Good Side of the Stoop: Blackberry, Hibiscus, and Mint Fizz

Hibiscus is a bully. It is the loudest thing in the zero-proof pantry, and because it is beautiful and cheap and turns everything the color of a stained-glass window, people leave it steeping while they do something else. Four extra minutes and it will eat the blackberry, the mint, and most of the goodwill in the glass.

Respected properly, it is one of the best tools available: real acidity, real tannin, and a fruit character that is nobody’s specific fruit. This drink stacks it with black tea, which sounds like too much astringency and is exactly enough. The two together give you something with a spine, and then the blackberry has a job other than being sweet.

One drink

• 2 oz strong chilled hibiscus tea
• 1 oz blackberry puree
• 3/4 oz lemon juice
• 1/2 oz mint syrup
• 1 oz chilled black tea
• 2 oz soda water
• 2 dashes saline
• Mint and blackberry garnish

Plus, held back for the float: 1/2 oz blackberry puree loosened with 1 teaspoon soda water.

Mint syrup

Dissolve 1/2 cup sugar in 1/2 cup water over low heat, pull the pan off, let it cool until you can hold a finger in it, then add 1 packed cup of mint leaves. Steep 15 minutes and strain. Mint that hits boiling syrup turns the color and flavor of cut grass in about ten seconds, and there is no recovering it. Keeps four days.

The blackberry puree is blackberries blitzed and pushed through a sieve, no sugar. Six ounces of berries gives you roughly four ounces of puree, which covers three drinks with the float included. Seeds must come out or the float will not sit and the straw will clog.

Method

Shake the hibiscus tea, the ounce of blackberry, lemon, mint syrup, black tea, and saline with ice, then fine-strain over fresh ice. Top with soda. Now add a small dome of crushed ice on top — this is what makes the float possible, since the two liquids are close enough in density that on a clear cube the puree would simply sink. Pour the loosened puree slowly over the back of a barspoon onto the crushed ice, and let it find its own way down. Garnish with mint and a berry.

If it sinks anyway, it sinks. You get a beautiful pink-to-purple drift on the way down and a perfectly good drink at the bottom. This is not a technique with a failure state, only a technique with two outcomes.

Batching

Everything except the soda and the float scales cleanly and holds six hours in the fridge. Puree the berries the same day; blackberry puree goes brown-edged and slightly fermented-tasting after about eighteen hours even cold, and you will smell it before you taste it.

Crush the ice into a bowl and keep it in the freezer with a towel over the top so it does not fuse into a block. Set the reserved puree in a small pitcher with a spout next to the glasses and let people float their own. It is the rare bit of guest participation that does not end in someone over-pouring gin into their own drink.

If you want it with alcohol

1 oz of a lightly aged rum is the best answer, because hibiscus and cane sugar have a long history together and the rum brings a roundness that the tea is deliberately withholding. Gin works and makes it sharper. Bourbon does not work; the vanilla fights the mint and both lose. If you are making a mixed group of these, the spiked version can be poured over the identical base, so you only build one pitcher.

What to eat with it

Something rich enough to need cutting through. Fried chicken. A cheese plate that has gotten out of hand. Anything with a lot of black pepper on it.

Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.