Shamrock Sour

2 parts Basil Hayden's Bourbon
1/2 part Green Chartreuse
1/2 part Lemon Juice
1/2 part Grapefruit juice
1/2 part Agave Syrup (To make, combine equal parts water with Agave syrup)
1/4 part Egg white

Combine all ingredients in a mixing tin and shake without ice to blend. Add ice and shake. Strain over fresh ice in a double rocks glass and garnish with a mint spring and a lemon wheel.

Diamonds In the Skyy (Courtesy of CulinaryDropout)

1 1/2 oz Skyy Vodka
1/2 oz Yellow Chartreuse
3/4 oz fresh lime juice
2 dashes cherry bitters
1 barspoon cherry gastrique
Ginger beer

Try the cocktail that made Marc Bonneton the winner of the Bacardi Global Legacy Cocktail Competition:

BACARDI Fizz

50 mL Bacardi Superior Rum
40 mL cream
15 mL Green Chartreuse
15 mL lemon juice
15 mL lime juice
15 mL sugar syrup
1 egg white
top with soda water

Dry-shake the egg white in a shaker with no ice, then add all the other ingredients and shake for a long time to emulsify the egg white and the cream. Fine-strain into a tall glass and top with soda water. Garnish with a sprig of mint.

The South Park Cocktail

1 1/2 oz Spring44 Gin
1/2 oz Yellow Chartreuse
3/4 oz fresh lemon juice
1/4 oz agave nectar
2 dashes Angostura bitters
8 mint leaves

Shake all ingredients with ice, double strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a mint sprig.

^{TODD MAUL OF CLIO | Photo: CONOR DOHERTY}

DRINK DECONSTRUCTION

Consider mad scientist Todd Maul, who is designing a cocktail list for Clio (370A Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, 617.536.7200) that would befuddle a chemist. Or at least someone like me, whose most significant exposure to chemistry comes from living out — ahem, I mean watching — episodes of Breaking Bad.

I spoke with Maul while he was working with a couple of Harvard PhD candidates in bio-chemical engineering to “crack open” green Chartreuse with a rotary evaporator, a machine often used in molecular gastronomy. “It allows me to deconstruct alcohol, basically to break things down to their molecular components,” Maul explains. It's a multi-stage process, with each use stripping off more voluble molecules. The first to come off, Maul says, are the aromatics, which create something similar to a perfume. Next is the straight alcohol, which comes out at 160 proof, regardless of the spirit you begin with. (Don't drink that.) Further steps strip out rounder, bigger molecules. Eventually, you're left with the essence of what makes, say, Chartreuse Chartreuse. “The point of it is, I'm able to break open Chartreuse, just seeing how it works and what I can do with it,” Maul clarifies.

The essence of Chartreuse is then introduced to heat in a sugar pan, where it takes on a thicker viscosity. Now it's ready to be used for cocktail mixing. I tried it in a variation on a Manhattan called a Somerville, where it's mixed with rye and the essence of a cigar, which Maul creates by soaking a cigar in vodka until it breaks open and running the mix through the rotary evaporator. Drinking a cigar doesn't exactly sound appetizing, but the result is a lightly smoky cocktail that mostly just tastes like a perfectly made Manhattan, with the essence of Chartreuse working off the high notes of the rye.

Good Things Come

Created by Jeff Grdinich; recipe courtesy Beta Cocktails, by Kirk Estopinal and Maksym Pazuniak

1¾ ounces Redbreast Whiskey
½ ounce Pedro Ximénez Sherry
½ ounce Fernet-Branca
¼ ounce Yellow Chartreuse
Dash Scrappy’s Lavender Bitters

Combine the whiskey, Sherry, Fernet-Branca, Chartreuse and bitters in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake. Strain into a coupe glass.

Smooth Sipping: Irish Whiskey Cocktail

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Irish whiskey makes the perfect St. Patrick’s Day cocktail—no green dye needed.

By Jessica Voelker Published -->

Photograph by Scott Suchman.

If green beer lacks the class you’re seeking in a St. Patrick’s Day beverage, consider a cocktail made with Irish whiskey. The spirit’s signature smoothness comes from a tradition of triple distillation—much of the world’s whiskey is distilled only twice. The extra step removes impurities but can also rob the beverage of complexity and character, which is why Scotch and bourbon fans sometimes snub it.

“They call it breakfast whiskey,” laughs Bill Thomas, co-owner of Jack Rose Dining Saloon in DC’s Adams Morgan. But Thomas stocks some Irish whiskeys that he says will satisfy complexity seekers, including the $65-an-ounce Knappogue Castle 1951 and several brands made at the Cooley distillery on Ireland’s east coast.

When experimenting with Irish whiskey in cocktails, Jack Rose beverage director Rachel Sergi recommends a less pricey product such as Powers Gold Label (about $19 for 750 milliliters at Calvert Woodley Wine & Spirits), which she describes as “caramely with some spice but not too sweet.” She uses it in her own version of the Tipperary—Irish whiskey, green Chartreuse, and sweet vermouth—named for the town in southern Ireland. The Chartreuse lends it a greenish cast, making the drink perfect for Saint Patrick’s Day. Sergi’s recipe—which calls for equal parts of the three ingredients—is virtually foolproof, which should help any St. Paddy’s soiree go smoothly.

1 ounce Irish whiskey

1 ounce green Chartreuse

1 ounce sweet vermouth (Sergi suggests Martini & Rossi or Dolin Rouge)

1 mint leaf for garnish (optional)

Pour the whiskey, Chartreuse, and vermouth into a pint glass, then add ice cubes until it’s about two-thirds full. Gripping a bar spoon as you would a chopstick, stir ingredients about 50 times, keeping the back of the spoon against the inside of the glass as much as possible. Strain ingredients into a chilled cocktail glass. Add mint leaf if desired.

This article appears in the March 2012 issue of The Washingtonian.

We asked our resident Irishman and professional drinker Luke McKinney for some advice on St. Patrick’s Day. And once we deciphered his answer in our Irish-English-to-American-English dictionary, we found a great list of drinks that are supposed to be green. 

On St Patrick’s day it’s traditional to drink green beer, and like most traditions it’s based on idiots doing dumb things over and over without ever asking “Wait a minute, isn’t this stupid?”

Though, to be fair, fifteen pints is almost perfectly designed to prevent people from asking intelligent questions.

Your beer stopped photosynthesizing a very long time ago. It has no reason to be green. You’ll also notice that ordering “the green beer” means you’re not mentioning a brand, or a style, so you’re paying bar prices and you’d be lucky to get Old Man Hobo’s Trouser-Leg-Stain “Lager”, because the publican is saving beer with actual names for the more discerning customers. Besides, anything that turns your piss green should be killing you to try to take over the Enterprise.

Going green might be a stupid idea for beer, but it’s a great excuse for trying new drinks. Because anything is a great excuse for trying new drinks! And Kermit didn’t know what he was talking about: it’s easy being green.

Luke McKinney / MCD

Everybody’s Irish

2 oz Irish whiskey
½ oz green crème de menthe
½ oz green chartreuse

shake well

This isn’t a cocktail, it’s a cunning way of filling a cocktail glass with cheap whiskey and still looking classy. It’s also a funner way to say “double whiskey,” and let’s be honest, that’s a fun phrase to use already. Never mind the name, even the recipe is really Irish: a load of whiskey and a wee drop or two of green stuff.

This drink understands that every ingredient should contribute to the final taste. Fake color is for idiots painting themselves orange instead of sitting in the sun – real people know it’s the experience, not the final color, and this drink respects that. The crème de menthe and chartreuse might be green, and an insane battle of flavors, but the color-coded conflict is taking place on an entire battlefield of whiskey. So instead of short-circuiting your tongue, their struggle adds an interesting depth to whichever cheap firewater you used. Just make sure you are using cheap whiskey. If an Irishman catches you pouring mint into real drink, he’s liable to rescue it from you–with violence.

You can class up an Everybody’s Irish with the:

Luke McKinney / MCD

Shamrock

1 oz Irish whiskey
1 oz dry vermouth
3 dashes crème de menthe
3 dashes green chartreuse

shake well

With a blatant name like “Shamrock” this sounds about as genuine as a mall Santa, but less alcoholic. It’s certainly more European, cutting the whiskey with a continental liquor, and the result is just as you’d expect: more sophisticated but less direct fun. You also need to be careful with the crème de menthe because it’s the Borg of liqeurs: it looks a bit silly but will utterly overwrite any drink it gets into. You need strong ingredients like whiskey and vermouth to cancel it out, because a drink with too much crème de menthe is how recovered hobos hark back to the old days by pretending they’re drinking mouthwash.

iStockphoto/Thinkstock

Mexican Leprechaun

Chill a shot glass in the freezer

Pour some crème de menthe

Gently pour cheap tequila on top, creating a layered drink. (Pouring the tequila over the back of a spoon can help.)

Layered drinks are visually interesting, difficult to make, entirely stupid, and this is the only exception. A layered drink is also known as pousse-café, and if you think that sounds like somewhere wimps drink non-alcoholic beverages you’re pronouncing it wrong but still entirely correct. Being more impressed with a drink’s color than its contents is how we got into this green beer mess in the first place! But where every other layer is out to create a sparkling rainbow, this is out to get you brilliantly hammered.

The Mexican Leprechaun might sound like the WWE got desperate for novelty characters (because seriously, screw Hornswoggle), but it’s fun, fast, functional, fast-acting — hell it’s practically medicine. This shot is a Kryptonite-fueled power plant: using the overriding evil of a bright green chemical to unleash wonderful power from even the most dangerous substances. The separated layers aren’t designed to look good. They have jobs to do, because chilled crème de menthe is an emergency override for the sense of taste. You could suffer a gunshot to the mouth, and if iced menthe was poured into the wound your last thought would be “Goddamn that’s minty.” Allowing you to down even the cheapest, paint-stripperiest tequila — the shot flashes past your tastebuds, and before your nervous system even knows it’s been insulted the speeding glacier of cold mint has turned your entire oesophagus into green ice. You’re pissed and refreshed at the same time — hell, between the sterilizing tequila and minty menthe, you’ve practically brushed your teeth.

Luke McKinney / MCD

Irish Flag

Layered drink: pour crème de menthe, irish cream, and grand marnier, in that order.

Yes, I just said that layered drinks are stupid, but since when was that a reason not to do something on St Patrick’s Day? The Irish Flag is everything wrong with layered drinks, an alternating horror which only looks like it would be fun. And let’s not pretend that we haven’t all done something (or someone) like that on a night out. You start with a faceful of bitter orange, which students of Irish history might know isn’t the most fantastic concept for the Republic, then brown Irish Cream because it’s not white, then a blast of mint. The only way this would be useful if you just said something stupid to the person you were chatting up and now you want to punish your tongue, and forget that you ever said it, all at once.

But it’s incredible fun to serve as a shooter. It looks cool, no-one can resist knocking it back when you’ve gone to all the bother of making it, and the expression on their face is priceless. Especially because you won’t be able to resist trying one yourself. It’s a silly, fun, alcoholic shared experience, probably a bad idea, and you’re going to do it anyway. This drink IS St Patrick’s Day!