Episode 72: Aperol Spritz

  • 3 parts prosecco

  • 2 parts Aperol

  • 1 part soda water

  • Orange slice garnish

Fill a large wine glass with ice and pour in chilled prosecco. Slowly add the Aperol and then top up with soda. Gently stir and garnish with an orange slice.

Aperol is a citrusy bittersweet Italian Apertif. The name is actually a play on a French slang word for aperitif, “Apéro”.

While Aperol first came on the market in italy in 1919, the spritz has been around for much longer. In the 1800s, part of the Veneto region of northern Italy was controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The story is that visitors and soldiers from the empire found Italian wines too strong and started adding a splash (a "spritz," in German) of water to lighten them up.

Over the years the recipe slowly evolved, and soda water was eventually substituted for flat water, and from there people started adding other flavors and liqueurs to their wines to dress them up even more.

Aperol was added to the spritz in the 1950s, and while the recipe was an instant hit in Italy, it didn’t really become popular in the US until the 1970s when many Italian liqueur brands were spending a lot of marketing dollars in the U.S.

It was modestly popular in the 1970s, but when Aperol was acquired by Gruppo Campari in the early 2000s, they went in hard with advertising to Americans once again, making the Aperol Spritz the go-to drink at social media-friendly events like The Governor's Ball. Since then the drink is absolutely ubiquitous across the globe.

Episode 37: Sloe Gin Fizz

  • 1 1/2 ounces sloe gin

  • 1 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice

  • 1/2 to 3/4 ounce simple syrup, to taste

  • Club soda, to top

  • Optional garnish: cocktail cherry and/or lemon wedge

Add the sloe gin, lemon juice and simple syrup to a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Shake until frosty and strain over ice into a highball or collins glass. Top with club soda and garnish with a cocktail cherry, a lemon wedge, or both.

sloeginfizz.jpg

For those who don’t know, Sloe Gin a liqueur made from a sloe berry. These tiny tart jammy little berries grow in clumps on blackthorn trees in England and Western Europe. They’re a cousin to the plum.

In Europe sloe gin is usually made at home by harvesting sloes berries from and infusing them in gin with sugar. It’s usually bottled in the fall and matured for a few months, so it’s usually considered a winter drink.

In America, a lot of Sloe Gin is artificially flavored and colored, producing brightly red, super fruity, and syrupy sweet, liqueur that was perfect for 80s classic cocktails like the Alabama Slammer or the Sloe Comfortable Screw.

Thankfully, a few years back Plymouth Gin started producing a classic, English style sloe gin based on an 1883 recipe and now Hayman’s and Sipsmith are making the real stuff too. Greensmith’s gin in Greenpoint Brooklyn makes a beach plum gin that’s supposed to taste very similar. Beach plums are a cousin to the sloe berry indigenous to the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Maine.

The sloe gin fizz is a take on the classic gin fizz made with gin, lemon, sugar, seltzer, and an egg white. For a sloe gin fizz, you just swap the sloe gin for regular gin, and leave out the egg white. It’s lighter and brighter than a traditional gin fizz, and Sloe gin is less boozy than regular gin so you can have as many as you want. It’s bright and tart and sweet and tastes a bit like a (slightly) alcoholic Italian Soda.

Episode 18: The Whiskey Highball

  • 2 oz Bourbon or Rye Whiskey

  • 4 to 6 oz Soda Water

  • Ice

  • Lemon garnish (optional)

Fill a highball glass (8-10oz tall narrow glass) with ice. Pour whiskey over ice and top off with soda water. Some recipes insist stirring can squelch the bubbles in the soda, so there’s no need.

Garnish with a lemon wheel, wedge, or curl if desired.

highball

This is probably the simplest and easiest cocktail we’ve ever made on the show, but that doesn’t mean this drink doesn’t have a rich and storied past.

Historian Jessica Norris says that “Most folks agree that the Highball started out as a sparkling brandy cocktail with the English gentry in the 1790s, when Johann Jacob Schweppe had just set up his first soda shop in London.”
Some say a bartender named Patrick Gavin Duffy was likely the one who brought the drink to the U.S. in 1895 in the form of a scotch and soda.

As for the name of this simple classic drink, one origin story claims it came from 19th century English golf club bars, where “ball” meant “whiskey” and “high” referred to the tall glass it was served in.
Other people say it may have come from nineteenth century railroad signals. On American railroads, if a globe or ball was raised up high on a signal post, it meant “clear track ahead” and showed the conductor that the train could pass through without stopping. As dining cars started serving cocktails in tall glasses, they adapted the “high ball” signal and attached it to this classic beverage.