Happy Hour With 3 Ingredients: a Wasted Summer
Happy weekend and welcome back to Happy 3 Ingredient Hour , a weekly drinks column featuring very simple yet delicious libations. I recently enjoyed the charm of a small South American brandy known as “pisco,” so I thought we might try a summer but still strong pisco cocktail.
This delicious grape brandy is made from wine, but as with many types of alcoholic beverages and their classification, further classification can be a little tricky. This excerpt from Eater is great on it and you should read it if you like, but I’d love to have a drink. I currently enjoy Pisco Logia , a Peruvian white brandy with “nuances of orange blossom, pecans, seasoned dried currants and banana.”
For a complex (and tough) yet refreshing cocktail, I took inspiration from Raymi ‘s El Capitan in New York and combined pisco with another of my summer favorites, the Cocchi Americano . If you’ve never had such a treat, Cocchi is an Italian aperitif wine with a crisp citrus flavor and a discreet bitterness thanks to the cinchona bark. Then I hired some grapefruit bitter rather than Angostura to keep this whole citrusy idea alive. Then I named it after theBelle & Sebastian song because I’m nuts and if you drink a lot of this over the summer, you will be wasting it.
To make this delicious wine wonder compartment you will need:
- 2 ounces pisco
- 30 grams of cocci americano
- 2 drops of grapefruit bitterness
Pour everything into a mixing glass (or, for example, half a liter), add ice, stir for about twenty seconds and strain in the compartment. If you want to get something out of the ordinary and technically increase the amount of ingredients, depending on how you feel about the side dishes, you can squeeze a strip of lemon zest for the entire situation and then let it float in your delicious drink. This is optional, but not a bad option.