The bar
A traditional rye wants the drinks that were written for it. The cask-strength bottles take a drop of water. The 45% small batch is the one to stir. Please enjoy responsibly.
The first serve is no serve. A traditional rye, six or seven years in virgin oak, should be allowed to speak before anything is added.
A tulip or a rocks glass. Cask strength (56–59%) often wants a drop of water. The 45% small batch can go neat or over one large cube. Give it a minute.
The original whiskey cocktail: spirit, sugar, bitters, ice. Rye keeps it from becoming a sweet drink. Nothing costume about it.
Muddle sugar with bitters and a splash of water, add rye and ice, stir until cold. Express a wide orange peel over the glass and drop it in.
The drink the Martinez later borrowed from. Rye, Italian vermouth, bitters. The virgin oak in Reinheart stands up to the vermouth without disappearing.
Stir with ice and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a cherry or an expressed orange peel.
New Orleans. An absinthe-rinsed glass, Peychaud’s, rye. Keep it honest: no fruit salad, no costume.
Rinse a chilled rocks glass with absinthe. Stir rye, sugar and Peychaud’s with ice; strain into the rinsed glass. Express lemon over the top and discard the peel.
The Negroni’s American cousin, written in Paris in the 1920s for Erskine Gwynne’s magazine The Boulevardier. Rye instead of gin; the same three-part discipline.
Stir with ice and strain over a large rock, or serve up. Garnish with an orange twist.
A Canadian whiskey cocktail that wants rye: Fernet-Branca, a little syrup, Angostura. Bitter, herbal, short.
Stir with ice and strain into a chilled coupe. Express orange over the glass.
Walter Bergeron, Hotel Monteleone, 1930s. Rye, cognac, vermouth, Bénédictine, two bitters. A longer conversation than a Manhattan.
Stir with ice and strain over a large rock. Garnish with a lemon peel.
The sour is older than the word cocktail. Rye, lemon, sugar; egg white if you want the texture. Reinheart’s spice keeps the drink from reading as lemonade.
Shake hard with ice (dry-shake first if using egg white) and strain into a rocks glass or a coupe. A dash of bitters on the foam if you like.
For adults 18+. A spirit of Hammer & Son.
