Buzz of Delight

Cold Brew to Winter’s Rescue

It’s a wonderful age to be cocktail creative, for distillers continually come up with new things for you to play with. In Santa Barbara we have the good fortune to be the home of Cutler’s Artisan Spirits, and Ian Cutler has something delicious up his distilling sleeve: Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur.

Now, the problem with most coffee-tinged alcohol products is they seems to assume we all dump four tablespoons of sugar into our coffee mugs, and make their products too sickeningly sweet. Cutler doesn’t do that; as with the rest of his product line, everything is about balance and delivering what you most expect. This liqueur is delicious coffee first, every other note second at best.

So while it’s a perfect straight-sipper after dinner, it’s also fun to mix with. That brings us to this issue’s drink, The Buzz of Delight. Its inspiration—as is so much of mixology—is New Orleans, in particular the spectacle of Café Brûlot. As most famously popularized at the venerable Arnaud’s, Café Brûlot is as much theater as a drink, for it involves table service, flames and the blue glow of alcohol-powered coffee working its way down a long spiral of orange peel.

Hoping to honor those core flavors of coffee, brandy and orange, I came up with The Buzz of Delight. Why use coffee when you can use coffee liqueur? And why not use oranges we can pick in our very own yards?

As for brandy, while we don’t quite yet have any local (although Ian Cutler is working on an amazing project with Deborah Hall and truly old-vine Mission grapes to fix that, too), we can try yet another newish product that’s an ungainly mouthful: Francis Ford Coppola’s Maria Gaetana Agnesi 1799 Small Batch American Brandy. And I promise I didn’t pick it simply to help me get to my article’s word count. It’s part of a line of distilled spirits long-time winemaker Coppola is releasing all named after esteemed women; Agnesi was a mathematician ahead of her time who passed away in 1799—the smooth, easy-sipping brandy is just five years old.

Combine the three flavors and they all push and pull at each other’s boundaries: The coffee’s chocolate edges up a notch; the brandy’s vanilla sings a harmony; the orange’s acid keeps everything focused, but of course it’s sort of sweet, too. It does exactly what a three-ingredient drink is supposed to: make you reconsider the joys of geometry and the powers of triangles. And want another.

After all, the three-ingredient drink is having a moment; for just one proof check out the 2018 James Beard nominee 3-Ingredient Cocktails: An Opinionated Guide to the Most Enduring Drinks in the Cocktail Canon by Robert Simonson. Or have a Manhattan, Margarita or Martini, to just run through three famous, classic alliterative examples. Famed bartender Audrey Saunders put it this way: “The three-ingredient cocktail doesn’t lie.” Easy, pleasing, direct—everything one might want in an age that often thinks its bells need whistles.

That said, you can go with one more ingredient if you want to add even more depth and length: a few dashes of bitters. Here we again turn to New Orleans (OK, I might be a bit obsessed) and to the El Guapo Chicory-Pecan Bitters. These bitters bring out similar flavors in the Cold Brew and the Agnesi, making everything a bit more vivid. Especially on the nose.

We also get to use a garnish we’ve used before for the Spring 2017 GB Cocktail: flamed orange peels. You might need to practice this move before you do it for guests.

Slice off some very fresh orange peel; it is harder to do with an orange that’s been picked for a while as the skin gets drier and you need oils. If you get a bit of pith that’s OK; this trick is easier with a thicker piece of skin. While it’s sort of instinctual to try to squeeze it from long end to long end, instead hold the peel by its narrow sides. Light a flame between the peel and the drink’s surface, and squeeze. The oil in the peel will spark through your flame to the cocktail. The flamed citrus, which you do drop into the drink, mellows the twist a bit and adds a hint of smoke.

And while it’s nowhere near as spectacular as a Café Brûlot presentation at Arnaud’s, you’ll get to drinking quicker and save yourself a plane ticket.