For Thanksgiving, I was searching for a new and different cocktail; one that would… fall in step with the season. See what I did there? Don’t worry; I didn’t hurt myself too badly coming up with that one. Thanks to The Spruce Eats for turning me on to Pisco Portón’s recipe, I now consider this one of my all time favorites! After the thanks, I do have a slight difference of opinion; namely, they classify it as an aperitif. As we learned in making the Negroni, an aperitif is usually described as at least one of the following: bitter, dry, or airy.
This cocktail is none of those. It has a taste profile that is dark, sweet but not overly so, and warming. After one sip it’s not hard to remind yourself of the last time you sat in front of a cozy fire reading a good book. In my mind, this taste profile fits better with that of a “digestif” which is usually served after a meal. Indeed, checking the list of typical digestif ingredients provided by the editors of Wikipedia yields a near 100% match to the ingredients provided below.
The confounding factor is the Campari, normally always part of an aperitif, it makes a show here as supporting role that takes something pretty good and adds a “where did that come from!?” dimension. Here, Campari is kind of like Creed (played by Creed Bratton) in The Office; it would be pretty good without him but he just adds this extra goodness to the comical chord that no one else can do and the end product is so much the better for it.
Ingredients
1 ounce Pisco brandy (substitute any South American brandy or other good brandy like Cognac)
1 ounce Drambuie (a honey and spice infused Scotch whiskey liqueur)
¼ ounce Campari (just a splash “for color”)
¼ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice (optional)
garnish: orange and/or lime
Firstly, hats off to Pisco Portón for making such a fine product. On the other side, distribution of the product needs work. This is a tough ingredient to find. On the advice of the manager of our state run liquor store after striking out at one other local distribution store, I substituted Revanche Cognac for the Pisco brandy and was well pleased with the results. Would Pisco brandy be better? Perhaps. Maybe even possibly! The goal here, if you can’t find Pisco brandy, is to to go with a good brandy made from grapes grown for brandy. Sometimes the cheaper brandies use seconds from the wine-making process. Spend the extra $10 on good brandy rather than waste the $35 you spent on the cheap stuff after you take one taste and throw it out.
I enjoyed this recipe on three different occasions over Thanksgiving and enjoyed it neat every time. If an all-alcohol cocktail is a little too much, try serving it with ice.
This is a shoe-in for my Christmas go-to cocktails!
I’ve also found that I prefer it without the lime juice. Taste the components and try different combinations, substitutions, and even (gasp!) omissions. This is your drink! Make it the way you like it but keep the base recipe in mind; you may want to come back to it after a while.
John