The Too Much Cynar Problem
When life gives you too much Cynar, make an orange-y, rich, bittersweet gin sour.
I would say it’s impossible to have too much Cynar. Cynar is weird. Cynar is wonderful. Cynar is incredibly versatile. I put it in everything — and I recommend that you do too.
How could one possibly have too much?
It’s hard to imagine — except that I have, in fact, read a brief but credible account of having too much Cynar.
In the Bartender’s Choice app, the excellent searchable cocktail recipe database from Attaboy founder Sam Ross, there’s a short note attached to a drink called “Too Soon?” (the question mark is part of the drink’s name).
Before we get to the note, let’s back up: The original New York City location of Attaboy, as many readers surely know, is located in the space that originally housed Sasha Petraske’s Milk & Honey, arguably the most influential and important cocktail bar of this century.
Ross worked at Milk & Honey and was mentored by Petraske; Attaboy carries on many of its predecessor’s ideas and traditions. It’s not the same bar, but it’s very much a successor.
So it’s no surprise that there are quite a few cocktails in Attaboy’s database that originated at Milk & Honey. Indeed, since Petraske passed away before he could finish his own cocktail book — it was eventually completed by his wife and collaborators — the app is one of the better documents of the Milk & Honey era.
Which brings me back to the Too Soon? The head note describing the drink’s origin says that years ago, the bar found itself with an extra case of liter bottles of Cynar. And Petraske gave instructions: Find a way to move those bottles quickly.
Both Attaboy and Milk & Honey are, rather famously, bars without menus. Although the bartenders only serve drinks that were vetted and approved in advance, customers do not order a specific drink from a published list. Instead, if you find yourself sitting at the bar, you describe what you want — boozy, shaken, bitter, light, gin, tropical, eggy, whatever — and the bartenders serve you something that fits the bill.
This gives the bartenders considerable latitude. Order something “stirred, bitter, and weird,” and you will probably end up with something in the Negroni family — but the exact composition will be up to the barkeep who is making your drink.
So after receiving Petraske’s instructions, the bar staff put together a bittersweet gin sour that uses a whole ounce of Cynar. You can imagine this drink being served to pretty much anyone who ordered something gin forward and shaken so long as they did not specify “but nothing too bitter” or “and also I despise Cynar.”
Frankly, you can imagine this drink going to a customer who was slightly resistant to bitter flavors, because although it obviously puts Cynar’s bitter backbone into the mix in a big way, it mitigates the bitterness, showing off the amaro’s semisweet and earthy side.
It also incorporates whole orange slices. The orange wheels give this drink a fruitier, more summer-friendly character. The fruit-forwardness also gives it a little bit of adjacency to both the lime-forward Gin & Tonic and the Mezcal & Mango & Tonic I wrote about recently.
So this week, we’re going to make the fruity, bittersweet, Cynar-heavy Too Soon? And we’re going to situate in the universe of easy, bitter-tinged gin sours like The Fitzgerald, as well as a similar drink that dates back to the 1920s. And then we’ll take a brief look at how to adapt this style to whatever bitter bottles you have on your own home bar.
Just Add Bitters?
At the beginning of last summer, we looked at Dale DeGroff’s Fitzgerald, which is basically a gin sour with the addition of Angostura Aromatic bitters. It’s a small change — just a few dashes — but, oh! oh!!!!! What a difference it makes.
Dasher-bottle bitters are quite strong, and they can radically change a cocktail’s flavor profile even in relatively tiny proportions. But as the Fitzgerald demonstrates, the results are frequently delicious.
When I make a Fitzgerald, the recipe looks like this: