DrinkedIn Trends

Usually, bartenders and bar owners talk about how to scale things up: how to bring in more guests, sell more drinks, open more venues. But during the pandemic, that conversation shifted, says Jessica Sanders, proprietor of a laid-back neighborhood bar and gastropub in Austin known for its focus on elevated classic cocktails.

“I learned how to scale down,” she says. Instead of focusing on more, it served her better to think about less, namely how to keep operations lean, with the goal of adapting quickly and sustaining a viable, successful business into 2021 and beyond.

“We have a much smaller team now, with just four or five of us,” Sanders explains. “We’ve had to dial in on … the things we do very well here, and pare everything else away.”

That has extended to the bar’s approach to its cocktail menu. Historically, the bar staff allotted two or three months to workshop a menu of up to 25 drinks, updated quarterly. For spring 2021, the menu of eight original cocktails was established in four weeks.
“We trimmed off all the fat,” Sanders explains. “But [the menu] hits all the notes of what a guest is looking for.” For example, instead of three Gin & Tonic riffs, the goal was to offer just one, making that “the best version of that drink we can offer them.”

This variation, the Forager’s Remedy, layers “warm” spice tones found in The Botanist gin with “cool” herbaceous notes contributed by a basil eau de vie and a lavish opal basil garnish. “The Gin & Tonic is one of those drinks you should smell before you drink it,” she says. “It should hit your nose the second it hits the table.”

Six years ago, Todd Leopold told me a secret. He was building a time machine. In the quiet of his Denver distillery’s tasting room, Todd presented facsimiles of cryptic blueprints he’d exhumed while researching the arcana of his trade. What they depicted were exacting instructions for a three-chamber still, the kind that was used in the 19th century to make rye whiskey. Looking like something out of a Jules Verne novel, the contraption promised the impossible: to transport a distiller or a drinker to a bygone era when domestic whiskey was categorically different. Though its low yield had rendered it outmoded in an ever-industrializing market, Todd was gripped by his vision, insisting it would exude juice of a quality that contemporary drinkers couldn’t imagine. He swore me to silence.

After 15 years of furtive measures, Leopold Bros.’ Three Chamber Rye has arrived at last. With a deceptively simple mash bill of American malted barley and a forgotten strain of rye called Abruzzi, Three Chamber is nothing short of a game-changer. Drinkers accustomed to the output of more widely known whiskey makers, who produce in a week what Leopold Bros. does in a year and label their offerings as “small batch,” may be awestruck. There’s simply no going back after tasting a potion like this one.

Recently, someone asked me what “craft” meant anymore in the context of distilling. I quickly answered to myself, “Not much,” which wasn’t entirely fair. Good people remain committed to the designation of “craft” as a signifier of transparency and mindful production apart from larger producers and mercenary conglomerates that invest more in apocryphal marketing than in actual spirit-making. As advocates for craft distilling, like the American Craft Spirits Association or the American Distilling Institute, have not been particularly bold in denominating the category, opportunists have been free to co-opt the language of craft, saturating the market with fanciful and obfuscating origin stories like the old chestnut about the lost bourbon recipe found under a mattress in an antebellum prison, the myth of the revived 250-year-old distillery that’s been producing for three years yet offers 15-year-old whiskey, the story of the hardened mezcalero whose grandchildren are the first to wear shoes in the region thanks to a brand’s intervention, and the one about the hyper-regional single malt made from Eastern European grain malted in a facility resembling the Death Star.

While I may have discarded the epithet “craft” a decade ago, consigning it to the obsolescence of other words like “sustainable” or “artisanal,” I remain uncynical in pursuing what those terms have hoped to embody, and Three Chamber does exactly that.

Like a master carpenter, Todd Leopold began by building his own tools, namely his Victorian time machine, which appears an arresting, luminous copper shaft with three discreet portal windows, crafted by Vendome Copper & Brass Works in Kentucky. For now, it is the only still of its kind, but this will likely change once the world tastes its issue. Prior to this release, I had two opportunities to test the whiskey: once, fresh from the tap, and on a subsequent visit when Todd shared a barrel sample at around a year old. Even as a newborn and a toddler, the whiskey was prodigious.

The Spanish Gin & Tonic never went away. A blockbuster drink in the United States about a decade ago, Spain’s gintónica was noted for voluminous balloon glasses (copas de balón) filled with specialty gins, artisanal tonics and a garden’s worth of garnishes. Though it has taken a back seat to flashier drinks, it held steady on many menus, and lends itself to customization at home.

The gintónica has roots in Spain’s Basque region, “sometime between 1999 and 2008,” says Keli Rivers, brand ambassador for Sipsmith Gin and the former bar manager and “Ginnoisseur” at the San Francisco bar Whitechapel. She pinpoints as the epicenter San Sebastián, where forward-thinking chefs would gather for Lo Mejor de la Gastronomía Congress (The Best of Gastronomy Conference) to share ideas, showcase avant-garde techniques and most of all, blow off steam. Gathering at spaces such as Coctelería Dickens or El Museo del Whiskey, one of the chief activities was, Rivers says, “drinking one of the many gins stocked in a large wine glass with plenty of ice, cooling down the warm evenings.”

Eventually, gintónica variations began showing up on the menus of Michelin-starred restaurants like El Bulli in Catalonia, “garnished with items that enhanced what was in the gin.”

By 2013, most of Europe was aware of Spain’s affection for the gintónica; By 2014, the Spanish Gin & Tonic, as it became known here, made its way stateside. Consumers cozied up to copas filled with what Rivers characterizes as “large fruit salad cocktails,” abundantly garnished with colorful citrus or cucumber wheels, fresh herbs and free-floating juniper berries or peppercorns.

Though it’s no longer a novelty, the Spanish G&T remains a staple at many bars. Part of the appeal, says Marshall Minaya, beverage director at gin-focused New York bar Valerie, is that the Spanish version transforms the G&T from an equal-parts highball to a session drink. “A proper Spanish-style Gin & Tonic has a one-to-four ratio of spirit to tonic,” he notes.