Absinthe Drip

Sazerac

The Sazerac is one of the oldest documented cocktails in American history, originating in New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century and taking its name from the Sazerac de Forge et Fils cognac that formed its original base. The switch from cognac to rye came gradually, accelerated by the phylloxera epidemic that devastated French vineyards in the 1870s and made cognac scarce across the American market. By the time cognac returned, rye had become the standard and has remained so ever since. It is a three-ingredient drink dressed with an absinthe rinse and a lemon peel expressed and discarded. The absinthe coats the glass, the lemon oils land on the surface, and neither remains in the drink in any measurable volume, yet both are present in every sip in a way that adding them directly cannot replicate. That indirection is the technique. New Orleans has argued about the correct build for as long as the drink has existed. The version here uses rye, Peychaud's with a single dash of Angostura, and a sugar cube.

Death in the Afternoon

Death in the Afternoon was created by Ernest Hemingway and submitted to a 1935 celebrity cocktail collection called So Red the Nose, in which notable figures contributed original recipes with their own commentary. Hemingway's instructions were characteristically direct: pour one jigger of absinthe into a Champagne glass, add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness, and drink three to five of them slowly. It is a two-ingredient cocktail with no technique beyond a careful pour. The absinthe louches as the Champagne makes contact, turning from clear to cloudy as the anise oils come out of solution. That transformation is not incidental: it signals the point at which the two ingredients have integrated, and the drink should be consumed from that moment rather than left to sit. The balance is the only variable that matters. Too much absinthe and the drink is medicinal; too little and the Champagne overwhelms the anise entirely. Hemingway's ratio produces a glass where both are audible without either one dominating.

Doctor Funk

The Doctor Funk is the only drink in the tiki canon named after a real physician. Dr Bernard Funk practised in Samoa in the late nineteenth century, where his patients included Robert Louis Stevenson, and his standing prescription against the tropical heat was a mix of absinthe, lime and soda water. It was medicine by the standards of the day, and better company than most of it. When Don the Beachcomber opened his Hollywood bar in 1934 he added rum and grenadine to the doctor’s formula and put it on his first menu, which makes the Doctor Funk older than the word tiki itself: a genuine South Seas artefact smuggled into a genre that otherwise invented its own mythology. The absinthe is the drink; everything else is the delivery system. Lime and lemon keep it honest, grenadine tints it rather than sweetens it, and the soda stretches it into a long, dry, faintly mysterious cooler that drinks nothing like its neighbours on the menu.