The One Drink and the No-Drink
Exit Through the Garden: Cucumber, Tarragon, Green Grape, and Gentian Tonic
Every topped highball is two drinks in a trench coat: a thin one on top and a heavy one at the bottom, and the guest who stops stirring after the second sip only ever meets one of them.
Serve alongside
Radishes with butter and salt, or thin crackers with fresh goat cheese. Gentian is bitter and everything else here is green and delicate — the plate has to be cold and salted, and it should not try to be clever.
Tools
A juicer, or a blender and a fine sieve lined with a thin cloth, which is slower and produces the same juice. Shaker. Tall glasses. A small pitcher for the tonic, ideally one with a spout. A vegetable peeler for the cucumber ribbon.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Green grapes, cucumber, fresh tarragon, sugar, lemon, alcohol-free gentian bitters, tonic water, plus a cucumber for ribbons.
Magic
Dash the gentian bitters into the tonic rather than into the base. Stir them into the tonic in a small pitcher and pour that over the shaken juice. Bitters dashed into a dense fruit base sink with it and sit under three ounces of tonic where nobody meets them; carried in the tonic instead, the bitterness rides the top layer and is the first thing the drinker gets. Not feeling brave? Dash them straight onto the surface after topping, which gets you most of the way and looks better than it has any right to.
Gotcha
The bitters go into the tonic no more than a minute before it hits the glass. Tonic in an open pitcher loses its carbonation fast, and past two or three minutes you are pouring flat quinine syrup onto cucumber juice, which is exactly as sad as it sounds. Mix small amounts, one round at a time.
Every topped highball is really two drinks stacked on each other. The shaken base is dense with sugar and fruit solids and it stays at the bottom. The tonic is lighter and it floats. Stir once and they mix; put the glass down and within a couple of minutes they have partly re-sorted themselves, because that is what liquids of different densities do while you are talking to someone.
Which means the placement of two dashes of bitters is not a trivia question. Put them in the base and they go where the base goes: down, under three ounces of tonic, mostly out of reach until the last third of the drink. Put them in the tonic and the bitterness is the first thing that happens.
Put the bitterness on top
Practically, this means measuring the tonic into a small pitcher, dashing the bitters in, giving it one gentle turn, and pouring immediately. It sounds like an extra step and it is, but it is an extra step that happens once per round rather than once per glass, so serving four people costs you about eight seconds.
Gentian is the reason it is worth doing. It is the bitter principle in a great many aperitifs, it is genuinely assertive, and against cucumber and green grape it is doing all the structural work in this drink. Two dashes buried under the tonic tastes like a cucumber cooler that somebody mentioned bitters near. Two dashes carried in the tonic tastes like a drink with a spine.
One tall glass
- 1 1/2 ounces green-grape juice
- 1 ounce cucumber juice
- 1/2 ounce tarragon syrup
- 1/2 ounce lemon juice
- 2 dashes alcohol-free gentian bitters
- 2 ounces tonic water
- Cucumber ribbon
Green grape juice is worth pressing yourself if you have any way to do it. The bottled stuff is nearly always white grape concentrate, which is sweeter, heavier, and has lost the slightly green, slightly sour quality that makes this build work. A blender and a sieve will do it.
Tarragon syrup should be made by steeping, not simmering. Bring the syrup to temperature, take it off, drop the tarragon in, and give it fifteen minutes. Boiled tarragon tastes like aniseed and boiled leaves.
Method
Shake everything except tonic and bitters with ice. Note that the bitters have moved out of this step.
Strain into a tall glass over fresh ice.
Top with the tonic you have just dashed the bitters into, poured steadily down the inside of the glass.
Garnish with a cucumber ribbon, run down the inside wall with a peeler and tucked against the ice rather than draped over the rim, where it will slide off onto someone’s shoe.
Ice
Fill the glass. All the way, cubes touching the rim. This is a five-and-a-half-ounce drink in a tall glass and if you use four cubes you will have a warm, half-empty glass of vegetable juice by the time the conversation gets interesting.
Cold glasses help too, and cucumber in particular tastes noticeably better very cold, going from refreshing to faintly savory as it warms.
Morning of
Prepare the still base the morning of the party. Not the night before — cucumber juice is the most perishable thing in this recipe and it goes from clean and green to something closer to the smell of a salad drawer within about twelve hours, even refrigerated.
For eight, that is 12 ounces grape juice, 8 ounces cucumber juice, 4 ounces tarragon syrup, and 4 ounces lemon juice, bottled and kept very cold. Pour 3 1/2 ounces per glass. Keep the tonic in the fridge with it, since a cold tonic poured into a cold drink holds its gas far better than a room-temperature one.
Cut the cucumber ribbons an hour ahead at most and keep them in cold water. They curl attractively and they also go limp and translucent if left too long, at which point they look less like a garnish and more like something that happened.
With alcohol
Gin is the obvious answer and it is correct: an ounce and a half of something juniper-forward, with the tonic reduced to 1 1/2 ounces. Blanco tequila is the more interesting answer and pairs unexpectedly well with the tarragon.
The drink loses nothing without either. Cucumber, gentian, tonic, and lemon give it bitterness, acidity, and a dry finish, which is a complete structure, and this is one of the very few zero-proof builds that is genuinely improved by being served in the same glass as everything else on the table so that nobody can tell which is which.
Food
Anything green and salty. Olives, feta, cured fish, a bowl of good chips. It also does well as the palate-reset drink partway through an evening, which is a job most drinks are bad at.
For the version where that reset has a place in an actual evening, Exit Through the Garden’s occasion plan handles the food, sequence, and controlled-heat service.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
