Tuesday night cocktail. It’s a put-on-your-finest Saturday night delight. 

These days I make a fair number of classic, no-frills Manhattans, but I mostly make them for my wife, who grew up in New York City and drank them even back in the days of Cosmos and craft beer.

For myself, however, I make Manhattan variations. For in addition to its other qualities, the Manhattan is one of the great cocktail templates. The three-ingredient recipe — a couple ounces of whiskey, an ounce or of sweet vermouth, several dashes of bitters — represents the root form of drinks ranging from the Vieux Carré to the Bobby Burns to the Brooklyn to my personal favorite Manhattan riff, the Bushwick. 

You can make Manhattan-style drinks with different base spirits, different modifiers, different bitters. But you can also add to the template, expanding the flavor profile instead of merely swapping out ingredients.

Indeed, one of the easiest and most interesting ways to modify the Manhattan is to include a bit of some other highly flavored liqueur — Benedictine, Cynar, even the nearly-impossible-to-obtain Amer Picon (or, more plausibly, one of its widely distributed substitutes). 

In the past, I have called this category of cocktail the Manhattan Plus.

This week, however, I want to take a closer look at one of the sub — or perhaps even sub-subcategory? — categories within the Manhattan Plus: the Fruited Manhattan. 

The Fruited Manhattan is exactly what it sounds like: a Manhattan that uses some sort of fruit liqueur to modify or expand the cocktail’s baseline flavor profile. This mini-category takes many forms, and we’ll look at a couple of different recipes today. But all of the recipes we’ll examine revolve around a single drink: Julie Reiner’s Slope, a Manhattan variation that showcases apricot liqueur. 

The Slope is a useful case study because multiple recipes have circulated online. Those recipes call for different base spirits and ratios/proportions.

The drink also uses Punt e Mes, a slightly bitter, almost amaro-like sweet vermouth that isn’t part of my usual three vermouth rotation, the inclusion of which might pose a slight complication for home bartenders with limited fridge space. 

So we’re going to start by looking at several different recipes for the Slope, noting the ways they depart from each other.

Then we’re going to go over each element in the drink and look at swaps and substitutions, showing how you can make a version of this cocktail even if you don’t have Punt e Mes on hand, and what your options are if you don’t have apricot liqueur handy.

And then, at the end, we’ll make an entirely new cocktail in the Fruited Manhattan style. There’s banana liqueur and Cynar, because of course there is.

Doctor (Your) Manhattan

The Slope is a Manhattan variation that combines whiskey, Punt e Mes vermouth, apricot liqueur and bitters. But compare recipes, and you’ll discover that the particulars are very much up for debate.