A Sunny Afternoon Sipper
August's Cocktail of the Month features an intense tea and a bitter French aperitif that you'd be certain to enjoy after a bike ride on a river on a sunny afternoon
The Cocktail - Tea Time Trial
With as much mileage as espresso martinis are getting these days, I’ve been consistently surprised at how rare it is to see tea incorporated into cocktails. Then I realized that I haven’t written a recipe that incorporates tea in years (but I have before!), so I’m part of the problem. Be the change you want to see and all that…
So, with a goal of incorporating tea, a looming trip to Italy, and a great deal of professional bike race consumption over the last few weeks I’ve come up with a delicious cocktail that isn’t anything at all like an espresso martini but highlights each component well, especially the tea. It starts quite sweet, but finishes bone dry. You taste the must from the grappa, the bergomot from the tea, and an intense bitterness from Suze separately and together. I don’t always make drinks that would be at home on a good cocktail bar menu, but this is certainly one of them.
What You Have - Grappa, Orange Syrup
These play so nicely together that you could probably make a decent old fashioned with them - they don’t need much help to work. But, they can also take more of a back seat and support other flavors. So while you’ll get the flavors in this cocktail, they won’t be front-and-center like they were last month. Don’t worry - you’ll still get that grappa finish you’ve surely come to love.
What to Buy - Suze
Suze is so fun. It’s a rare European aperitif that isn’t wine-based in any way, and it’s been around forever. Suze is made from gentian root along with a ton of other botanicals that of course the brand doesn’t share. It’s bitter and floral, not dissimilar from more popular elderflower liqueurs but certainly less sweet. I also get a lot of lemon from it.
Suze debuted at the Paris World’s Fair, where it was, for some reason, overshadowed by a large tower. It gained popularity quickly among the European cognoscenti, being featured in a fun Picasso still life in 1912.
Not content to rest on their laurels, though, Suze also became an early premier sponsor of the Tour de France between the wars and the brand became almost synonymous with cycling. Tons of Suze imagery can be found beside cycling promotions, and even today that association seems to remain strong. And I’ll always gravitate towards brands that were part of that crazy era of professional cycling.
What to Make - Earl Grey Sun Tea
Sun Tea is to tea what Cold Brew is to coffee, except it’s still introduced to heat. That heat is just the natural heat of the sun, not any boiled water. To make sun tea, all you do is add tea bags to water in a container and put that container in the sun for a few hours (or less, if you live in Phoenix in the summer like me).
Like cold brew, this leads to a more gradual extraction of the tea into the water and generally lends itself to a stronger brew that can be helped by some dilution. My general ratio is 2 or 3 bags per quart of water depending on the strength of the tea I’m using. For this tea, I used 3 Earl Grey bags and 2 basic black tea bags for a 2-quart pitcher. It’s very strong, but very good.
The Earl Grey is important here because the key flavor we’re after for the cocktail is the bergamot. Bergamot is a small, bitter orange that’s probably an ancient cross between a very bitter orange and a sweeter lemon. As an oil, it adds a delicious citrus punch to pretty much anything, and that oil addition is what makes Earl Grey different than any old black tea. With the prolonged extraction here, you get a ton of that flavor in the resultant tea, and that’s what makes it work as a base for the cocktail.
The Recipe
The ratio is essentially one-to-one of tea and “everything else.” The ratio in “everything else” could easily be adjusted to your liking - add more syrup for a sweeter drink, less Suze if you don’t love the gentian bite, etc. But the one-to-one really works overall.
0.5 oz Orange Syrup
1 oz Grappa
1 oz Suze
2.5 oz Earl Grey Sun Tea
Add every ingredient into a shaker with ice and shake like crazy - much like with coffee, more aeration of the tea really helps here and develops a pretty foam as well. Strain it into a glass with ice and enjoy! You might find that you prefer the way the drink develops once the ice melts a bit too - there’s a lot here, so some more room to breathe isn’t a bad thing.