26 Aug Martini Week: St. Germain Martini Cocktail Recipe

Martini Week: St. Germain Martini

Our final martini of the week is another ingredient substitution. We’re going to tag in St. Germain for the vermouth. You’re probably familiar with St. Germain. Made from elderflower, it’s the delightfully pleasant, sweet and floral liqueur that we, like most any bartender, have used in a number of our recipes (here and here and here, for example). And here’s why: everything with St. Germain is an instant hit, especially–but by no means only–with the ladies.

Want to make a martini your girlfriend will like? Make this drink; your odds of success are very high.

We’ve actually posted this recipe before, just not on this blog. Are you familiar with Drizly? Say you discover that you’re out of something in your bar, a bottle of St. Germain, perhaps. Say also that, for some reason, you can’t currently drive to the liquor store to pick some up. Order it on Drizly, and a few minutes later that bottle of St. Germain will show up at your door. Amazing! Drizly features recipes on its site, in case you know you want to order something, but you just don’t know what; our St. Germain Martini and Reversed Manhattan are two of them.

By the way, if you’re not a St. Germain fan, this recipe works with whatever your favorite liqueur happens to be. We’ve used it once already on this site for a ginger martini.

Exchanging vermouth for a liqueur as we do in these flavored martinis makes for a simpler, more intense flavor; rather than the complex but subtle flavors involved in a vermouth, you get a lot of a single flavor (Beware: you also get a higher alcohol content; liqueurs have 2x or 3x vermouth’s alcohol. Sweeter doesn’t mean lighter!) We like to exaggerate the intensity of flavor in this style of martini by using the more neutral vodka, instead of the more complex gin that we would prefer in a standard martini (really, we do like gin a lot!).

St. Germain Martini Cocktail Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 oz vodka (a clean, simple mixing one)
• 1/2 oz St. Germain

Instructions

• Stir with ice.
• Strain.