Deck Your Halls

A Cocktail to Pine For

As many reasons as there are to make one desirous of drink around Christmas—family visits, kids getting greedy-cranky, the perils and delays of travel, family visits—that doesn’t make one stop from wanting to drink Christmas. And by that I mean the most pleasant scent of the season, that remarkably redolent tree we drag inside the house.

This issue helps you do just that, in one of the easiest to make cocktails I have written about during my Edible tenure, because it’s the holidays and you want to spend time chatting and noshing, not muddling and straining, or worse yet, planning ahead (Uncle Ned always shows up unannounced and thirsty). You do need a few special ingredients, but they are truly special, and it’s the time of year people might give you such things. So get to work on your wish list early, and be sure to be nice, not naughty. Then, after you make this cocktail, everyone will think you nice forever more.

The Deck Your Halls Cocktail has at its heart a very special drinkable landscape product from Oregon—Clear Creek Distillery’s Eau de Vie of Douglas Fir. Yep, this drink has Christmas tree in it. It wasn’t easy for Clear Creek’s distiller Stephen McCarthy to make this spirit, inspired by similar ones from Alsace, France.

And this is where your holiday gift list gets to expand, as you get to ask for Amy Stewart’s fascinating book The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World’s Greatest Drinks (Algonquin, 2013). The title should tell you all you need to know, but it’s very engagingly written, full of good recipes, and will make you look at everything that grows as eventually drinkable. Stewart offers an informative two-page chapter on what McCarthy went through to make this lovely pale green brandy. Turns out he actually distills right there in the woods, as the buds oxidize too quickly if you take them to a distillery. That’s commitment.

Of course, the reason people love gin, and the reason other (misguided) people hate gin, is that it tastes strongly of pine trees. That’s the juniper, the only ingredient gin must have in its botanicals that can grow an arm’s length long in today’s exploratory distilling culture (from citrus to rose to peach to Orris root, a type of iris). As the major ingredient in this drink, you want it to be a Christmas tree in a glass, so picking a gin that’s as juniper-y as you can get is the goal. I’m partial to Wisconsin’s organic Death’s Door, but even the gin-genre-bending floral Nolet’s Silver works, too. So make many of these cocktails and experiment—that’s what the holidays are for! (You’ve got days off.)

Needless to say the garnish, a fresh rosemary sprig—and who doesn’t have rosemary growing somewhere nearby?— also adds a sharp nose tickle of pine. But here’s your chance to give the kids something to do (they can “harvest” sprigs for you), give your drink a charming visual fillip and make people sing “O Tannenbaum” while sipping your drink.

Two of the other ingredients bring a different, delicious Christmas register—cranberries. A garland of popcorn and cranberries might have gone out with The Waltons, but it’s still very much a seasonal fruit, plus its blush color makes the drink an enticing pale Christmas red. Cranberry shrub can be had from Shrub & Co, and the vinegar charge—the heart of all shrub recipes, which go back to colonial days, and that somehow seems even more holiday appropriate—adds a depth not every drink can reach. Even better, the Shrub & Co. cranberry shrub has more Douglas fir in it, so you get another register of pine, too.

Given there’s quadruple pine in the gin, eau de vie, shrub and rosemary, it’s worth going twice with the cranberry (although you can leave the bitters out if you want to save a few dollars). Bitters give the drink one more angle of flavor, and Fee Brothers makes a relatively inexpensive cranberry, especially given how little you use per cocktail. Plus, Fee Brothers were one of the first companies to revive artisanal bitters beyond Angostura’s back in the early 1990s, so they’re a fine company to support given the holidays are all about traditions.

Editor’s Note: Shrub & Co is no longer in business.