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Chapter 11: Risen Like the Phoenix
Nature abhors a vacuum. In the early years of the
twenty-first century, many entrepreneurs had made their nut by building a
company from scratch and then selling it to whatever big fish of a corporation
swallowed up their kind. Now they were looking around for a business that would
be fun to build and run. Craft breweries were an obvious possibility, but that
niche was already crowded and hard to make a name in. They did, however, serve
as a good model for craft distilleries.
Ambitious men and women bought cheap real estate, expensive
stills, and a lot of oak barrels, and set to work. Almost all began by making
vodka and then gin, which required no aging. Then they set their sights higher…
and saw that the market for rye was scandalously underserved.
Meanwhile, the Craft Cocktail movement was in full bloom. To
oversimplify drastically, a lot of bartenders grew tired of mixing vodka with
fruit juices and liqueurs to make sticky-sweet and obvious concoctions with
names like Screaming Orgasm, Sex on the Beach, or Harvey Wallbanger. They
wanted to regain their self-respect . Looking backward in time they rediscovered drinks
that honored the alcohol in them. Drinks with names a grownup would feel
comfortable ordering in public.
Not only did they succeed at all of the above, but by creating a
market for sophisticated drinks, these heroic baristas resurrected extinct
spirits like Old Tom Gin and liqueurs like Crème de Violette. If
you’ve ever enjoyed a Martinez or an Aviation, you have reason to be grateful
to them all.
The movement can be divided into two factions: One employs the
finest and freshest ingredients to create classic cocktails, many of which had
passed into near-oblivion. The other employs the finest and freshest
ingredients to create new cocktails inspired by those classics but
tweaked with combinations unknown to our revered ancestral topers. Which cult you prefer is strictly a
personal choice. I choose to defer to whichever bar I happen to be in at the
time.
To honor the completely mad crafters of artisanal cocktails,
you could do worse than to raise a Perfect Black Manhattan, a variant of
a drink invented in San Francisco in 2015 with dry vermouth replacing half the
Averna to keep its flavor from overwhelming the rye:
Perfect
Black Manhattan
2 ounces
rye whiskey
½ ounce
Averna
½ ounce dry
vermouth
1 dash
Angostura bitters
1 dash orange
bitters
spiced
cherry
directions:
mix, chill, and serve with a spiced cherry for garnish
This is a beautifully dark cocktail with an appropriately bitter
heart. It would be the perfect drink to mix to celebrate the end of an affair you
should never have begun. Like life itself, it can be savored
despite the bitterness and, on occasion, even because of it.
On which note, this chronicle comes—gracefully, I hope—to an
end. It has been a long and bumpy road that led from the barely drinkable swill
our Colonial forebears tossed back with depraved abandon to the artisanal and
hand-crafted (whatever that may mean in this context) ryes and rye cocktails that
now grace our better watering holes.
No matter what the coming decades may bring, it may be confidently
predicted that they will pass in the twinkling of an eye. When they do, parts
of this chronicle will doubtless seem quaint and, for reasons unforeseeable, out of date. So
be it. But, barring the extinction of the human race, it seems a safe bet that rye
whiskey will endure.
To which pleasant prospect, I raise my glass. Slainte!
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