Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, Loaded For Pear!

A pear martini with actual pears in it. Who would have thought?

Yay! A photo from Hemingway’s that isn’t lit terribly!

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. I’m planning ahead for January’s cocktail menu, and I’ve come up with an elevated version of a country club classic. Let’s make a pear martini, but make it spicy, juicy, and a little tart. And let’s make an awful Dad joke when we name this drink. Time to make a Loaded For Pear. Here’s the recipe:

Loaded For Pear

2 oz House D’Anjou Vodka

½ oz ginger liquor

¼ oz St. Germain

¼ oz lemon juice

Shake all ingredients and strain into a martini glass. Garnish with a lemon twist

House D’Anjou Vodka

750 ml vodka

3 D’Anjou pears

Peel, core, and coarsely chop the pears. Combine pears and vodka in a large glass jar. Let sit at room temperature for 24 hours. Strain into a sealable bottle for use, pushing down on the solids to extract as much juice as possible. Keeps indefinitely in the fridge, 1-2 weeks at room temperature.

This is another recipe that I’ve salvaged from my country club days, where a “pear martini” consisted of 4-5 chilled ounces of Grey Goose pear vodka poured into a martini glass. I’m not a huge fan of “premium vodkas” like Grey Goose or Belvedere in the first place, and I’m not at all sure how much actual pear is in their pear-flavored vodka. Reviews pick up banana, bubble gum, and vanilla flavors from the spirit, but there isn’t much pear in evidence. Grey Goose goes through an elaborate distillation and infusion process to incorporate pear into its spirit. But at the end of the day, I feel like so much filtering and processing is involved in getting bottles on the shelves that something important gets lost.

I decided to take a very basic, elemental approach to making an authentic pear vodka for this cocktail. Take some pears. Put them in some vodka. Let them sit a while. Done. It only took a day for the pear juice to leach out into the spirit. Straining the infusion with a nut bag let me squeeze every last bit of pear goodness from the fruit into the liquor.

The process wasn’t without some surprises, however. When I first strained the pear vodka, it appeared cloudy but was clear. After four days, the spirit turned a light brown, the color of weak tea. Oxidation occurs when cut fruit is exposed to the air. I’m not sure whether the color change occurred because the liquor was left at room temperature on the back shelf of the bar or because it was exposed to more light on the shelf than in a dark fridge. Insight from the Wonketariat is welcome here. In either case, the color change did not affect the taste, and after shaking, the cocktail turned a light yellow-brown that I associate with pears. It’s an unexpected but fortuitous result.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot, pre-cocktail manufacturing. The deeper I get into mixology, the more random bottles get handwritten labels.

D’Anjou Pear Vodka: I chose D’Anjou pears because they’re relatively firm and less likely to turn into mush after sitting in the vodka. Feel free to use whatever variety of pears you wish. I used Luskoya vodka as the base spirit; it’s the rail vodka at Hemingway’s. A lighter, sweeter vodka, such as Tito’s, would be excellent here. If you wanted to go crazy, you could take Grey Goose Pear vodka and, ah, “re-pear” the flawed spirit with fresh pear flavor.

Ginger Liquor: Pear and ginger are a natural flavor pairing. We use Canton Ginger Liquor at the bar. A cheaper ginger spirit won’t be as nice.

St. Germain: Sometimes referred to as “bartender’s ketchup,” this elderflower liqueur finds its way into any number of cocktails. It’s a bit of a cliche at this point, but the elderflower flavors do complement the pear. Simple syrup is a straightforward alternative. Note that we’re using a tiny amount of ginger, St. Germain, and lemon in this recipe; the pear flavors are subtle and can easily be overwritten by other flavors.

Lemon Juice: A touch of acid to balance the sweetness of the cocktail. Always use fresh. Plastic lemons provide plastic juice.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by and I’ll make a drink for you … or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette.

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