The One Drink and the No-Drink
Afterparty Download: Rye, Espresso, Tamarind, and Dark Cacao
The drink for the part of the night when the host has stopped offering and started pointing.
Serve alongside
Dark chocolate with sea salt, or a bowl of spiced nuts. Tamarind makes this the sourest coffee drink you are ever likely to meet, and salt and fat are what keep the sourness interesting instead of tiring.
Tools
A bowl, a fine sieve, your hands, a mixing glass and bar spoon, a Y-peeler, rocks glasses, big-cube tray. The tamarind step is done with fingers and there is no tool that improves on them.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, coffee, seedless tamarind pulp in a block (jarred concentrate, cut with hot water and sugar), sugar, dark cacao liqueur, aromatic bitters, orange
Magic
Make the tamarind syrup from a block, and take the pulp out at 20 minutes. Break two ounces of block into a cup of water just off the boil, work it apart with your fingers as it softens, and push it through a sieve at twenty minutes — that is when the fruit has given up its sour-date character and the fibers have not yet started giving up theirs. Sweeten the strained liquid one-to-one by weight. Not feeling brave? Ten minutes of soaking and a harder push through the sieve gets you a thinner syrup with no risk at all.
Gotcha
Do not increase the tamarind. Tamarind pulp runs to something like twelve percent tartaric acid — ounce for ounce more sour than lemon juice — so a quarter ounce of the syrup is already doing a bar spoon of citrus’s work in a drink that is otherwise entirely spirits. Push it past half an ounce and the stirred build hazes within a minute of hitting ice and the texture goes thin and sandy. It tastes wonderful in the spoon. That is the trap.
Tamarind concentrate in a jar and tamarind are two different ingredients wearing the same name. The jarred stuff is cooked down, usually salted, and flat in a way that reads as sour without reading as fruit. The block — a compressed brick of pulp, sold cheap in any Latin or South Asian grocery — tastes like dates and lime and molasses. This drink is built on the second one and merely survives the first.
It also, incidentally, keeps forever in the cupboard, which makes it the opposite of most things a recipe will ask you to buy.
Build
One drink. Three minutes.
- 1 1/2 ounces rye whiskey
- 1/2 ounce coffee-infused sweet vermouth
- 1/4 ounce tamarind syrup
- 1 teaspoon dark cacao liqueur
- 2 dashes aromatic bitters
- Orange peel
The pour, drawn to scale
- rye whiskey1 1/2 ounces67%
- coffee-infused sweet vermouth1/2 ounce22%
- tamarind syrup1/4 ounce11%
Combine everything but the garnish in a mixing glass with ice.
Stir until cold and diluted — about 30 seconds with hard cubes, half that from a fridge-cold batch.
Strain over one large cube.
Express the orange peel over the drink and drop it in.
The coffee vermouth
Two tablespoons of coarse grounds per cup of sweet vermouth, at room temperature, strained through a paper filter at twelve minutes. Cold and short. Never warm it, and never let it run long — you are after roast and cocoa, not extraction.
Made properly it is good for five days in the fridge and then the coffee oils turn. If a batched version of this drink has gone strange on you, the vermouth is almost always the culprit.
Why the tamarind and not something easier
A stirred whiskey drink usually gets its lift from citrus, and citrus is exactly what a stirred drink cannot really have — the moment you add enough to matter, you are making a sour and should shake it. Tamarind threads that needle. It brings acid and dried-fruit sweetness in the same quarter ounce, which means the drink gets brightness without getting a texture change or a cloud.
Coffee, cacao, and tamarind together land somewhere near the flavor of a very dark chocolate with fruit notes, which is a thing chocolate people talk about and drinks people mostly do not.
Glass and ice
Rocks glass, one 2-inch cube. This is a three-ounce drink at roughly 30 percent alcohol after dilution and it is not meant to be quick. Small ice will take it apart in twelve minutes.
The peel is a wide strip with as little white on it as you can manage. Express it an inch above the surface with one firm bend, then drop it in — it keeps working on the nose for the whole drink, which matters more here than in anything else on the menu because everything in the glass is dark and low and needs something bright sitting over the top of it.
Three days ahead
Batch the complete drink without dilution up to three days ahead. For six: 9 ounces rye, 3 ounces coffee vermouth, 1 1/2 ounces tamarind syrup, 2 tablespoons cacao liqueur, 12 dashes bitters. Bottle it, refrigerate it, and then late in the evening the entire job is pouring two and a half ounces over a cube and stirring fifteen seconds.
Cut the peels ahead as well, and keep them under a damp towel. After about four hours they go leathery and stop giving oil, and a dry peel over a dark drink is decoration doing nothing.
The zero-proof route
Strong black tea in place of the rye, cascara syrup in place of the coffee vermouth, and keep the tamarind exactly as it is — it is carrying more of this drink than the whiskey is. Two dashes of alcohol-free bitters, same cube, same peel. What you lose is warmth and weight. What you keep is the whole flavor argument, which is not a bad trade at one in the morning.
On the tray
Tamarind short-rib toasts and espresso truffles. Both of them echo something in the glass, which is either good menu writing or laziness depending on how the evening has gone.
It is a coffee drink that will not admit to being one, which is precisely what you want at that hour.
Afterparty Download’s full occasion plan decides where that echo stops, with the food, quantities, batch, and late-night pacing mapped outside the recipe.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
Where this goes next
