It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time
You should learn to forget, your first lessons's tonight...
It’s been…one of those stretches. I don’t know what it is, you know when things are good, but also just there’s the crushing burden of navigating life in these very weird times? Yeah, it’s been like that. It’s just been…a lot recently, everything in my life seems to be firing on all cylinders and this, this is the escape valve right now, a nice place to muse and safely think about little things while trying to swat away any and all suggestions I turn it into more of a hustle. I have a long to-do list (who doesn’t though?) because we all have too much to do, and making drinks, like baking, like cooking, for me, these serve as fun places where I don’t really think about all the rest. In the moment, trying to figure out the right levels, wondering what will happen if you put some Créme de Noyaux in instead of apricot liqueur, idk…there is something comforting about the small stakes instead of thinking about the crushing morality of which streaming service to use when most of them suck, or where your life is going, or exactly how to juggle all these commitments as a hyper (over?) engaged individual. Perhaps it’s just in choosing, in having control over something minor, in something that, if it doesn’t work, you can just do again though it may take time and money to do it right, it is not that much of either when it’s just a cocktail that didn’t work.
In that mindset, I was thinking about some cocktails I hadn’t made at home/had in a while, which led me to a Greenpoint, a riff on a Brooklyn, itself a riff on a Manhattan (see what they did there?). The Greenpoint does what it does through the addition of one of my favorite things to play with, Yellow Chartreuse, but since getting a Julep strainer, I’ve just been playing more with long-stirred stuff.
So I was sipping on a Greenpoint thinking to myself, how do I bring this back into a space that is more like what I do around here. And by “what I do around here” I mean, how do I add rum to this? In case you didn’t bother clicking into the link, here’s a Greenpoint, quickly, to make sure we are on the same page:
2 oz rye whiskey
.5 oz sweet vermouth
.5 oz yellow Chartreuse
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 dash orange bitters
My rye of choice, in case you are new here, tends to be Rittenhouse, at least for home mixing (it is unbeatable at that price point imo). And the sweet vermouth I’ve been using recently is Cocchi Torino. My orange bitters that I’ve been going to the most right now are Scrappy’s if you are deeply curious.
So…what is the first step here? V1 was a couple simple substitutions. First, I guess because I wanted to make something really punch, I substituted Green instead of Yellow on the Chartreuse front. Second, I did 50/50 Rittenhouse and Smith & Cross. Apparently I really just wanted all the abv. The third little substitution was to just do two dashes of Angostura. So here is what v1 ended up like:
1 oz Rittenhouse
1 oz Smith & Cross
.5 oz Cocchi Torino
.5 oz Green Chartreuse
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Put that all in a mixing glass with some ice, give it a nice long stir, strain into a chilled coupe, garnish with a lemon peel and a Maraschino cherry (accept no substitutes). There you go, you have yourself an unnamed first draft beverage.
But the proportions were just a little off…clearly this did not call for a 1:1 ratio of rye and rum. So in V2 I dialed up the rum, dialed down the rye, and reintroduced a second bitter, Peychaud’s, to push it in a slightly different direction. So here we are with at present what is the standard version of It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time (a bit of a mouthful, I admit, so let’s just call it A Good Idea for short):
.75 oz Rittenhouse
1.25 oz Smith & Cross
.5 oz Cocchi Torino
.5 oz Green Chartreuse
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 dash Peychaud’s bitters
Same as before, dump it all in a mixing glass, long stir, garnish the same. If you don’t really feel like fishing out your cherries, that’s fine, but the lemon peel (preferably expressed over the glass and all that) is essential and I will not argue about it unless you just prefer oranges (which are probably fine too, but not my personal preference).
Here’s to something to get your mind off life for a while.
This is Trader Jane’s, a periodic newsletter about drinks (mostly tiki) and other fun writing. Follow me on Substack for something every week or two (if we are being honest), and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more timely updates on my beverages (and for lots of other things of course!)
And, as with any good drink, feel free to share (responsibly, of course)