The One Drink and the No-Drink
Cabin Fever: Roasted Apple, Lapsang Tea, Spruce, and Tonic
Three acids are already in this glass before the tonic shows up with a fourth. A scant pinch of baking soda in the shrub takes the elbows off the vinegar and lets the smoke finally come forward.
Serve alongside
Smoked cheddar with apple, or salted pretzels. Lapsang puts real smoke in a glass with no alcohol behind it, and the plate has to be salty and firm or the drink reads as a campfire nobody is watching.
Tools
A sheet pan, a shaker (a quart jar with a tight lid shakes fine and is louder in a good way), a fine sieve, a rocks glass, and a tall vessel for the shrub. That last one is not optional and the Gotcha explains why.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Roasted-apple shrub, lapsang souchong tea, lemon, spruce-tip syrup (rosemary syrup), saline solution, dry tonic, apple and rosemary, plus baking soda from the back of the cupboard
Magic
Take the edge off the shrub with a scant pinch of baking soda. Stir 1/16 tsp into every 4 oz of finished shrub and let it foam itself out. It neutralizes part of the acetic acid into sodium acetate, which is savory rather than sharp, and the vinegar stops arriving first. Suddenly there is room for the smoke and the roasted apple, both of which were being shouted down by something that is technically a condiment. Not feeling brave? Skip it and dial the lemon back by a quarter ounce — less elegant, same direction.
Gotcha
It foams to roughly three times its volume for about twenty seconds. Use a vessel with real headroom or you will be wiping shrub off the inside of a cabinet door. And stay under 1/8 tsp per 4 oz — past that the drink goes flat and faintly soapy, and the fix is more shrub, not more of anything else.
Count the acids in this glass. Apple cider vinegar in the shrub, lemon juice, quinine in the tonic, and the tannin from the lapsang doing an impression of a fourth. That is a lot of sharp elbows in one rocks glass, and the reason a good smoky zero-proof drink so often lands as merely sour is that vinegar wins those arguments. It is the loudest thing in almost any drink it enters.
The build
One drink. Five minutes if the shrub and tea are already made, which they should be.
- 1 1/2 oz roasted-apple shrub
- 1 1/2 oz chilled lapsang souchong tea
- 1/2 oz lemon juice
- 1/4 oz spruce-tip syrup
- 2 dashes saline
- 2 oz dry tonic
- Apple slice and rosemary
Shake shrub, tea, lemon, syrup, and saline briefly with ice. Briefly means about eight seconds. This is a chill-and-integrate shake, not a build-texture shake, and going long only waters down a drink that is about to receive two ounces of tonic anyway.
Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Fresh ice. The ice you shook with is half melted and rounded off and will collapse in the glass in four minutes.
Top with tonic and garnish with the apple slice and rosemary.
Why baking soda belongs in a cocktail post
Because a shrub is a vinegar and vinegar is an acid, and the standard bar response to an acid that is too loud is to add sugar until it shuts up. That works and it makes the drink sweet. Knocking a fraction of the acetic acid over into a salt instead solves it in the other direction — the drink stays dry, the sourness drops a step, and what is underneath gets audible. You are not removing the vinegar. You are turning down the part of it that shouts.
Do it to the shrub in the jar, not to the finished drink. In the glass it will fizz against the tonic, and the tonic’s bubbles are the ones you want.
Ice and glass
Rocks glass, cracked ice or a couple of standard cubes, not one big rock. This drink is long and low-intensity and it wants to be cold immediately rather than cold slowly. Cracked ice does that. It also means the drink is meant to be finished inside fifteen minutes, which suits it — the smoke fades as the tonic goes flat, and nothing about it improves after that.
The shrub, and how far ahead
Halve the apples, roast them cut side down at 400°F until the edges genuinely catch, cover with equal weights of sugar and cider vinegar, and leave them three days in the fridge before straining. Roasted, not raw — raw apple shrub is bright and thin and it will not stand up to lapsang.
The apples are a whole thing here. Half the older houses in town have a homestead apple tree in the yard, most of them planted by somebody nobody remembers, and every October the state asks people to actually pick the fruit rather than let it drop, because windfall apples in a yard are how a bear ends up on your porch at eleven at night. So there are always apples. They are small, they are streaked, they are usually a variety no one can name, and they roast better than anything you can buy.
Shrub keeps a month refrigerated and improves for the first week. The tea keeps three days and then goes dull. The mixed base — shrub, tea, lemon, syrup, saline, times however many — holds a day in a bottle; tonic goes in per glass. For eight people that is about a pint and a half of base and two liters of tonic, which is more tonic than you think and exactly as much as you will use.
If you do want it alcoholic
An ounce and a half of blanco tequila or a lightly peated Scotch, added to the shaker, and pull the tonic back to 1 oz so the drink does not get long. The Scotch version is the better one and it is also the version where the smoke starts fighting itself, so use a restrained bottle rather than the one that tastes like a campfire had an opinion.
Sharp cheddar and salted crackers. Something with mustard on it. It handles fat well.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
