cocktail inspiration by

RISA WEAVER-ENION

Egg white foam is typically found on top of sours (Pisco Sour, Whiskey Sour, New York Sour, etc.), and in keeping with the winter season, I wanted to bring in grapefruit and rosemary. Citrus fruits are at their peak during winter, and rosemary is basically just a tiny Christmas tree, right?

I decided to go with gin for my base spirit, but I easily could have used a blanco tequila here, so feel free to use whichever one you like best. The sour template is pretty standard: 2 ounces of spirit, 1 ounce of citrus juice, ¾ ounce of a syrup, and an egg white.

Instead of using plain simple syrup, I infused it with rosemary to get more of that woodsy flavor. It’s always ideal to garnish with something that ties back into the cocktail ingredients. I knew I wanted to embellish this cocktail with a grapefruit wheel and some fresh rosemary, so this was the best way to work the rosemary into the drink.

Note: I recommend using fresh rosemary for the infusion, but if you need to use dried rosemary, you’ll want to keep a close eye on your infusion because dried rosemary can turn bitter quite quickly. With fresh rosemary, you can let the infusion sit longer without getting bitter.

And just to make the garnish a little extra, I decided to sprinkle some sugar on the grapefruit wheel and brûlée it using a kitchen torch. This makes the grapefruit tastier if you want to eat the garnish when you finish your drink. (Or before you finish your drink. No judgment.)

The key to a freshly grated nutmeg garnish is a microplane (or rasp) grater. Selefina helpfully sells one, so when you stock up on whole nutmeg, be sure to add the grater to your cart if you don’t already own one.

I like to grate off the outer hull of the nutmeg before I use it to garnish a drink. The really fragrant nutmeg is inside, so you want to grate enough to get to the good part. I also recommend grating some nutmeg on top of the rosemary and grapefruit garnish (mostly for the visual effect—it looks a little bit like snow when it lands on the rosemary—but also because it will enhance your grapefruit snack even more).

If you’re worried about the garnish falling off while drinking, you could also serve this in a rocks glass over a large ice cube. In that case, you could balance the grapefruit and rosemary on top of the ice and there would be no danger of it falling off. But don’t forget the nutmeg!

Nothing says “the holiday season” like a little fresh nutmeg grated on top of your drink. Add in winter citrus in the form of grapefruit and some rosemary, and you have a festive garnish that works for all the end-of-year holidays.

The Old-Fashioned is the king of cocktails, and the original is perfect just the way it is (2 ounces of bourbon, either a sugar cube or some simple syrup, and 2 dashes of Angostura bitters), but the template is also endlessly riffable.

Does an Old-Fashioned need a sugar rim garnish? No. But is it fun? Yes.

The powdered maple sugar is very fine, and its flavor is delicate. I didn’t want to overpower the maple taste, so instead of bourbon I went with a less heavy Japanese whisky. Suntory Toki is widely available and has an approachable price point (usually under $40, which is a real bargain as far as Japanese whiskies go).

I also replaced the usual Angostura bitters with a cardamom option, again to not overpower the maple sugar.

For the garnish I used a technique familiar from margaritas—use a cut citrus wedge to wet the rim of the glass, then dip it in a pile of maple sugar. It got a little clumpy because, as I mentioned, the powder is very fine. But that also helps in terms of not getting a mouthful of sugar with each sip. You get just enough to amplify the maple taste.

When I made this cocktail, I used 1 teaspoon of the sugar and dissolved it into the whisky. You could also easily make a maple simple syrup with the powdered maple sugar. Just combine equal amounts of hot water and the sugar, stir to dissolve the sugar completely, and then let it cool.

I usually don’t make my simple syrups on the stove because it can cause the water to cook off, changing the sweetness of your syrup. I just pour boiling water over the sugar in a Pyrex measuring cup. It’s also easier to pour the cooled syrup into a storage jar thanks to the spout on the Pyrex.

If you want to double-down on the maple sugar flavor, you could make a rich maple sugar syrup. A “rich” syrup is a 2-to-1 ratio of sugar to water, whereas a “simple” syrup is a 1-to-1 ratio. (If you ever see a recipe call for rich syrup, now you know what that means.)

Using twice as much powdered maple sugar would result in a thicker consistency and a sweeter syrup, so you’ll have to play around with how much to add to your Old-Fashioned to get the right balance. But if you love bourbon, then I think a rich maple syrup would be the way to go, because it would stand up better to the bourbon.

The bottom line is that this powdered maple sugar is a versatile cocktail ingredient, and I’m looking forward to finding even more ways to put it to use!

When I saw that Selefina has a powdered maple sugar, I immediately wanted to put it in an Old-Fashioned. But then I went one step further and also garnished with it.

I originally envisioned using a whole slice of apple (sliced crosswise through the apple so you get the star shape made by the core and seeds). Once you pull out the seeds, the slits from where the seeds were create the star shape. I wanted to put the whole cloves into those slits, but they wouldn’t stay in place and kept flopping out. Also, the full apple slice was a little too big for a garnish and was unwieldy and overwhelming.

So instead I cut the apple slice in half and pressed the cloves into it along the outer edge for a decorative apple half-moon. Every time you bring the glass to your mouth for a sip, you get a lovely whiff of the cloves.

The cocktail itself really leans into fall flavors with apple cider, maple syrup, and Laird’s applejack. (No, not those Applejacks. We’re not putting sugary cereal in our cocktail.)

Applejack is basically a brandy (a spirit distilled from fruit). It’s a true part of American spirits history, having been made here since colonial times. The first person to distill it in America was William Laird in 1698, and the most well-known brand of applejack is still made by the company that bears his name.

The reason it’s called “applejack” is actually quite fascinating. Prior to the introduction of modern production methods, it was made by “jacking” apple cider—that is, fermenting the cider to make it alcoholic and then freezing it. By periodically removing the frozen bits (the water), the leftover fermented cider was concentrated and higher in alcohol because alcohol doesn’t freeze.

These days, applejack is made in the decidedly less interesting method of blending distilled apple brandy with neutral grain spirit to boost the alcohol percentage. But I’m sure someone out there is still “jacking” fermented apple cider to make a homemade bootleg product!

Lucky for you, Laird’s is widely available, so the hardest thing about this cocktail is picking up the tiny cloves and pushing them through the apple. And the apple makes a delightful snack when you finish the cocktail. Just please remember to remove the cloves. And don’t feel like you have to throw away the cloves when you finish the drink. I just put mine back in the jar and use them the next time I need whole cloves for something, which, let’s be honest, is probably going to be another cocktail!

We’re heading into fall, so it’s apple season, and cloves make a wonderful complement to apples. Apples also pair well with whiskey. This cocktail leans into fall flavors with apple cider, maple syrup, Laird’s applejack, and of course, cloves.

Despite the fact that fall/autumn doesn’t actually begin until the third week of September, a certain coffee shop that shall not be named has moved Pumpkin Spice Season ever earlier in a quest for more dollars (and euros and pounds and whatever other currency they do business in around the world).

And that’s how we end up using fall flavors when it’s still high tomato and sweet corn season, aka August. But it does give us something to look forward to when the weather actually begins to change and a warm beverage is just what we need to take the edge off that encroaching chill.

Enter: the Pumpkin Spice Irish Coffee. It’s everything you love about the original Irish Coffee, but with all those delightful fall baking spices. This recipe doubles down on the pumpkin pie spices, using them to make a flavorful syrup and also sprinkling them on top of a generous pillow of whipped cream.

There are two ways to make pumpkin spice syrup. If you have all the ingredients in whole form, you can steep them in a simple syrup mixture to impart the flavors. But if you really want to lean hard into those flavors, using Selefina’s ground pumpkin pie spice is the way to go. It takes longer, but the flavor bomb is worth the time.

The reason it takes longer is that the ground spices don’t fully dissolve into the simple syrup. Dissolving sugar into water takes only a few minutes, but you need to heat and stir the mixture much longer (closer to half an hour) to get some of the pie spices to dissolve.

Even then, they won’t all dissolve, which means you need to strain the syrup through a coffee filter to remove the remaining spice sediment. This can take anywhere from an hour to overnight, depending on how much syrup you’re making. So plan ahead!

Once you have your syrup though, it’s so delightfully flavorful. I wanted to use it first in an Irish Coffee because that’s such a classic cold-weather cocktail. The spiced syrup adds depth and warmth of flavor that complements the whiskey and isn’t overpowered by the coffee.

By sprinkling some pumpkin pie spice on top of the whipped cream, you get a nice whiff of cinnamon and cloves with each sip.

*The syrup is also excellent mixed into regular coffee or hot chocolate, drizzled on ice cream or yogurt, and used in place of simple syrup in cold cocktails.

The Pumpkin Spice Irish Coffee: It’s everything you love about the original Irish Coffee, but with delightful fall baking spices. This recipe doubles down on the pumpkin pie spices, using them to make a flavorful syrup and also sprinkling them on top of a generous pillow of whipped cream.

This cocktail is a fun lesson in chemistry. Dried butterfly pea flower is used to infuse gin with a purple color, which then changes shades when lemon or lime juice is added. The acidity in the citrus juice changes the pH of the gin, creating a fun effect.

It’s more obvious when you make the drink without the citrus juice and then add it after the fact, but that works best for highballs, and we’re making a foamed sour. But feel free to experiment on your own!

Selefina sells both whole dried butterfly pea flowers and a powdered version. I’ve used both to infuse gin, but I prefer the whole dried flowers. The powder is so fine that some of it ends up dissolving into the gin but what doesn’t dissolve is more difficult to strain out. You have to strain through a coffee filter, which takes a bit longer.

When you use the whole flowers, you can strain through a cheesecloth instantly. And bonus benefit: you can garnish with the dried whole flowers as well!

When garnishing with flowers (whether dried or fresh), it helps to have a foam layer to rest them on. Foam is achieved with one of three ingredients: egg white, artificial foamer, or aquafaba (the liquid in a can of chickpeas). They all have their downsides.

Egg whites are an animal product, so if you are vegan or allergic to eggs, you can’t use them. Some people also say that egg white foam smells a little like wet dog, lol. But aquafaba has sort of a weird aftertaste (at least I think it does). And do you really want to open a can of chickpeas every time you make a foamed cocktail?

Artificial foamer avoids both of these problems, but I have yet to find a good one. Fee Brothers makes one, but you have to use 10-12 dashes per drink, so the bottle goes fast. Mrs. Betters (a Canadian company) also makes one, but it’s expensive (and I hear it smells worse than actual egg whites). I’ve tried all three approaches, and I’m sticking with egg whites.

Another tip for floral garnishes is to use a pair of tweezers to place the flowers. It can be more precise than using your fingers. (Also if you’re making drinks for someone other than yourself, it’s more hygienic to not touch the garnish with your bare hands. You’ll see professional bartenders either wearing gloves or using tweezers to garnish drinks.)

When garnishing with flowers, you always want to make sure they are either fully edible or food grade. Fresh edible flowers can literally be eaten if you desire. Dried flowers aren’t really edible. But they also won’t poison you, which is obviously important. When in doubt, do a little Googling before putting any flowers in your drinks. I can vouch for these dried butterfly pea flowers!

Everyone loves a vibrantly colored cocktail, and purple is easy to achieve without artificial coloring. You simply use dried butterfly pea flower to infuse your spirit, and you can achieve varying hues of purple. Combining the purple spirit with lime or lemon juice changes the pH to turn it a different shade of blue/purple.

My Summer Spa Day Herbal Blend from Selefina Spices is fabulous infused into spirits or made into a syrup, but I wanted to use it as an over-the-top garnish, so I decided to paint some honey on a glass and sprinkle the herbal blend right into it.

Fun fact: if you let this drink sit for too long, the honey/garnish will eventually slide down the glass and end up in a pool at the base of the glass. I learned this the hard way while photographing this cocktail, lol.

The herbal blend contains lavender, hibiscus, and rosemary. I decided to play up one of those ingredients by infusing some gin with dried hibiscus leaves in order to end up with a bright red cocktail. Mission accomplished!

Hibiscus imparts a lot of color in a short amount of time. I infused my gin for less than three hours and it was a deep ruby red. Infusions with herbs can be tricky, because if you leave them in for too long, they can turn bitter. So I taste my infusions every hour or so until I’m satisfied that I’ve extracted enough flavor and color while preserving the original spirit.

Some garnishes can serve double-duty as a snack, such as the olives in a martini, or anything garnished with berries. Some garnishes are mostly to add aroma—like a bouquet of mint. This garnish is purely for show. It looks fancy, but it’s actually really easy.

You only need three things to do this at home: some honey, the herbal blend, and a small paintbrush that you can find at any arts & crafts store. You literally just dip the brush in the honey and paint a line onto the glass. Then you just sprinkle the herbs over the honey. It helps to press them in a little to make sure they stick.

Now this isn’t something I would do if I were just making cocktails at home for myself, but if I had company coming over, it certainly would kick off the evening in style! (Again, I can’t stress enough that you shouldn’t let the glass sit too long after applying the garnish.)

I originally had a vision of using this garnish on a Nick & Nora glass for a cocktail served up, but summer is Highball season (drinks served in tall glasses and lengthened with a bubbly element) so I went with a tall glass (interchangeably called a Highball or Collins glass). I’ll just have to create a different recipe and use this garnish again!

Summer is Highball season, when everyone wants a crushable, refreshing drink. By infusing gin with dried hibiscus petals, you get a vibrant and flavorful base spirit. The Summer Spa Day herbal garnish makes things even more festive.

Laurel Bay Leaf (Lauris nobilis) is the more commonly seen type, but there’s also Indian Bay Leaf (Cinnamomum tamala), which is the leaf of the cinnamon tree. Laurel bay leaf is more common in Italian cooking and has a bit of pine and lemon in its scent. The Indian bay leaf is, perhaps not surprisingly, used in Indian cooking, and has a fragrance of cinnamon and cloves.

I originally created this recipe for a bourbon that had been finished in Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon barrels, which imparted a hint of (Laurel) bay leaf to the bourbon. So I garnished it with a whole bay leaf and cinnamon stick, to play off the cinnamon syrup. But when I discovered that there’s such a thing as Indian bay leaves, and that they smell like cinnamon, I realized they would make an even better garnish than the Laurel bay leaf.

The selection of Indian bay leaves I received from Selefina had a wide variety of sizes. One of them was at least six inches long! I don’t recommend using one that big for a cocktail garnish. Fortunately, they also come in more reasonable, garnish-appropriate sizes.

You can garnish by placing the bay leaf and cinnamon stick on top of the ice cube, but it’s a little easier to drink if you place them down inside the drink. Just don’t eat the bay leaf. Not that you would.

This cocktail recipe is not really based on an Old-Fashioned and not really based on a Vieux Carré, but you can see elements of both here. We start with a base of whiskey (bourbon, in this case), add a little sweetness via crème de cassis, maraschino liqueur, and cinnamon syrup, but then temper it with some bitterness from the Campari.

Crème de cassis is blackcurrant liqueur. It’s deeply flavorful, quite rich in taste, and super dark in color. A little goes a long way, much like maraschino liqueur. I kept the quantities of each ingredient fairly low so together they didn’t overwhelm the bourbon.

This drink works well either before dinner or after. It’s only about 2 ½ ounces in volume after stirring with ice to dilute, so it’s a relaxing little sipper. And if you’re wondering about the name, the original bourbon I used is called Athenaeum, which is derived from the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, and is “a building or room where books, periodicals, and newspapers are kept for use.” So...a library, lol. I imagined myself sipping this in a wood-paneled library while reading a classic novel. Not that I have a wood-paneled library, mind you. But one can dream.

Three words: Indian Bay Leaf. The lesser-known bay leaf is from the cinnamon tree, and it smells like cinnamon. And cinnamon is a great pairing for bourbon, so let's put them all together in a delicious cocktail!

You actually do need to be a Star Wars fan to get the reference I make in the name of this drink. Han Solo (Harrison Ford’s character) is a spaceship pilot/smuggler. One of the items he smuggles is glitterstim spice, which is mined on a moon of the planet Kessel. It happens to be quite close to a cluster of black holes, making the route in and out of Kessel rather treacherous.

When Han Solo first meets Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi (who are trying to hire him to fly them off of Tatooine), he brags that his ship is the one that “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.” As an homage to both the glitterstim spice and the Kessel Run, I created this recipe.

[Selefina editorial: If you're old enough to mix this drink, you're old enough to know #HanShotFirst]

Rye whiskey is known for its spicy flavor profile. While bourbon is rather sweet because of its high corn content (at least 51% of the mashbill is required to be corn), rye whiskey is spicy because at least 51% of its mashbill must be rye. Since I was trying to design a cocktail to honor a made-up spice, rye whiskey was an obvious choice for the base spirit.

I modeled this recipe on a classic Old-Fashioned template, so I needed to get some bitters and some sweetness in there. Allspice dram is a liqueur made from a base of rum, with cinnamon sticks, allspice berries, and sugar added during the infusion process. It’s one of my favorite liqueurs, and I’ll take any excuse to use it.

Ginger liqueur was another way to get even more spice into the mix. I didn’t want the cocktail to be too sweet, so I took the typical half-ounce of simple syrup from an Old-Fashioned and split it evenly between the allspice dram and the ginger liqueur.

I wanted to keep the Angostura bitters in the recipe, but I also added cardamom bitters to get yet another spice in there. The brand I used is The Bitter Housewife out of Portland, OR.

Selefina’s Crystallized Ginger Root makes the perfect garnish for this drink! Not only does the garnish reference the ginger liqueur in the recipe, but it also makes a tasty snack when you finish your drink. I like to place the crystallized ginger down into the cocktail as I sip it, and then it’s soaked in whiskey by the time you finish your drink.

The crystallized ginger is nicely pliable, so it’s easy to run a cocktail pick through it. You also could do without the cocktail pick and just toss a piece of crystallized ginger right into the glass.

This riff on an Old-Fashioned honors Star Wars and Han Solo by incorporating as many spice-based cocktail ingredients as possible. Mix one up to celebrate Star Wars Day on May 4, and May the Fourth be with you!

Let’s back up to the beginning. When I saw this new product on the Selefina website, I immediately wanted to use it on top of a foamy drink. Because National Espresso Martini Day is March 15, it seemed like a good choice, and coffee and chocolate are great together.

If you’ve ever had a freshly made espresso at a coffee shop (or at home), you know there’s a foamy top layer called the crema. It’s formed by microbubbles of carbon dioxide that attach to the oils and fats in coffee and rise to the top. When you make an espresso martini, you lose some of the crema effect due to the temperature change, but there’s still usually a layer of foam.

The traditional garnish for an espresso martini is three coffee beans on top of the crema. In order for the black cacao garnish to fit in better, I used an espresso martini recipe that includes some chocolate bitters. There are quite a few variations on the espresso martini recipe, but this one comes from the book Homemade Happy Hour by Katy McAvoy.

Admittedly, making espresso martinis at home is best done with access to a fancy espresso machine, but if you don’t have one of those, you can use a stove-top Moka Pot or cold brew coffee. (Note that cold brew coffee may not give you the foamy crema.) You also can go buy an espresso at a coffee shop if there’s one nearby. You want the espresso to be cold before using it in the cocktail, so it won’t matter if you have to carry it home first.

[Uses a recipe from book "Homemade Happy Hour" by Katy McAvoy. Check out @katymcavoy for more inspiration.]

Some tips for using the black cacao powder as a garnish:

• It doesn’t come packaged with a shaker cap, so I transferred it to a (rather old) metal shaking tin.
• Be sure to get your stencil as close as possible to the surface of the drink. The further the powder has to fall, the more opportunity it has for dispersing outside the boundary of the stencil.
• Use a small stencil pattern! This is where I went wrong, lol. (You could skip the stencil altogether and just sprinkle a little bit of black cacao on top.)
• Don’t get carried away with the cacao garnish. A light dusting will do just fine. On my second attempt at the garnish, I used even more powder than the first time, and by the time I finished photographing the drink, it was basically bubbling like black lava! It was funny, but not quite what I was going for.

The Espresso Martini has been having a moment for at least a couple of years now. There are a variety of recipes out in the world, but this one by Katy McAvoy uses chocolate bitters to give it an even dessert-ier feel. A light sprinkle of Selefina Black Cacao Powder leans into the chocolate notes.

Guajillo chiles are not really spicy, rating a “mild to medium” on the Scoville scale. I find that they add a little bit of earthy smokiness when I use them in cocktails. Not like campfire smoke though, more like the subtle smoke in a mole sauce.

The advantage of a guajillo-sea salt rim is that you get not only the salty taste as you sip the drink, but also a nice aroma from the guajillo each time you raise the glass to your mouth. Eating and drinking are as much about aroma as taste, and the guajillo adds a level of complexity that regular salt cannot achieve.

And because the guajillo powder is a deep red, you get a nice pink salt mixture after combining it with the white sea salt. This adds visual interest to your drink, which is also important! We eat and drink with our eyes before anything gets to our stomachs.

Before mixing your drink, you’ll want to prepare your glass with the salted rim. First, cut a lime in half through the long end, then cut each half in half again so you end up with four wedges. Slice a diagonal slit across one of the wedges—this is the wedge you’ll use to wet the rim of your glass.

Pour a small amount of fleur de sel into a small bowl. I find that a set of glass Pyrex prep bowls is super useful for this sort of thing. Add as much guajillo chile powder to the salt as you like, then stir to combine. Sprinkle the mixture onto a small plate so that it forms a pile in a line.

Tuck the rim of a rocks glass into the lime wedge with the slit and rotate it around so that about half the rim is covered in lime juice. Dip the wet rim into your pile of guajillo-sea salt mixture and gently dab it while rotating until the rim is well salted. Set the glass aside while you prepare the rest of the recipe.

I like to salt only a portion of the rim because not everyone wants salt with every sip of their margarita. When preparing drinks only for yourself, you can do whatever you want. But if you’re preparing drinks for friends or family (or strangers!) it’s nice to give people some flexibility.

One last tip: the fleur de sel is fairly large grains of salt. If you prefer smaller grains, and if you have a mortar and pestle (or a spice and coffee grinder), you can feel free to crush or grind the sea salt to a finer texture before combining it with the guajillo powder, which is very fine.

You can easily jazz up a margarita by salting the rim of your glass with something other than plain salt. By adding some guajillo chile powder to sea salt, you get a subtle earthy smokiness that complements the vegetal notes from the tequila.

A twist of orange peel is the traditional garnish for many classic cocktails. Studding the orange peel with whole cloves is an easy way to up-level a twist, so that was the jumping off point for the rest of this recipe. With cloves in the garnish, I wanted to work them into the recipe as well. I decided to make a clove simple syrup, but then at the last minute, I tossed in a whole cinnamon stick too, because clove & cinnamon are a match made in heaven.

Once I had the cinnamon-clove syrup, I started to think about a base spirit. The Old-Fashioned template is one of my favorites to play with. It’s mostly spirit, with a bit of sweetness and a bit of bitterness. It’s usually made with whiskey, but you can swap out that base spirit for any other aged spirit and have yourself a totally different drink.

Cinnamon and clove both go well with rum, so I split the base between two rums, one from Hawai’i and one from Jamaica. Gold rum has a bit more body and flavor than white rum, and the Smith & Cross Jamaica pot still rum has a distinctive aroma and “funk” to it, which is why it’s used in a smaller quantity.

I wanted the orange to be present in the drink itself, and not just in the garnish, so I added a bit of orange liqueur. Then I decided to bring some banana liqueur to the mix to amp up the tropical feeling of the whole thing. Mole bitters completed the picture, further adding some warmth and spice.

This garnish may look fancy, but it’s fairly easy to make. First, peel a long, wide strip of orange peel using a Y-peeler (or vegetable peeler). Trim all four sides of the orange peel with a sharp knife to create straight edges in the shape of a parallelogram. Poke the sharp end of a clove into the orange peel at intervals. Don’t place the cloves too close together, or you won’t be able to twist the orange peel. I find that 4-5 cloves is usually the right number, but it depends on how long your orange peel strip is. Wrap the clove-studded orange peel around a whole cinnamon stick and balance it on top of the ice cube in your cocktail.

Tropical aromas of banana and orange meet the warming spices of cinnamon, clove, and mole in this robust take on a Rum Old-Fashioned.