The One Drink and the No-Drink
Glass House: Vodka, Rose, Lychee, Dry Vermouth, and Celery
Rose has exactly one failure mode and it is soap. There is no gentle slope down into it either; you are fine, and then you are drinking a hand towel.
Serve alongside
Cold crab, or cucumber and radish with butter and salt. Celery bitters keep this savory underneath all the rose, and the plate should side with the celery rather than the lychee.
Tools
Mixing glass, bar spoon, julep strainer. A pint glass and a chopstick get it done. A measuring spoon that actually measures, since a quarter ounce is a half tablespoon and the difference between a half and a rounded half is the difference between this drink working and not.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Vodka, dry vermouth (keep it in the fridge and buy the small bottle), lychee syrup (the syrup from a can of lychees, strained, is entirely legitimate), rose water cordial, celery bitters, lemon.
Magic
Sweeten it after you chill it. Stir the vodka, vermouth, and bitters alone over ice to full dilution, pull the mixing glass off the ice, and only then stir in the lychee syrup and the rose cordial cold. You dilute the spirits to target without watering the two most fragile things in the build, and — the real prize — you can taste and adjust the rose at the last possible second instead of finding out about it in the glass. Not feeling brave? Stir it all together as written but hold back half the rose cordial and add it at the end.
Gotcha
Stop stirring the spirits at 25 seconds. There are only 2 1/4 ounces of liquid in the mixing glass at that stage rather than a full three, so it takes on water noticeably faster than a standard martini does. At 35 seconds you have a wet drink, and there is no step later in this recipe that removes water.
Rose has one failure mode and it is soap. There is no gentle slope down into it either. You are fine, and fine, and then you are drinking a hand towel, and the distance between those two states in a three-ounce drink is somewhere around an eighth of a teaspoon.
Which is why the order of this build matters more than anything else about it. Rose water cordial, lychee syrup, and dry vermouth are all delicate in different directions, and the standard method — everything in the glass, stir, strain — means the moment you can first taste the drink is also the moment it is finished. You get one look at it, at the point where nothing can be changed.
Sweeten it after you chill it
Split the stir. Vodka, dry vermouth, and the celery bitters go over ice and get stirred to proper temperature and dilution. Then lift the mixing glass off, strain out or remove the ice, and stir the lychee syrup and rose cordial into the cold liquid with a few slow turns.
Two things come from this. The smaller one is dilution control: the water goes into the spirits, where you want it, and the cordials arrive at full concentration rather than pre-watered. The larger one is that you now have a cold, diluted, nearly finished drink in front of you at the exact moment the rose goes in, so you can add a bit, taste, and stop.
Start with less rose than the recipe says. You can always add the rest. You cannot take it out, and the standard remedies people suggest for an over-roused drink — more vodka, more lychee, a pinch of salt — produce a bigger drink that still tastes of rose.
The build
- 1 1/2 ounces vodka
- 3/4 ounce dry vermouth
- 1/2 ounce lychee syrup
- 1/4 ounce rose water cordial
- 2 dashes celery bitters
- Lemon twist
Celery bitters are the ingredient nobody expects and the one holding the drink to the ground. Rose and lychee together are almost aggressively pretty. The celery is green and slightly bitter and stops the whole thing from turning into a candle.
The stir, in two parts
Stir vodka, vermouth, and bitters with ice until very cold. Twenty-five seconds, counted rather than felt.
Add the lychee syrup and rose cordial off the ice, and turn the spoon five or six times to combine. Taste here.
Strain into a chilled Nick and Nora glass.
Express a lemon twist over the surface and discard or garnish. My preference is discard. A twist left in the glass keeps giving oil to the drink for as long as it sits there, and this build does not want any more perfume than it already has.
Glass
Nick and Nora, out of the freezer, and this is one of the drinks where the frozen glass is genuinely load-bearing rather than a flourish. Cold suppresses volatile aromatics, and cold is exactly what is keeping the rose in proportion. Serve this at fridge temperature instead of freezer temperature and it smells about twice as strong, which sounds appealing and is not.
Two days ahead
Batch and refrigerate up to two days ahead. This drink is unusually good-natured about it, because there is no citrus in the build and vodka is not going to change its mind about anything overnight.
Batch the vodka, vermouth, bitters, and lychee syrup with 20 percent water by volume, and leave the rose cordial out. At service, pour into a frozen glass and add the rose per drink from a dropper bottle or a bar spoon, stirring once. That way a guest who hates rose gets a clean lychee martini and nobody has to have a conversation about it.
Zero-proof
Straightforwardly good, this one. Replace the vodka with 1 1/2 ounces of chilled cucumber water and the vermouth with 3/4 ounce of a dry nonalcoholic white, or a very light chamomile tea if you have neither.
Keep the lychee, the rose, the celery bitters, and the split stir, and add two drops of saline, which the alcohol was previously providing in the form of texture. Stir the base for 20 seconds rather than 25. It should still be served in a frozen glass, for the same reason as above, and it should still be served without comment.
What goes with it
Cold shrimp, cucumber, anything you would eat with your fingers standing up. Nothing hot, nothing with garlic. This drink cannot be asked to compete and will simply stop being audible.
Glass House becomes a full cocktail party here, with the cold-food lane, quantities, timing, and service built around the drink instead of on top of it.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
