Cocktails to toast the change of season
The calendar says it’s still summer, but customers are already on Rachael Jones’s case about apple drinks.
“The way that we structure our cocktail menu,” she said, “is we change it four times a year, seasonally. But, people are already asking me about fall drinks. I had someone on Sunday like, ‘Do you have apple cider yet?’ I’m like, ‘It is a hundred degrees outside!’ It’s still going to be patio season for at least another month, hopefully.”
Spice it up
One of Jones’s responsibilities at the Firefly Bistro in Manchester is developing seasonal bar menus. She said that earlier in the summer, when the weather was oppressively hot, the focus was on light, spritzer-y drinks with a lot of citrus.
“When we introduce the fall menu, there are some items that definitely lean into the pumpkin and the apple cider,” Jones said, but this end-of-summer/not-quite-autumn period lets her staff play with drink specials that have more rounded flavors.
“We have a couple of fun items — we make a fun Sarsaparilla Old-Fashioned, for instance.That’s awesome for cooler weather — you get your bourbon with a little bit of that sarsaparilla flavor, almost like a root beer flavor. Because it’s an old-fashioned, it’s made in a rocks glass. We make a Madagascar vanilla bean simple syrup, and use that as the sweetener, and then a little bit of sarsaparilla bitters, and it’s perfect for patio sipping, but it is a darker liquor, so that helps ease into the cooler nights, for sure.”
Bengali Mule
adapted from Firefly’s concept
2 ounces rye whiskey
¾ ounce garam masala syrup (see below)
1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
3 ounces ginger beer
2 ounces very bubbly club soda
Mix rye, syrup and lime juice with ice in a mixing glass. Stir thoroughly.
Add ginger beer and club soda. Stir gently to keep the carbonation intact.
Strain over ice.
Traditionally, all mules are served in a copper cup, but feel free to use a Collins glass.
Garam Masala Syrup
1 cup (198 g) granulated sugar
1 cup (227 g) water
1 Tablespoon ground garam masala – This could be whatever curry powder you have on hand, but let’s face it; you have no idea how long you’ve had that. Most whole spices should be replaced once a year, but ground spices and spice mixes go stale much more quickly and are really only good for six months or so. This will be a good excuse for you to buy some fresh curry spices. The pre-ground stuff is fine for this application, but if you decide you want to go a step further, buy a bag of whole garam masala spices, toast them in a dry pan when you want them, and grind them yourself.
Heat all three ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Let the mixture boil for 30 seconds or so, to make certain that the sugar has gone completely into solution, then remove from the heat. Let the mixture steep for 20 to 30 minutes, then strain it, and store it in your refrigerator for a couple of weeks.
Jones said another of her favorite drinks during this shoulder season between summer and fall is called a Bengali Mule. “That one has a spicier rye whiskey as the base,” she said. ”And then we’re using a garam masala simple syrup. So if you’re familiar with garam masala, it’s similar to chai spice, but it has a few more savory elements like cumin and coriander in there as well. That’s a good bridge cocktail going into the fall.”
It’s important to listen to the customers when she’s designing a menu, Jones said, but that doesn’t always help when she’s planning a month or more in advance.
“Our fall menu will start just after Labor Day,” she said, “and then our winter menu starts just after Thanksgiving. It’s not necessarily what customers want right now, but it’s what they’ll want in a month.”
“One of the items coming up on the fall menu that would be really nice right now,” Jones said, “is a late summer bridge drink we call The Golden Hour. It’s sort of modeled off of a classic Gold Rush. So that cocktail is just a basic bourbon, with a honey and lemon base. For this, we use a lighter bourbon with a strawberry amaro. That can be hard to get hold of, but it has a really nice strawberry flavor with balanced bitter notes of [an Italian bitter liqueur], and then we’re infusing honey with fresh sage and adding lemon juice, so it gets a little bit of savoryness. It’s perfect for a cooler night.”
Fruits of early fall
For Christine Hepner, the lead bartender at Mesozoic Tiki Bar in Nashua, finding the best drinks for this time of year was rolled into the bigger job of coming up with the cocktail list for the new bar, which opened less than a month ago.
“Fortunately,” she said, “with tiki drinks, it’s an all-year thing. They’re always a good choice. Once we turn into winter, we’ll add some martinis to the menu that might have a heavier base and aren’t a twist on a tiki classic.”
Bar co-owner Aaron Shelton agreed but said that the fruit-forward flavors in most tiki cocktails make them very well suited for the end of summer.
“With a tiki drink,” he said, “you want a cocktail that allows you to escape reality, so you feel like you’re on vacation. Tiki balances tropical fruit flavors, but also with a particular rum.”
Or more than one rum. Hepner pointed out that rums cover a spectrum of flavors.
“Some rums carry a lot of caramel flavors,” she said, “and that’s what you’ll taste. With others you’ll taste a lot of allspice and some of the very Caribbean spices that aren’t very native to our area. The lighter rums will taste a lot different than a darker rum, where you’ll get more of those caramel notes or that clovey kind of taste within them. So they’re not all the same. Captain Morgan’s very different from Smith & Cross.”
“It can be surprisingly complicated,” Shelton added. “Two rums might have the same color profile but completely different flavor profile. Some of them have a musky, ‘funky’
flavor that we might balance with a lighter, sweeter rum.”
Hepner said her personal recommendation for a late summer cocktail is a classic mai tai. “I love a good mai tai,” she said. “And making one well doesn’t happen by accident. I’ve had some pretty bad mai tais. Ours, though, are phenomenal.”
Hepner said another drink for late summer is one of Mesozoic’s recipes.
“It’s called the Clever Girl,” she said. ”We’ve gotten wonderful feedback on it. It has prosecco, vodka and elderflower liqueur. It’s super-refreshing and has a fruit punch ice sphere. The presentation is gorgeous, as well as the flavor.”
Down the street at CodeX B.A.R., the bartenders work under aliases.
Rusty (the one with red hair) and Stretch (the tall one) said late summer is the best time to focus on fresh summer fruits in their cocktails.
“It’s an interesting time of year, cocktail-wise,” Stretch said. “At the end of the summer, for me, what’s most exciting is blueberry season. They just came in. I just got my blueberry syrup all ready to go, today. I’m all about just taking classic cocktails and blueberry-ifying them; that’s really fun for me. This is the time of year when you get to use a lot of fresh, local fruit. Earlier in the summer, I love using strawberries — going to the farm, picking those, and getting the really red strawberries. But by the end of the summer we move into things like stone fruit, as those come into season, cherries, blueberries, peaches, and even figs. We have a fig vodka that we infused that we’re going to be using very soon. We’re just sitting on that until we have a perfect recipe to use it in.”
Rusty agreed that blueberries are a great cocktail ingredient for the late summer, because of their versatility.
“Mint, basil, thyme — blueberry is a flavor that goes great with all these herby green things. The seasons are fun, especially the in-betweens for me. The super-savory flavors you get in winter, versus the super-fruity, super-cold, crushable, summer stuff. I like the in-between stuff. Right now it’s still fairly hot during the day, and using a lot of these ingredients is really refreshing. And of course it’s the perfect time of year for tiki drinks.”
A classic mai tai
¾ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
½ ounce fruit syrup – you can absolutely make your own from fresh fruit and sugar, but in an emergency the juice from a can of fruit cocktail can work, too
¼ ounce orgeat (almond syrup)
½ ounce dry Curacao
2 ounces dark, aged rum – Pusser’s is a good choice
Combine all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker. Shake enthusiastically, until you hear the ice start to break into tiny shards.
Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with a tropical flower or a tiny paper umbrella
Fruity and sweet, but not too sweet, with a sophisticated rummy hit at the end, this is an excellent way to see the summer off and wish it well.
Gateway flavors
Jill Barnett is the bar manager at Lovejoy in Milford. She said a summer cocktail ingredient that doesn’t get enough attention is rhubarb.
“Rhubarb’s good,” she said. “I had a rhubarb drink once called Rhubarb’s Drag Race. (Naming cocktails is a big challenge, but super-fun when you find a really good one.)”
Barnett said that by late summer, cooler nights mean she can use flavors with more body than during the hottest part of the summer.
Tomato Spritz
Courtesy Krista Fisher, Local Street Eats
1 ounce botanical gin – Fisher said she likes this with an Irish gunpowder gin
¼ ounce dry vermouth
1 ounce tomato water, made from muddling fresh tomatoes – Fisher suggests cherry tomatoes
¼ ounce tomato shrub (see below)
Prosecco or club soda to top
Serve over ice in a wine glass or a tall Collins glass, garnished with a cherry tomato and fresh dill.
Tomato Shrub
¾ cup halved cherry tomatoes
¾ cup granulated sugar
3 ounces dry rose wine
¾ ounce red wine vinegar
Cook in a saucepan over low heat until the sugar has dissolved and the cherry tomatoes are soft, then puree and strain once it has cooled.
“I think I tend to use orange juice a lot more at the end,” she said, adding that it isn’t too early to start using warmer fall spices. “At this time, pretty much every year, I’ll usually make a big batch of allspice dram, and throw that in some cocktails for that fall flavor. Even if you just add a little bit to a drink, it gives you a great flavor.”
(Jill Barnett on making allspice dram from scratch: “You can just get like a spice grinder — I used a mortar and pestle for a while, but that’s tough. You grind up the allspice berries and infuse it into a light rum, like Bacardi, and just infuse it for a week. After a week, you add however many cinnamon sticks you want for the size of the batch, then let it sit for another day or two. Then you just strain it and mix it half-and-half with a rich simple syrup [two parts sugar to one part water] to make it into a liqueur. If you look hard enough, you can find it and buy it, but it’s always more cost-effective to just make it yourself.”)
One of the things that makes allspice such a good gateway flavor between summer and fall cocktails, Barnett said, is that it’s a classic ingredient in tropical drinks, “but allspice kind of reminds people of cloves and other spices that go well with apples. I used it with an apple shrub — I made an apple-cinnamon shrub, then mixed it with tequila and lemon. It’s super-easy, but people just found it a really tasty combination. That’s my kind of drinks — they’re not always the most complex, but I think that I prefer them to be easy to make, but also balanced and yummy.”
A shrub is a sweet-and-tart syrup, usually made from fresh fruit, sugar and vinegar.
Still sipping in summer
“I definitely try not to rush summer,” Krista Fisher said, “especially in New England. I feel like we really want to hang onto it for as long as possible. So I definitely don’t jump right into the fall flavors right away, but there is that sort of in-between time right now, where we’re starting to get away from watermelon-flavored things and moving into other flavors that aren’t quite fall flavors yet.”
Fisher is the bar manager at Local Street Eats in Nashua. She, too, is a fan of end-of-summer blueberry cocktails. “Because all the produce around here is so fresh,” she said. “But also I think a huge trend right now is more savory cocktails. It’s tomato season for sure. I don’t personally grow them, but my mother-in-law brings them to me, my aunts — everyone’s bringing tomatoes to me. I remember thinking about it last year, toward the end of summer, about staying in that spritz category but maybe moving to a savory spritz, and using tomato as a fruit as opposed to just a vegetable. So something like a tomato with dry vermouth and prosecco and lemon juice is really refreshing, but not that sweet cocktail you feel like in June. Nothing beats an heirloom tomato fresh-picked, you know?”
Fisher says that because gardens are at their peak right now she takes a lot of inspiration from what is at its freshest and most flavorful: “I’m doing blueberry-basil lemonades right now, and using more herbs that are fresh from the garden.” At this time of year, she said, that is the flavor of abundance. “We incorporate dill a lot of the time,” she said. “We have a house-made brine, and the fresher the herbs the better. So I’m a big fan of dill. We just did a Mediterranean martini. It was a really simple gin martini, but jazzing it up with those things like a feta-stuffed olive, fresh lemon peels, and then fresh dill. It’s just so aromatic when you get to work with fresher herbs and ingredients like that.”
Blueberry Basil Mojito
inspired by CodeX B.A.R.
Several fresh basil leaves – this will vary depending on your type of basil and how much you like it.
Tiny pinch of coarse sugar
2 ounces white or silver rum
¾ ounce blueberry syrup (see below)
1 cup crushed ice
5-6 ounces extra bubbly club soda
In the bottom of a pint glass or a Collins glass, muddle the basil leaves and the sugar. You don’t want to take it completely to the paste stage — you want to still be able to identify bits of leaves — but let it know who’s boss.
Add the rum, stir thoroughly, then walk away for a few minutes to let the alcohol strip away some of the flavors in the basil that are not water-soluble.
Upon returning, add the rest of the ingredients, and stir with a long-handled bar spoon. Serve in the glass you mixed it in, and garnish with a couple small basil leaves. Offer your guest a straw, which might be the most civilized way to drink a mojito.
Blueberry Syrup
An equal amount, by weight, of fresh or frozen blueberries and sugar. Even if you have access to super-fresh, flavorful berries, freeze them. Ice crystals will poke holes in the blueberry cells and help syrup-ify them.
Juice of half a lemon
In a small saucepan, over medium-low heat, cook the berries and sugar down into a syrup, stirring often. You will be surprised how much liquid the frozen berries will release. Mash the berries from time to time with the back of a spoon or even a potato masher. Bring the mixture to a boil to make certain the sugar has completely dissolved.
Remove from the heat, and stir in the lemon juice, then leave everything to sit and get to know each other for half an hour or so, while it cools. Then strain the syrup and store it in your refrigerator for your cocktail and pancake needs for up to a month. Eat the leftover blueberry conserve on a piece of sourdough toast with too much butter.
This is the time of year, Fisher said, when spritzes start to get a little backbone to them.
“We’re kind of getting to more wine-forward spritzes,” she said. “Even if you’re still keeping it a little bit light, red wine is kind of coming back into the scene of the season. People are ready to put on a little bit more flavor and not just focusing on [drinks] that aren’t just about keeping you refreshed.”
There are subtle signs in late summer drinks, Fisher said, of sweater-weather drinks from later in the year, if you know to look for them.
“There are little ways they creep in,” she said. “So, this might not be full-blown Manhattan season yet, but maybe something like a whiskey sour with maple kind of eases us into it — still lemony and refreshing, but with those pre-fall flavors.”
Summer-to-fall cocktail makers
Firefly Bistro and Bar (22 Concord St., Manchester, 935-9740, fireflynh.com) is open Monday through Friday, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., with brunch hours on Saturday and Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday dinner from 4 to 9 p.m., and Sunday dinner from 4 to 8 p.m.
Mesozoic Tiki Bar & Lounge (97 Main St., Nashua, 204-5236, mesozoictiki.com) is open Wednesday and Thursday, from 4 to 10 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, from 4 to 11 p.m.
CodeX B.A.R. (29 Main St., Nashua) is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 5 p.m. to midnight
Lovejoy Restaurant (40 Nashua St., Milford, 554-8430, lovejoynh.com) is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 5 to 9 p.m.
Local Street Eats (112 W. Pearl St., Nashua, 402-4435, local-streeteats.com) is open Tuesday through Thursday, from 4 to 9 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, from 4 to 11 p.m.
Featured photo: Gluten-free loaves at Dishon Bakery. Photo by John Fladd.