The One Drink and the No-Drink
Last Known Location: Rye, Smoked Tea, Blood Orange, and Amaro
Blood oranges are in season for about ten weeks and taste like ordinary oranges for two of them. Buy them when the flesh is frightening and not before.
Serve alongside
Smoked almonds and dark chocolate with orange, or a few slices of speck. Everything in this glass is smoked, bitter, or both, and the food should bring salt and fat rather than another flavor.
Tools
Shaker, fine strainer, and a rocks glass that can take a large cube without the cube touching all four walls. A silicone big-cube tray, or a loaf pan of water frozen slowly and hacked into chunks with a serrated knife. A thermometer helps here more than usual; a kettle left off the boil for two minutes is the workaround.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Rye whiskey, medium-bitter amaro (Montenegro for gentle, Nonino for dry), smoked black tea leaves such as lapsang souchong, sugar, blood oranges (navel orange with a bar spoon of pomegranate juice is a passable stand-in for color and tartness), aromatic bitters.
Magic
Make the syrup before you make the tea, then pour one onto the other. Dissolve the sugar in water first, bring it to about 175°F, and pour that warm syrup directly over the smoked tea leaves — six minutes, then strain. A heavy sugar solution is a much poorer solvent for tannin than plain water is, so you pull the smoke and the malt out well ahead of the astringency. Not feeling brave? Brew the tea conventionally but pull the leaves at three minutes and sweeten after.
Gotcha
Six minutes, and the syrup no hotter than 175°F. Boiling syrup scalds smoked tea leaves and turns the smoke from woodsmoke into cold ashtray, which is a distinction everyone can taste and nobody can fix. Past about eight minutes it goes there anyway, even at the right temperature.
Blood oranges are in season for roughly ten weeks and taste like ordinary oranges for two of them, usually the first two, when they arrive pale and hedging. Wait. The ones worth juicing have flesh that looks slightly alarming when you cut them and juice that runs closer to garnet than to orange, and they are noticeably more tart than a navel, which is the property this drink is actually buying.
Half an ounce of that juice against an ounce and a half of rye is not enough to make the drink citrusy. It is enough to keep the amaro and the smoked tea syrup from closing ranks and becoming one dark, sweet, undifferentiated thing, which is what happens when you build this with regular orange juice and wonder why it feels heavy.
Sugar first, water never
Smoked black tea is a difficult ingredient to sweeten after the fact. Lapsang souchong is dried over pinewood fires, which gives it its smoke, and it is also a fully oxidized black tea with plenty of tannin behind that. Brew it in plain water and you extract both at once, then add sugar to a liquid that is already astringent, and the sweetness sits on top of the drying sensation rather than integrating with it.
Reverse the two steps. Make the syrup first — equal weights sugar and water — and get it to about 175°F, which is a hard simmer that has been off the heat for a minute or two. Pour it straight over the dry leaves. Six minutes with a lid on. Strain and cool.
This is not a cold brew and it is not the base of the drink; it is half an ounce of syrup doing a specific job. What you notice is that the smoke arrives clean and the drink does not dry your mouth out, which means you can actually have a second one.
One rocks glass
- 1 1/2 ounces rye whiskey
- 1/2 ounce medium-bitter amaro
- 1/2 ounce smoked black-tea syrup
- 1/2 ounce blood-orange juice
- 2 dashes aromatic bitters
- Orange peel
Method
Shake all ingredients except garnish with ice. Short and hard, about eight seconds. There is juice in here so it wants a shake rather than a stir, but there is not much of it, and a long shake over-aerates a drink that is meant to feel dense.
Strain over one large cube in a rocks glass. Fine-strain if your juice has pulp.
Express orange peel over the drink and garnish. Use the peel of the blood orange itself if it has any oil left in it after juicing; the peel is where the drink gets its top note, and blood orange peel smells faintly of raspberry in a way navel peel does not.
The cube
One large cube, and this is the part of the recipe most likely to be ignored and most likely to matter. Two and a half ounces of liquid over four or five small cubes is a completely different drink twelve minutes in. The point of the big cube is surface area: less of it, slower melt, and a drink that stays the same drink for the length of a conversation.
If you have no mold, freeze a shallow tray of water and break it into rough chunks. Rough is fine. Clear is not necessary and the pursuit of clear ice at home has cost more Saturdays than it has improved drinks.
Two days ahead
Batch everything except juice up to two days ahead. Rye, amaro, tea syrup, and bitters in a bottle, in the fridge.
For eight: 12 ounces rye, 4 ounces amaro, 4 ounces tea syrup, 16 dashes bitters. At service, add 1/2 ounce of fresh blood-orange juice per drink and shake. Juice the oranges the same day, and juice more than you think; blood oranges are smaller than they look and yield less than a navel.
The syrup itself keeps two weeks. It is also, incidentally, very good on a pork shoulder, which is not what it was made for but is where mine usually ends up.
Zero-proof
Harder than most, and worth admitting. Rye brings spice and heat and the amaro brings a genuinely complicated bitterness, and neither has a clean substitute.
What works: 2 ounces of strong cold rooibos for body and a little sweetness, 3/4 ounce of a bitter nonalcoholic aperitif, 1/2 ounce smoked tea syrup, 1/2 ounce blood-orange juice, 2 dashes nonalcoholic aromatic bitters, and a pinch of salt. Shake and pour over the same big cube. Rooibos is doing the work here because it has body without tannin, so it will not fight the smoke.
It lands lighter than the original. It is not trying to be the original, and it is a better drink than any version built by simply leaving the whiskey out.
Food
Something charred. Grilled meat, blistered peppers, a dish that has seen actual fire. The smoke in the glass has an easier time when the plate agrees with it.
The food can agree without becoming one long smoke signal; the Last Known Location party plan shows where the char belongs, what else to serve, and how to pace the night.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
