Welcome to Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Brown Derby!

Because NA cocktails shouldn't taste like they came from a sippy cup.

A smoky, balanced mocktail? Sign me up.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. I’m writing this on Thursday, and I’m as sick as a dog. Booze seems like a horrible idea right now. I decided to make the best of things and work on a mocktail for the Wonketariat. I’m normally not a fan of mocktails, but this one hits some notes most NA cocktails don’t touch. Let’s make a Brown Derby. Here’s the recipe:

Brown Derby

1 ½ oz Lapsang Souchong tea, room temperature

1 ½ oz grapefruit juice

1 oz maple syrup

½ oz lime juice

2-3 drops saline

Pinch smoked paprika

Shake all ingredients. Garnish with an orange twist.

My major complaint with mocktails is that they lean on fruit juice and soda as their central ingredients. Don’t get me wrong, we use top-notch fresh juice at Hemingway’s, but there’s only so much flavor fruit can bring to the table. Alcohol is complex. Gin is the prime example – it is nothing but alcohol and dozens of botanicals. A gin like The Botanist or Roku is dizzyingly complex. Juice, syrup, and soda just can’t compete. It’s like trying to paint a landscape with finger paints. The fine details just aren’t there.

One of my fellow bartenders at Hemingway’s, Thomas Wines, is a huge advocate of tea as a cocktail ingredient. The Burlesque Martini is a creation of Tommy’s that uses a hibiscus syrup. It’s a fantastic drink that’s selling like gangbusters. Tea can provide layers of flavor, depth of character, and desperately needed bitterness to a mocktail.

Tommy’s approach is delicate, layered, and nuanced. I did none of that. Instead, I grabbed the smokiest tea I could find and used it as a whiskey substitute in a classic.

Per Dale DeGroff, the Brown Derby was a cocktail created in the 1930s at the Vendome Club, across the street from the Brown Derby Diner. (Yes, the Brown Derby Diner was in a building shaped like a big brown hat. No, it did not pour the cocktail named after it. Yes, bar owners can be this petty.) Bittersweet grapefruit juice seemed like a great way to reinforce the tea’s tannins with another bittering agent (furanocoumarins, for the record). Honey syrup and grapefruit are a natural pairing in cocktails, but I decided to use maple syrup in this glass. Maple and bourbon love each other. I wanted to see if the tea would yield a similar pairing.

I didn’t have to hunt too hard for the correct tea. I wanted something very dark and very smoky, and Lapsang Souchong fit the bill beautifully. Lapsang Souchong is one of the world’s first black teas, dried over pine fires in high, misty Wuyi mountains. Nothing else came close. When I shook up this cocktail, the long, smoky finish of the drink reminded me of a classic Islay scotch. Perfect.

At this point, with just three ingredients, the cocktail was a winner. I only needed a few adjustments to make it perfect. The drink tasted a touch flat. Some saline fixed that nicely. A little more acidity from lime juice sharpened the flavors. The flavor profile was almost perfect, but it wasn’t quite complex enough. A pinch of smoked paprika added another dimension to the cocktail’s smoke and some surprising richness. The end result is a mocktail that isn’t sweet and isn’t juice-forward, exactly what I was hoping for.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot. Not bad work for a sick day.

Lapsang Souchong tea: Make sure that the tea is cooled to room temperature before adding it to the cocktail. Do not substitute your favorite tea for the Lapsang Souchong. The recipe isn’t that flexible. It won’t work. I brewed this tea strong – ¼ oz tea, 8 oz. water.

Grapefruit Juice: Ocean Spray is making 100% unadulterated grapefruit juice, and I’m so grateful. For too long, the only grapefruit juice you could get on the market was a “grapefruit juice cocktail”, doctored with apple juice and white grape juice and whatnot. Use the real stuff.

Maple Syrup: Grade A Amber or bust. If you try using “pancake syrup” in this drink, we will have words.

Lime Juice: A touch of added acid. Use fresh.

Saline: 1:10 sea salt and water, fully dissolved. A pinch of sea salt is fine.

Smoked Paprika: Use a light hand, and make sure to double-strain the cocktail. If I had given myself more time, I would have tried brewing the tea with the paprika. Right now, I just want some OJ and bed.

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. We’ll make it through this together.

OPEN THREAD!