The One Drink and the No-Drink
Canyon Glow: Mandarin, Rooibos, Ginger, and Verjus Spritz
Rooibos is the only tea you cannot ruin by forgetting about it, which makes it the most forgiving base in the zero-proof pantry. Two kinds of ice go in the same glass, on purpose.
The parts that change whether this works tonight.
- Equipment
- Wine glasses, a citrus press, a box grater for the ginger, a fine sieve, a large-cube tray, and a canvas bag and a mallet…
- Make-ahead
- Prepare the tea and syrup two days ahead. Combine the still ingredients four hours before service
- The method
- 7 ingredients
From this recipe’s own Kitchen Kit and make ahead section. Nothing here is a guess.
Serve alongside
Spiced nuts, or a wedge of aged Gouda with mandarin segments. Rooibos is sweetly tannic and ginger is hot, and the plate needs to bring salt and a little fat so both have somewhere to go.
Tools
Wine glasses, a citrus press, a box grater for the ginger, a fine sieve, a large-cube tray, and a canvas bag and a mallet for cracking ice. A clean dish towel and a rolling pin is the household version and works fine; it also wakes the house up, so do it early.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Rooibos tea, mandarins (clementines, or a good bottled mandarin juice if January is not cooperating), verjus blanc, fresh ginger, honey, nonalcoholic aromatic bitters, soda water
Magic
Two kinds of ice in one glass. One large cube on the bottom, then cracked ice packed above it to the rim. The cracked ice has enormous surface area and it does its whole job in the first two minutes — a fast, hard chill that knocks the tannic edge off the rooibos and opens the ginger — and then it is gone. The cube underneath holds the temperature for the next twenty without adding water. A spritz that is correct at minute one and still correct at minute fifteen. Not feeling brave? Fill it with cubes and drink it faster.
Gotcha
Build this one with the guest standing in front of you. The cracked ice is spent in about 10 minutes, and a glass poured early and left on a tray is a watery drink with a sad cube in it by the time anyone picks it up. Every other component here can wait for days. The ice cannot wait for a conversation.
Rooibos is the only tea you cannot ruin by forgetting about it. It has no tannins of the sort that turn bitter, so a pot left steeping for forty minutes while you deal with something in the oven comes out stronger rather than worse. In a house where drinks get made in the gaps between other tasks, that is not a small thing.
It also brings a woody, faintly vanilla base that reads as depth rather than as tea, which is the property that makes a zero-proof spritz stop tasting like flavored water. Mandarin sits on top of it beautifully. Ginger connects the two.
Brew it strong and early
Four teaspoons of loose rooibos or four bags per two cups of boiling water. Give it ten minutes or an hour, it does not much matter. Strain, cool, refrigerate. It keeps four days and it is the one component genuinely worth making in quantity.
Ginger-honey syrup
Grate 1/4 cup of fresh ginger on the fine side of a box grater. Whisk it with 1/2 cup honey and 1/2 cup hot — not boiling — water until the honey dissolves. Steep 20 minutes, then strain through a fine sieve, pressing to get the ginger juice out. Boiling honey drives off the floral notes and leaves you with sweetener, so keep the kettle water off the boil for a minute first. Keeps a week.
One drink
- 2 oz strong chilled rooibos tea
- 1 oz fresh mandarin juice
- 3/4 oz verjus blanc
- 1/2 oz ginger-honey syrup
- 2 dashes nonalcoholic aromatic bitters
- 2 oz soda water
- Mandarin wheel
The pour, drawn to scale
- strong chilled rooibos tea2 oz32%
- fresh mandarin juice1 oz16%
- verjus blanc3/4 oz12%
- ginger-honey syrup1/2 oz8%
- soda water2 oz32%
Ice the glass: one cube in the bottom, cracked ice packed on top. Add tea, juice, verjus, syrup, and bitters to the ice-filled wine glass. Top with soda and stir gently, one lift from the bottom. Garnish with mandarin, cut thin enough to sit rather than sink.
Why the wine glass
Because the bowl catches the ginger and the mandarin oil, and because a spritz in a highball is a tall cold drink while a spritz in a wine glass is something people hold differently and drink more slowly. That sounds like a nonsense distinction and it is observably true at every party where both have been offered.
Make ahead
Prepare the tea and syrup two days ahead. Combine the still ingredients four hours before service. That means tea, mandarin juice, verjus, syrup, and bitters, in a bottle, in the fridge. Mandarin juice holds better than most citrus, though it does go slightly candied overnight, so four hours is the honest limit rather than a cautious one.
Crack the ice into a bowl an hour ahead and keep it in the freezer under a towel so it does not weld itself into a single mass. Set the cubes in a second bowl. Two bowls of ice on a counter looks like a fuss and is the only labor this drink requires.
If you want it with alcohol
1 1/2 oz of a blanco tequila is the best fit, since agave and ginger and mandarin are a well-established argument. An aged rum at the same volume goes warmer and works better in cold weather. Prosecco in place of the soda water is the easiest possible move and turns this into a genuine spritz, though you lose some of the rooibos underneath the bubbles — if you go that way, cut the soda entirely rather than adding wine on top of it.
What to eat with it
Warm spice, roasted vegetables, anything with a little chile heat. It is very good next to roasted carrots with cumin, and it holds up to a whole table of small plates without needing to be re-thought halfway through.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
Where this goes next
