Brooklyn
The Brooklyn is a dry Manhattan with two seasonings: a barspoon of maraschino and a barspoon of Amer Picon. Jacob Grohusko printed it in Jack's Manual in 1908, and it is the drink that gave the borough its cocktail identity, eventually producing the Red Hook, the Greenpoint, the Bensonhurst and a dozen more. The problem is the Picon. It was a French bitter orange aperitif at high proof, reduced and reformulated through the twentieth century, so the bottle the recipe assumed no longer exists in any obtainable form. Every modern Brooklyn is therefore a reconstruction, and it is more honest to say so than to pretend a substitution is the original. This version uses Averna with two dashes of orange bitters, which is the accessible route: the amaro supplies the bitterness and the body, the bitters supply the orange. Bigallet China-China is closer to the original voice if you can find a bottle of it.
Glassware: Nick & Nora Glass
Garnish: Maraschino Cherry
Ingredients
60ml
Full Manhattan strength under two small seasonings. Rye rather than bourbon: the drink is dry throughout and bourbon's sweetness pulls it out of shape.
22.5ml
The single thing that separates this from a Manhattan, and a third of the glass. Fresh and fridge-cold, because there is nothing here to hide a tired bottle behind.
7.5ml
A barspoon, which is the measure the era favoured. At this scale it contributes cherry-stone funk and almond as a background note rather than as a flavour you could name.
7.5ml
Standing in for the vanished Amer Picon, which is a substitution rather than an equivalent. Bigallet China-China is closer to the original if you can find it; Averna with orange bitters is the accessible route.
2 dashes
Restoring the orange half of what the Picon used to supply. Two dashes, working alongside the amaro rather than sitting on top of it as a garnish.
Instructions
Add the rye, dry vermouth, maraschino, Averna and orange bitters to a mixing glass.
Fill with cubed ice and stir for 25 seconds.
Strain into a chilled Nick and Nora glass.
Garnish with a good cocktail cherry.
Expert Tip
Whatever you use for the Picon, keep it at seven and a half millilitres. The temptation with an amaro substitute is to add more because it seems like the interesting ingredient. It is not: the Brooklyn is a rye drink with two small seasonings, and a full measure of Averna turns it into an amaro cocktail with whiskey in it. Use dry vermouth and keep it fresh. This is the single thing that separates a Brooklyn from a Manhattan, and at twenty-two and a half millilitres against sixty of rye it is a third of the glass. An oxidised bottle takes the drink somewhere flat and faintly sour. Stir long and strain cold. There is nothing sweet enough here to hide an under-diluted drink behind.
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
Jacob Grohusko printed the Brooklyn in Jack's Manual in 1908, working, as it happens, at a bar in Manhattan. Naming drinks after New York's boroughs and neighbourhoods was a fashion of the period, and the Bronx and the Manhattan were already established.
It never achieved anything like the Manhattan's fame and it slept through most of the twentieth century. What brought it back was the revival's appetite for pre-Prohibition specs, and by the time it returned its central ingredient had been gone for decades.
The Amer Picon Problem
Amer Picon was a French bitter aperitif built on orange, gentian and quinine, bottled at around 39 per cent when the recipe was written. Over the following decades it was reformulated repeatedly and its strength dropped to 18 per cent, and it was never widely distributed in the United States after the middle of the century.
The bottle the 1908 recipe intended does not exist. That is not a sourcing difficulty, it is a permanent absence, and every Brooklyn poured today is a reconstruction of a drink nobody alive has tasted as written.
The reconstructions are worth taking seriously rather than treating as a shrug. Bigallet China-China is the closest living relative and the usual first recommendation. Amaro CioCiaro is another common route. Averna with orange bitters, which is what this version uses, is the most accessible.
A Manhattan, Made Dry
Strip the seasonings out and what remains is a dry Manhattan: rye and dry vermouth at roughly three to one. That is the frame, and the two barspoons sitting on top of it are what make this a different drink rather than a variation on that one.
Maraschino brings cherry stone and almond, which reads as a faint perfume rather than as sweetness at this measure. The Picon, or its stand-in, brings bitter orange. Between them they occupy the space sweet vermouth would fill in a Manhattan, without any of the sweetness, which is why the Brooklyn tastes considerably more austere than its ingredient list suggests.
The Borough School
The Brooklyn's revival produced a genre. Enzo Errico's Red Hook, built at Milk & Honey in 2003, took the frame and engineered the Picon problem out of it using Punt e Mes, and its success set the pattern: rye, one modifying wine or amaro, one small sweet measure, named after a neighbourhood.
The Greenpoint, the Bensonhurst, the Carroll Gardens and a good many others followed. All of them navigate by this 1908 original, including the ones built specifically to avoid its difficulty.
How to Serve It
Stirred for twenty-five seconds over cubed ice, strained into a chilled Nick and Nora, with a good cherry.
Worth making beside a Manhattan once, because the comparison is instructive: the same spirit, the same shape and a completely different temperament. One is plush and the other is dry and faintly bitter, and they are one river apart in name only.
The Spirit
Whiskey (Rye)The whiskey the American classics were written for. Rye is dry and peppery where bourbon is sweet and broad, and a Manhattan or a Sazerac built on the wrong one is a noticeably different drink rather than a near miss.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Brooklyn cocktail?
Rye whiskey and dry vermouth with a barspoon each of maraschino and Amer Picon, stirred and served up. Jacob Grohusko printed it in Jack's Manual in 1908. It is effectively a dry Manhattan with two seasonings on top.
What happened to Amer Picon?
It was reformulated repeatedly through the twentieth century and dropped from around 39 per cent to 18, and it was never widely sold in the United States after the mid-century. The bottle the recipe assumed no longer exists in any form.
What should I use instead?
Averna with two dashes of orange bitters is the most accessible route, and it is what this version uses. Amaro CioCiaro is the other common substitute, and Bigallet China-China sits closest to the original if you can track a bottle down.
How does it relate to the Red Hook?
The Red Hook is the Brooklyn rebuilt so that it can be made. Enzo Errico replaced both the vermouth and the Picon with a single bottle of Punt e Mes in 2003, and the success of that launched the whole neighbourhood-drink genre.
Master the Techniques
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Red Hook
The Red Hook is a Brooklyn that can actually be made. The original calls for Amer Picon, a French bitter orange aperitif that stopped reaching America decades ago and was reformulated at home as well, so every Brooklyn recipe arrives with an argument attached about what to use instead. Enzo Errico's answer, built at Milk & Honey in 2003, was to stop substituting and start rebuilding. Punt e Mes is a sweet vermouth with a bitter edge already in it, so it covers the vermouth and the missing amer in one bottle. The maraschino then doubles from the Brooklyn's barspoon to a full fifteen millilitres, which gives the cherry something to say rather than leaving it as a trace. Three bottles, one stir, no arguments. It also started a genre: Greenpoint, Bensonhurst, Carroll Gardens and a dozen more take this frame and change one bottle, and the borough-naming habit of the 2000s begins here.
Manhattan
The Manhattan is the oldest documented whiskey cocktail in the American canon and the template for every stirred, spirit-forward classic that followed. It appeared in bar guides of the 1880s already described as an established drink, suggesting an origin in the 1870s. The most commonly cited account places its creation at the Manhattan Club in New York, at a banquet hosted by Lady Randolph Churchill in honour of presidential candidate Samuel Tilden; the account is disputed, Lady Churchill being documented elsewhere on the date in question, but the Manhattan Club association remains the most plausible origin available. What it established is the shape rather than the recipe: a base spirit, a fortified wine and a bitter, stirred cold and served up. That structure is the foundation of the Vieux Carré, the Boulevardier, the Rob Roy, and every other stirred whiskey drink that followed, and understanding it is the most direct route into that entire family. The sweet vermouth is the variable that most determines the finished drink. A stale or poorly chosen vermouth does not simply diminish the Manhattan; it defines it. The drink’s simplicity leaves the vermouth nowhere to hide.
Black Manhattan
The Black Manhattan asks a simple heretical question: what if the vermouth were replaced entirely by amaro? Todd Smith posed it at Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco in 2005, chose Averna, and produced one of the defining drinks of the modern era. Rye and Sicilian amaro at the classic ratio, both bitters, one cherry, and a drink the colour of its name. The swap works because Averna is built like a vermouth that kept going: wine-adjacent sweetness, herbs and citrus peel, but darker, denser and bittersweet where vermouth is fresh. The Manhattan’s architecture survives intact while every surface of it changes, and the two dashes of bitters now read as accents in an already bitter landscape. It sits with the Hanky Panky and the Toronto in the small family of drinks that taught amari to speak cocktail, and it has moved more bottles of Averna than any of them.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits
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