trinidad sour

1 1/2 oz Angostura Bitters
1 1/2 oz Ferrara Orgeat
1 oz Lemon Juice
1/2 oz Rittenhouse Rye

Shake with ice and strain into a coupe glass. And yes, those are the correct volumes.

For my second cocktail at Drink last night, the honorable Ben Sandrof came by to chat. We began speaking about how much bitters you could drink straight without getting sick and then how much you could put in a cocktail and still have it work. Excluding some of the sweeter bitters out there like Fee's or Stirrings, the most I have ever seen was in the Woodpecker, a drink I left off of our menu at the International Migratory Bird Day cocktail party where we served bird-inspired cocktails, due what seemed like an absurd recipe:

Woodpecker
• 2 oz Vodka
• 15 dashes Angostura (or Peychaud's) Bitters
Serve with 4 ice cubes or with crushed ice in a rocks glass.

Ben countered that he had two cocktails that he thought I might like to change or at least challenge my mind. The one I went with was a sour created by Giuseppe Gonzales of the Clover Club in Brooklyn and brought to Ben by way of Daniel Eun. Well not just a sour, but an inversion of a standard sour recipe such that the rye, which you would assume is the base spirit, becomes the flavor enhancer, and the bitters instead of being the accent become the drink's base. One of the pleasures of Ben's bartending is that while he can conjure up and serve perfectly regular drinks, he will gladly throw in a level of perversity if you are game, and accepting the perversity gauntlet often pays off grandly. For example, one of the most memorable drinks I had at No. 9 Park was a 1794 cocktail that Ben made for me with some xanthum gum-thickened Campari (almost a jelly) that yielded a cocktail with a rather fun and full mouthfeel to it. I figured that this would be a drink bold enough to match the Scotch Sazerac I had just finished.
I was in utter awe when the drink appeared in front of me. It was rather red with a thick froth on top. On the nose of the drink, there was a great deal of cinnamon, spice, and almond/orgeat aromatics. Upon the first sip, it was surprisingly very citrusy with more of a lime taste to it due to something in the bitters modifying the lemon's flavor. The ounce and a half of Angostura bitters a priori sounds like a disaster and my mind had a preconceived opinion of the flavor profile. However, it worked in a very delicious way, and not only that but the cherry wood in the Angostura's botanical mix brought out a great cherry-fruit flavor. Lauren Clark of DrinkBoston was at the ice bar behind me and Ben made her one as well. Lauren said she initially attributed the cherry flavor to her mind tricking her into thinking the drink was cherryish due to its incredible red color a la cherry juice. Over all, I was quite pleased with this drink both as an experience and as a drink itself. It was indeed an intense cocktail but very different type of intense from my Ardbeg Sazerac.