You Probably Aren’t Using Enough Raspberries in Your Cocktails
They are berry, berry delicious.
When you think of ingredients used to make cocktails, you probably think of bottles of liquor, bitters, syrups, or citrus juice. Maybe you’ve been reading this newsletter long enough that you think of salt.
What you probably don’t think of is fruit, specifically berries—and even more specifically raspberries.
But you should! Because raspberries—and raspberry-derived or raspberry-flavored ingredients—are delicious in cocktails.
Raspberries add a bright and tangy acidity to a mixed drink, as well as vivid coloration. They make your cocktails more interesting, more fun, and more enjoyable to look at. They’re inexpensive and easy to come by. They’re also quite versatile, playing well with everything from rye and cognac to rum, mezcal, tequila, and gin.
Raspberries, in short, are berry, berry good in boozy drinks.
Indeed, if you look through both historic and contemporary cocktails, you’ll find that raspberries are, if not exactly common, at least frequent fellow travelers in all sorts of libations.
Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book contains any number of raspberry-flavored cocktails, including the aptly named Raspberry Cocktail. There are old punch-style cocktails that use raspberries. There are boozy raspberry lemonades
If you’re looking for a more contemporary example, you can hardly do better than Dave Arnold’s utterly insane-sounding Sagittarius B2, a high-science libation designed to capture the rum-and-raspberry aroma of ethyl formate found in a particular gas cloud at the center of the galaxy.
Arguably, the most famous raspberry cocktail is the Clover Club, a frothy, eggy, raspberry-tinged gin sour that can be made with raspberry liqueur or homemade raspberry syrup. It’s a great drink, especially as summer approaches, and it’s a strong introduction to the delights of raspberries in cocktails.
But for this week’s newsletter, I want to move beyond the Clover Club with a pair of drinks that demonstrate the versatility of raspberries in cocktails. The first is an often-overlooked whiskey sour variation from cocktail history. The second is an original-to-this-newsletter stirred drink in the Negroni family. Folks, it’s a Cynar week.
Better yet, unlike the Clover Club, they don’t require you to make syrup or purchase a specific fruit liqueur. All you need to make them is a few raspberries from your local grocery store.
Just add a raspberry (or five)! It’s really that simple.
Berry and the Hendersons
The first drink on our raspberry journey is a century-old shaken cocktail that reads like a raspberry whiskey sour that has subtly been made just a little bit more complex.
That subtlety comes not only from the tangy raspberry but from the use of a split base of rye whiskey and cognac. Yes, even a hundred years ago, bartenders sometimes added interest to a drink by taking the base spirit and fractioning it out into multiple parts.
This is the drink that got me thinking about raspberries in cocktails, and the various tasty possibilities they afford.