The 12 Cocktails of Christmas, Day 10: ‘It’s Alive!’
Recipes inspired by global craft cocktail culture, shared this holiday season by Melissa Rayworth and Ted Anthony.
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This year, in lieu of the holiday card we didn’t have time to create, we welcome you to The 12 Cocktails of Christmas — a dozen recipes and thoughts on what makes them work. We’ll continue updating the top drink each day until we’ve reached a dozen (yes, we’ll get done right after Christmas, but our schedules have been pretty crazed with new job adventures, current job obligations, two teenagers, two cats — the list, just like yours, goes on).
Hope this brings you all some holiday cheer. Please do share these recipes with your friends and family, and please take a moment this year to raise a glass — no matter what it may hold — to one another and to all the adventures and good things ahead in 2020.
Happy holidays,
THE 10th COCKTAIL OF CHRISTMAS: ‘It’s Alive!’
Some nights, we just open our bar and throw things together to see what sticks. Sometimes, after trying this, we walk out onto our deck and throw the results over the side, never to be spoken of again (talkin’ to you, elderflower bloody Mary). But sometimes, an uncanny patchwork of ingredients best suited for other cocktails comes together like Frankenstein’s monster. This one did just that. Hence the name: “It’s Alive!”
Ted wanted to make a drink that enlisted the taste of pink peppercorns, a sweet spice he often uses in cooking. He thought it had cocktail-ingredient potential. So we ground up some of those and then took two things that were unlikely partners — grapefruit vodka and chili amaro, a spicy take on traditional Italian bitter liqueur — and tossed them together, thinking that the polar opposites might work together.
Turns out they do.
We added a bit of one of our home infusions — a tarragon and candied ginger vodka — to the proceedings to balance things out, then garnished it with crushed pink peppercorns at the very end. What emerged was a Frankenstein of a drink that started out tasting like summer and, by the end, had a decidedly wintry and sharp piquancy to it. We weren’t optimistic, necessarily, at the beginning. But we weren’t disappointed at the end. We offer it to you as a nice Christmas Eve cocktail for the parents to enjoy after all stockings are hung by the chimney with care.
Since this drink is a patchwork quilt, don’t be dissuaded if you aren’t infusing anything at home. Ginger liqueur, we suspect, will substitute perfectly for our tarragon-ginger vodka infusion, though you might want to cut the simple syrup a bit if you do that. And we’d be interested in your results if you substitute other amaros. Campari and Aperol are technically amaros, for example, and they might already be on your shelf. We’d love to see how they fare in this mixture, though you’ll lose the nice spicy finish that the chili amaro affords.
Finally, though this drink is fine in any glass, we chose to do it in half-full highball glasses with lots of ice, and sip it with a straw. This provided the lovely bonus of occasionally getting a gentle burst of sweet pink peppercorn taste when the pieces that we garnished the drink with came up through the straw.
‘IT’S ALIVE!’
3 oz. pink grapefruit vodka
1 1/2 oz chili amaro
3/4 oz tarragon/candied ginger-infused vodka (substitute ginger liqueur as you wish)
2 dashes tiki bitters
1/3 oz. lime juice
1/3 oz. simple syrup
8 pink peppercorns, crushed
2/3 egg white (optional, for frothiness)Shake all ingredients. Add ice and shake again. Strain into rocks glasses or coupe glasses, or pour over ice into highball glass with a straw (our preferred method). Serves two.
WHY WE LIKED THIS ONE: It’s tart. Though it contains some sweet ingredients, there’s nothing particularly sweet about this drink. The chili in the amaro announced itself without being overpowering and provided a comforting afterburn. Melissa spoke of a “fruity opening and a spicy finish.” We both agreed that it makes you sit up straight — hence, the name. Unlike yesterday’s Loopy Fruit, you are well aware that this is a grown-up drink with alcohol in it, and our choice of the highball glass — and the ice melting within — made this one feel mellower as you sipped through and the minutes passed. Like Henry Frankenstein with his creations, we look forward to mad-scientisting this with other amaros and herbal liqueurs to see what new life it produces.
Previous libations in this series:
- The First Cocktail of Christmas: “Opening Day”
- The Second Cocktail of Christmas: “Afternoon Delight”
- The Third Cocktail of Christmas: “Subourbon Oasis”
- The Fourth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Phipps Conservatory”
- The Fifth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Sour Spice”
- The Sixth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Dark Horse”
- The Seventh Cocktail of Christmas: “Pop Culture Books Night”
- The Eighth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Everything Bagel”
- The Ninth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Loopy Fruit”
- The entire story and collected cocktails.
The same motivation that led us to these drinks led Melissa to do these stories while we were living in Thailand. Check them out:
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©2019, Melissa Rayworth and Ted Anthony. All rights reserved.
