Diamondback
The Diamondback is three strong bottles and nothing else: rye, calvados and yellow Chartreuse, stirred and served up. There is no citrus, no sugar and no soda. Whatever softening the drink gets, it gets from the ice. The structure is the Widow’s Kiss with the hierarchy inverted. That 1895 drink leads on calvados with yellow Chartreuse behind it; here the rye takes the spine and the apple brandy drops to second, with the Chartreuse unchanged in its supporting role. Tasting the two in sequence is the clearest lesson available in how much a chord changes when you decide which note leads. What arrives is autumn with its collar up: orchard fruit and rye spice under the honeyed saffron of the Chartreuse, which supplies the drink's only sweetness and a good deal of its character. It is strong, and it is meant to be. This is a one-per-evening drink, and the snake it is named after is fair warning.
Glassware: Nick & Nora Glass
Garnish: None and Maraschino Cherry dropped without ceremony
Ingredients
45ml
The spine, and it needs to be full proof to hold two loud partners. A soft or low-proof rye disappears under the Chartreuse, and the drink stops being a whiskey cocktail and becomes a herbal one.
22.5ml
Apple brandy with real age, not a young eau de vie. It has to carry orchard fruit through both the rye and the Chartreuse. American applejack is the usual substitution and works well, being a touch rounder and sweeter.
22.5ml
Yellow, never green. Green is stronger and far more aggressively herbal and pushes the apple straight out of the glass. Yellow is honeyed and softer, and it supplies the drink’s entire sweetness as well as half its character.
Instructions
Chill a Nick & Nora glass.
Add the rye, calvados and yellow Chartreuse to a mixing glass.
Fill the mixing glass with cubed ice and stir for 25 seconds.
Strain into the chilled glass.
Drop in a cherry if using.
Expert Tip
All three bottles pour at spirit strength and nothing in the recipe lengthens the drink. Ninety millilitres of spirit goes into the mixing glass, with no citrus, syrup or soda to carry it. Count it as two drinks and you will be closer to right than the volume in the glass suggests. Stir it longer than feels necessary. Twenty-five seconds against good cubed ice is the minimum and thirty does no harm. Dilution is the only softening this drink gets, and an under-stirred Diamondback is genuinely hot rather than merely strong. Yellow Chartreuse, not green. Green is higher in proof and far more aggressively herbal, and it bullies the apple out of the glass entirely. Yellow is softer, sweeter and honeyed, which is what lets the calvados stay audible in a drink that is already crowded.
Behind the Diamondback
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
The drink is credited to the Diamondback Lounge of the Lord Baltimore Hotel, where it was poured in the 1950s. It then disappeared for decades, as most hotel bar drinks do.
It came back through Murray Stenson, the Seattle bartender working at the Zig Zag Café, whose habit of reading old cocktail books and actually making what he found returned several drinks to circulation in the 2000s. The Last Word is his more famous rescue. The Diamondback is the one bartenders tend to order for themselves.
The name belongs to the lounge, which in turn points at either the diamondback terrapin or the rattlesnake. Either reading suits the drink.
The Widow’s Kiss, Restrung
The Widow’s Kiss dates to 1895 and runs calvados as the base, with yellow Chartreuse and Bénédictine behind it. The Diamondback keeps two of those three ingredients and changes which one is in charge.
Rye takes the lead position, calvados drops to second, and the yellow Chartreuse holds its place. The effect is not subtle. The Widow’s Kiss is an apple drink with herbs around it; the Diamondback is a rye drink with an orchard behind it. Same components, different centre of gravity, and a genuinely useful demonstration of how much the order of a recipe decides.
Why It Holds Together
Three strong ingredients in one glass should be a mess. This works because each occupies a different part of the palate.
Rye is sharp and dry and sits high, all pepper and grain. Calvados is round and fruited and sits in the middle. Yellow Chartreuse is honeyed and low and broad, with saffron and herbs that spread underneath both of them. Nothing competes for the same space.
The Chartreuse's sweetness is the only thing binding them, which is why the measure is a full 22.5ml rather than a modifier's dash. Reduce it and the drink separates into three spirits sharing a glass.
The Proof
Ninety millilitres of spirit-strength alcohol, with no citrus, syrup or soda in the recipe. By volume it looks like a modest drink in a small glass. By alcohol it is closer to two.
That is not a flaw and it does not want fixing. The Diamondback is built to be a single slow drink, and lengthening it takes away the density that makes it worth drinking in the first place. If you want something in the same register that you can have two of, the Widow’s Kiss is lower and sweeter.
The stir is the only concession. Give it a full twenty-five seconds and let dilution do the work a mixer would do in another drink.
How to Serve It
Up, in a chilled Nick & Nora, late. The small bowl keeps it cold through a drink nobody rushes, where a coupe gives too much surface area for something this slow.
Garnish is optional and a cherry is the usual choice. It adds very little and it does no harm. There is a reasonable argument for none at all, on the grounds that the glass already holds three assertive ingredients and does not need a fourth thing to think about.
It is an after-dinner drink, and it does particularly well as the last one.
Make it at home
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.
Master the Techniques
More to explore
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Diamondback cocktail?
Can I use green Chartreuse instead?
How strong is it?
How does it relate to the Widow’s Kiss?
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Widow’s Kiss
The Widow’s Kiss is autumn in a coupe and one of the oldest sophisticated drinks in the American canon. George Kappeler printed it in Modern American Drinks in 1895: calvados wrapped in the two great French monastery liqueurs, yellow Chartreuse and Bénédictine, with Angostura holding the seams. It has never needed updating. The engineering is a study in herbal layering. The calvados brings orchard fruit and a spirit spine; the Bénédictine answers with honeyed spice; the yellow Chartreuse, softer and more saffron-lit than its green sibling, threads the two together; and the bitters keep the sweetness from settling into syrup. Every component predates the recipe, which is why the drink tastes coherent rather than assembled. It is rich by design, a dessert-hour drink in the truest sense, and it rewards a small pour and some patience. It opens as it warms, the way an old Sauternes does, which is fitting for the only cocktail regularly compared to one.
Nuclear Daiquiri
The Nuclear Daiquiri is a daiquiri with the base split between overproof Jamaican rum and green Chartreuse, and there is no sugar syrup in it at all. Ten millilitres of falernum is the entire sweet register, which is not much against forty-five millilitres of two of the loudest liquids on any back bar. Gregor de Gruyther built it at LAB in London around 2005. The name was accurate rather than clever: Wray & Nephew at 63 per cent and Chartreuse at 55 make a drink that is genuinely strong, and the colour that comes out of the shaker is a green-gold that looks like a warning. What makes it a modern classic rather than a dare is that it is properly balanced. The rum's ester funk and the Chartreuse's herbs are so loud that they cancel rather than compete, the falernum's clove translates between them, and a full measure of lime holds the whole thing inside a sour's structure. The result is improbably harmonious. It is also one per evening.
Tipperary
The Tipperary is Irish whiskey, sweet vermouth and green Chartreuse, and it is the boldest thing Irish whiskey does anywhere in the classic canon. Everything else the spirit appears in trades on its gentleness. This one puts it in front of a hundred and thirty herbs at 55 per cent and asks it to hold its ground. Hugo Ensslin printed it in Recipes for Mixed Drinks in 1916, by which point It's a Long Way to Tipperary had been the marching song of the war for two years and was playing on both sides of the Atlantic. The name needed no explaining to anyone reading the book. Ensslin's version is equal thirds, which is a genuinely fierce drink. Most modern specs pull the Chartreuse back to fifteen millilitres so that it seasons rather than leads, and that is the version worth learning first. The original is worth one respectful visit afterwards.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits