17 Aug The Granate State Cocktail Recipe
The Granate State Cocktail
After yesterday’s post, we have a lot of very tasty, very fresh, very inexpensive grenadine left over.
Before adding our vodka to the grenadine, as Annalaura suggests for preservation, we thought we’d make a couple more cocktails. Today’s makes use of another new arrival on our shelves: Wigle Whiskey’s latest seasonal release. As we’ve mentioned, our friends at Wigle, though they’re a distillery, like to offer seasonal releases, as brewers do. Wigle makes a genever, a Dutch-style, intense, malty relative to gin. Recently, they’ve been on a kick of aging their genever in used barrels and releasing those aged genevers as their seasonal releases. We’re fans. Aging gin or genever does an amazing trick: it mellows the spirit, while at the same time drawing out some elements of the original herb mix, and bringing in new characteristics from the barrels as well. Barrel-rested gins are simultaneously less intense and more complex than those not aged. Besides, aging is a great use of a barrel that’s just sitting around.
Last season, Wigle offered a truly excellent tequila barrel genever. This season, they released one aged in apple brandy barrels. The traces of apple are smaller than we would have thought. Johnny Gin still has that mellow quality we’d hope for from an aged gin/genever, and–to our tongues at least–for whatever reason, the rye from their multi-grain mash comes out in a stronger, attractive way. We thought it would serve as a great base for a grenadine highball.
The Granate State Cocktail Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 oz Wigle Johnny Gin (or another barrel-rested gin, if you can’t get a hold of Johnny. Or a nice gin if you can’t find an aged one)
- 1/2 oz grenadine
- 1 dash aromatic bitters
- 4 oz club soda
Instructions
- Combine all but the club soda in a highball glass.
- Add ice to near the top of the glass.
- Float club soda on top.
