What If Your Mojito Was More Like a French 75?
A sparkling, bubbly, Champagne-topped Mojito riff with a delicious aged-rum base.
Links About Drinks
Fake ice! Mint preservation techniques! An interesting look at what drink stylists do to make cocktails look good for Instagram. For this newsletter, I obviously try to take photos that are more appealing rather than less, but I don’t go nearly this far. I certainly don’t use fake ice, and, well, sometimes the mint isn’t its best self. Rather, the drinks shown at the top of the newsletter are the actual drinks I make at my own house, for myself and for others, and all of the photos are taken on a three-year-old iPhone.
Aaron Goldfarb’s history of bourbon taters reads like a short, funny summary of the bourbon boom (and the looming kinda-sorta bust). The neck pour! LOL. That said: I still have a dozen or so bottles from Beast Masters, and I read Breaking Bourbon all the time.
If the hottest ingredient in cocktails this summer is soda, does that mean we’re just reinventing whiskey and Coke?
Death & Co. will give you $12 cocktails for life at any location if you invest. If I understand their investment tiers correctly, this benefit kicks in at $10,000.
I made another visit to The Baldwin Bar in Woburn, Massachusetts. It’s a Sichuan food and cocktail joint housed in an old mansion, and it’s one of my favorite places to drink in the Boston area. All the drinks we ordered were excellent, with the Luck of Lucien a particular highlight. Notably, several of our drinks came with miniature snacks—a paper cone filled with rich chocolate candies, a cup of ice topped with bites of ultra-fresh fruit—to complement the drinks. These edible add-ons are not full-on side dishes, but they’re not quite garnishes either. I've seen more and more of this drink-and-a-tiny-bite approach to food and drink pairings recently—it seems to have been popularized by Double Chicken Please—and when it’s executed well, as it was at Baldwin, I’ve really enjoyed it.
Slow Mo…(jito)
In last week’s newsletter, I questioned whether a Mojito really needs to be topped with soda water.
Sure, club soda adds a pleasant effervescence, giving the minty summer drink a bit of bubbly sparkle. But soda water also mutes and dilutes the flavors of the drink, watering down the core rum-lime-sugar-mint quartet.
I like both versions, and the less intense club soda option can be particularly appealing on a late summer afternoon when you want something that drinks easy. But if, in some third-act villain’s-master-plan-revealed type scenario, I was strapped to a chair and forced to choose permanently, I would have to admit that I prefer the strong, direct, arresting flavors of a no-soda version.
But what if you could add bubbly zip to a Mojito style drink without simply watering it down? What if you could add a new array of flavors, drying out the drink ever so slightly and giving it a bit of class and elegance?
What if, in other words, you made your Mojito more like a French 75?
That’s the premise of this week’s cocktail, one of the more successful and well-traveled new cocktails of the last quarter century. This is a drink you’ll find on cocktail menus all over the world, at hotel bars and fancy-pants restaurants, at sidewalk cafes and sticky-floored dives. And it’s surprisingly easy to make for a small group at home.