COSMOPOLITAN DRINK VARIATIONS PLUS

COSMOPOLITAN DRINK VARIATIONS PLUS

LA’s Honeycut has employed a complicated housemade pomegranate grenadine-made with orange extract, plus malic and citric acids-in their makeover of the drink.

Of course, these variations are only drops in the vast pink ocean of contemporary Cosmo riffs. Using the sous vide method, he adds, “was in some ways a bit of an irreverent nod to Brooklyn food culture, but it also enabled us to showcase the flavors of the Meyer lemon in a way we couldn’t have achieved by simply adding lemon juice.” “We set out to make a drink that was a bit nostalgic and a bit playful,” Novick-Finder explains of his culinary-minded approach (which also employs tart, fresh cranberry juice in place of cranberry cocktail, plus dry Curaçao and pineapple gomme). As a base for his Brooklyn Cosmo, he swaps out the Absolut Citron for a citrusy homemade version made by combining vodka with lemon and Meyer lemon peels in a sous-vide machine. Read On →Īnother variation-one that offers an ironically complex play on the original sour template-comes from Jake Novick-Finder, the chef and owner of Brooklyn’s Gristmill. Sarah Baird on how low-brow is the new high-brow and why bartenders are so keen to let their hair down. The end result has a deep, concentrated raspberry color and appealing tartness.įrom slushies to test-tube shooters to once-banished '70s drinks, a number of craft bars are creating a whole new canon of ironic cocktails, many of which recall a simpler time in our boozing lives. His take on the drink, fittingly developed around Thanksgiving last year, employs a mix of cranberry sauce, cranberry juice and bitters, and splits the orange component between sweet and dry liqueurs ( dry Curaçao and Grand Marnier). “A lot of bartenders are going back to the drinks people thought of as… less serious, making them with more care and craft,” explains Omar Cormier, bar manager of San Antonio’s The Brooklynite, speaking about the Cosmo’s newfound appeal. put a vodka drink on their menu after a decade-long moratorium on the spirit) bartender enthusiasm for revamping retro drinks of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s and, most importantly, a new generation of bartenders and drinkers discovering the Cosmopolitan as something ripe for reinvention. This seems to be driven by a perfect storm: the slow destigmatization of vodka at craft cocktail bars (even Death & Co. Although Cosmo variations have been around almost as long as the drink itself (next year will mark 30 years of Toby Cecchini’s iconic version, made with Absolut Citron, Cointreau, Ocean Spray cranberry juice and lime), these imaginative and often tongue-in-cheek riffs have just started to pick up speed within the last couple of years.

Cosmopolitan drink variations