Santa Barbara Sangaree

Porter Packs a Punch

I’m going to have to ask you to sit down. You see, I’m going to tell you to put ice in your beer. I’m going to tell you to make a cocktail without any spirits in it. And I’m going to have you make a sherbet, but I don’t mean a frozen fruit mixture.

But first I’m going to have to tell you the story about an old concoction with a misleading name, the sangaree. Sure, it sounds like sangria, but that drink wasn’t invented until the early 1960s and took the U.S. by fruity storm at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.

The history of the sangaree, on the other hand, goes back centuries. We can join the story with famed mixologist Professor Jerry Thomas, who in his How to Mix Drinks or The Bon Vivant’s Companion, right between the Slings and Skins (cocktails simply had better names in the 19th century), offers a section of sangarees, a kind of punch made with different bases: port wine, sherry, brandy, gin, ale or porter.

Enter The Dead Rabbit, winner of the World’s Best Cocktail Bar Award from Tales of the Cocktail in 2015. Even better for those of us who don’t live in Uber-ing distance of lower Manhattan, the bar’s The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual won Tales’ Best Bartending/Cocktail Book 2016 award. And so we turn to them for inspiration, and to see if what sounds sort of odd really works. (You know how some recipe books seem more for inspiration and contemplation than actual athome creation.)

While the recipe only has four ingredients and two garnishes, two of those four ingredients require you to do some advance work, for just like a food recipe, the secret is a layering of flavors. Porter lends itself to such culinary magic as it’s so deep and wide. Why not start with one of Santa Barbara’s best, Telegraph Brewing’s Stock Porter? Their description nails it: “A tantalizing combination of coffee, vanilla and chocolate aromas married to a fruity, refreshing acidity.”

If we take one of the origin stories for porter at its word—that the style was drunk by hard laborers to give them sustenance through the day—we can see why it’s a fine summer quaffer: It’s not really heavy or too potent at 5.7% ABV. Nothing has changed since Thomas Mortimer wrote in 1810 in a General Dictionary of Commerce, Trade and Manufactures, “It is a wholesome, cooling and at the same time nutritive beverage.”

The tricky part is making a sherbet, a word more confusing than sangaree given what comes to mind now is something more like sorbet. Just think of sherbet as an advanced simple syrup, and that’s a bar basic. Yes, you start with something that sounds like a ritual priests used to do before Vatican II, whip up an oleo-saccharum, but that’s just peeled lemons and sugar and some elbow grease. What makes a sherbet so much richer than a simple syrup is you use fruit juice and not water as the base. Given that Santa Barbara seems a heaven of lemons, adding this flavor to the local porter seems particularly fitting. Not to mention delicious—talk about underlining the acidity!

The mace tincture is particularly easy to put together, once you find mace, of course. It lost the popularity battle with its cousin nutmeg, partially because it’s more expensive. While both come from the evergreen tree Myristica fragrans, nutmeg is the pit of the tree’s fruit and mace is the lacy covering of the seed—you get a lot more pit than aril per seed. Its flavor is subtler and more suggestive than nutmeg (and you’ll grate some of that for a sensory blast as a garnish anyway). And while you generally can only buy mace powdered, try to hunt down strips you can grind fresh, as it loses its kick quickly. But the powdered will do in a pinch.