Ask A Bartender: What Should I Drink This Fall?

Saturday, September 26, 2015

GoLocal PDX contributor, Kai Soderberg

Dark rum, used judiciously, is a great addition to your fall spirit repertoire.

Fall is in full effect and suddenly your margarita doesn’t taste quite the same. There is a reason behind this: while liquor products strive to be consistent and you can find a decent enough lime all year around, think about how the air changes around you and, with that, the smell. A large part of your taste is olfactory, so you’re never just eating or drinking what is on your plate or in your glass, you’re consuming the air around you as well. The smell of suntan lotion from your neighbor on the barstool has transformed into a musky, wool smell. Heaven help you if they own a large dog or are a smoker. Anyway, the task to find what drink goes with the scent of fallen leaves on wet pavement is at hand.

We know what to eat: spaghetti Bolognese, stews, chili - all the things that were just too heavy to stomach a couple of months ago. And we have a general idea of what to drink: full-bodied red wines sturdy enough to stand up to the aforementioned dishes, and, of course, whiskey. In particular, a Manhattan is a good drink to order on a rainy, fall day. A dark and stormy also fits the bill just fine. A Sazerac would work as well. The list goes on and on but you should already start to see a pattern. The three drinks I listed are all brown and warming in a spicy sort of way. I don’t mean holiday spice. That is a different kind of warming for an even more dormant lifestyle. Cognacs and drinks made with the likes of honey, cloves, and warm milk induce an almost catatonic state that is partway responsible for keeping us collectively docile enough to let winter holidays turn into the horrific, consumerist freak show that they now are. I’m talking about spicy heat. Somewhere between habaneros and cloves.

We don’t throw out the limes just yet but we add a bit to them, transforming their sour, tart kick into something else with the aide of ginger in a dark and stormy. It’s easy to see the Manhattan’s appeal on a fall day. Designed to be drunken quickly so that they retain their chill, just two of these in semi-quick succession are the perfect mood elevator and might just keep you sane enough to survive another shopping season without going all, “Falling Down” on Portland (although the movie would be admittedly much less entertaining if Michael Douglas simply pulled off the freeway and sat through rush hour in the quiet pleasantness of a roadside bar for an hour or two). But consider the history of dark rum and whiskey. They have had their moments together. In high school, we drank them both with coca cola, so there is that. Even further than that though, they were making punches with brandy and rum, then whiskey and rum. Dark rum is usually added in smaller doses than the whiskey, sometimes in the form of a float to provide it with an elevated amount of sugar, spice, caramel or vanilla. Wait a minute: it kind of seems like I’m describing whiskey, doesn’t it? Dark rum is sort of an extreme whiskey; whiskey to the power of, say, three, meaning it offers the same profile but to an oftentimes overbearing degree.

But when the season changes to fall, we want that extreme warmth. And don’t get me wrong. Dark rum is very good in warmer climates as well but it’s usually cut sensibly - as in the case of a dark rum daiquiri and all of its variations - with a bit of tartness or other bittering agents. Long story short, I rarely drink dark rum anymore but have been meaning too. When I’m in the neighborhood, I sometimes go to the Rum Club. They make some very inspired rum cocktails. I spent some time drinking rum in Cuba where dark rum and cheap, blended scotch were kind of the only thing they had there, but they sure knew what to do with it. I just never got to the point where I appreciated it enough to do anything with it personally, until last week sometime at about three in the morning. Coming home from work, wanting nothing more than a white cap and to go to sleep, and I was out of the staples. The only base spirits I had in my cabinet were dark rum and mezcal. I grabbed them both. I grabbed the white vermouth from the fridge, thinking I was going to do some sort of bastardization of El Presidente Vincent (which is basically a daiquiri on the tart side with dry vermouth), the triple sec, simple syrup and a grapefruit (since I was out of limes). To tie it all together, I used some cardamom bitters. I’m not going to type the exact recipe, just list the ingredients. I’m not recommending you try it at home. I thought it was good. So did my wife. But that’s not the point. It could have been better.

If it wasn’t for the Scrappy’s cardamom bitters I used, I’m not sure what it would have been. Cardamom (pound for pound, the third most expensive spice in the world) has a way of tying things together in a fragrant little package and though it doesn’t always make sense in a drink, it never makes one unpalatable. In this case, it worked wonders tying in all the other wild cards together.

The mezcal was the most suspect addition. You should always be skeptical of a drink made with mezcal. Because it’s relatively new on the Portland market, a lot of bartenders – myself included- just use it to see what they can do with it. It has its purpose. It also has smoke (especially the Vida Mezcal). It has, as my wife puts it, the taste of a ghost. And though I don’t know what a ghost tastes like, I somehow agree with her. The smokiness of something that no longer is, or something that is changing rapidly into something else. The taste of a memory. What better ingredient to incorporate in a fall drink?

Related Slideshow: 25 Festivals This Fall in Oregon

And not all of them are just music and booze.

Ask A Bartender: What Should I Drink This Fall?

Related Slideshow: 25 Festivals This Fall in Oregon

Cider Squeeze

Corn Maize

Korean Food Festival

Halloweentown

Howloween

Wordstock

Fall Kite Festival

Chowder Cook-Off

NW Filmmakers' Festival

Vegan Beer and Food Fest

Pumpkin Regatta Festival

NW Food and Wine Festival

Turkey Trot

Wine Country Thanksgiving

Queer Film Festival

Festival of Lights

Distillers Festival

Wild Arts Festival

Portland VegFest

Festival of Trees

Eastburn Ciderfest

BridgeTown Swing

Independent Film Festival

ZooLights

Winter Beer Festival

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