The 12 Cocktails of Christmas, Day Two: ‘Afternoon Delight’
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. It debuts tonight (Dec. 15) and 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 SECOND COCKTAIL OF CHRISTMAS: `Afternoon Delight’
Our second installment is a drink that celebrates the complex flavors of a perfectly steeped cup of loose-leaf tea. Between her English/Irish background and six years in Asia, Melissa adores tea almost as much as she adores Ted. He created this drink for her to combine the zen pleasure of an afternoon cup of tea with the refreshing and cooling citrus bite of lime juice and gin.
It contains two ingredients you may not have on hand right now:
One is gin that Ted infused with jasmine tea. Single-ingredient infusions are a quick and easy process, especially when using something like tea leaves, and would be a good choice if you’d like to try infusing liquor for the first time. Simply take a bottle of American-style gin (we’ve had good luck with brands like Aviation or Death’s Door, which have more of a floral undertone and less juniper, unlike their drier English counterparts) and pour it into a large mixing bowl or an oversized Mason jar.
Add a couple of small handfuls of Chinese jasmine green tea and allow it to steep for up to an hour. If you want a stronger tea flavor, steep the gin for a maximum of 90 minutes (more than that and it will begin to taste too bitter). Then strain the gin into another bowl and pour back into its original bottle through a funnel.
The other uncommon ingredient is Gyokuro Tea Shochu, a spirit made from rice wine and green tea from southern Japan. If you don’t feel like buying this (though it’s a great ingredient in many possible drinks), you can infuse a neutral-tasting basic vodka or sake with Japanese green tea leaves (not jasmine).
‘AFTERNOON DELIGHT’
3 oz. jasmine tea-infused gin
1.5 oz. Pama pomegranate liqueur
.75 oz. Gyokuro Tea Shochu
1.5 oz. turbinado simple syrup
5 dashes orange bitters
1/3 oz. Key lime juice
one half egg whiteShake the seven ingredients without ice (“dry shake”), then add ice and shake again. Strain into rocks glasses over one large ice cube and top with two dashes of aromatic bitters. Makes two.
(As below, the egg white is a valuable for giving this drink its frothy, barroom texture. But our vegan friends are welcome to omit the egg white.)
WHY WE LIKED THIS ONE: We worked on the balance of this concoction to make sure it had the refreshing brightness of a summer drink, with a warm finish of good tea. The slight graininess of the rice wine adds a nice note of complexity, and pomegranate liqueur furnishes tartness. This is what Twisted Tea dreams about being when it grows up and lets its sweetness take a backseat to an edgier vibe.
Previous libations in this series:
- The First Cocktail of Christmas: “Opening Day.”
- 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:
Welcome to Breadcrumbs, our publication and private storytelling service. We’re here to celebrate the stories of your life and ensure that they echo for generations to come. We work with you to elevate milestone moments, teasing out meaningful details. Using our decades of journalism experience and our creative talent, we battle the inevitable disappearance of memories that once seemed indelible. Our mission is to create permanent keepsakes in any form that suits you, from hard-cover books and personal magazines to pieces of home decor and art to one-of-a-kind projects we make or guide you through creating.
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©2019, Melissa Rayworth and Ted Anthony. All rights reserved.
