Hunter
The Hunter is rye and cherry brandy at two to one, stirred over ice, and there is nothing else in it. It comes from the turn-of-the-century books, where it sat among a run of sporting names, and no bartender is credited with it. The arithmetic is the Rusty Nail's: a spirit and its sweetened liqueur shadow at a fixed ratio, no citrus, no bitters, no dilution beyond the stir. What changes is the register. Where Drambuie brings honey and heather to Scotch, cherry brandy brings dark stone fruit and a kernel note to rye, and rye's pepper is what stops it settling into cordial. Its practical virtue is portability. Nothing in it spoils, which is what a hip flask actually requires, and the name has always understood that. It is the drink to decant for a cold afternoon outdoors, which almost nothing else in the canon can honestly claim of itself.
Glassware: Rocks Glass
Garnish: Maraschino Cherry or nothing afield
Ingredients
60ml
The spine, and pepper is what keeps the fruit honest. Bourbon's sweetness on top of a sweet liqueur leaves the drink with nothing to push against.
30ml
Heering-style cherry brandy: dark, rich stone fruit with a kernel note underneath. Maraschino is the other cherry entirely and makes a completely different drink rather than a variation.
Instructions
Add the rye and the cherry liqueur to a rocks glass over one large cube.
Stir for about 15 seconds, until chilled.
Garnish with a good cherry, or decant to a flask unadorned.
Expert Tip
Two to one, and the ratio does more work than a two-ingredient drink suggests. Cherry brandy is sweet and assertive, and at equal parts it takes the lead and the drink becomes a liqueur cocktail with whiskey in it. Sixty to thirty keeps the rye in charge. Get the right cherry. This wants a Heering-style cherry brandy: dark, rich, genuinely fruity with a kernel note underneath. Maraschino is the other cherry entirely, dry and funky and made from whole Marasca cherries including the stones, and swapping one for the other makes a different drink rather than a variation. Rye rather than bourbon. Bourbon's sweetness on top of a sweet liqueur leaves nothing to push against the fruit.
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
The Hunter turns up in the bar books of the early 1900s among a run of names borrowed from sport and the countryside, which was a fashion of the period in the same way the racing clubs gave their name to the Turf Club.
No author claims it, and the simplicity explains why. A two-ingredient stirred drink is not something anyone invents so much as something somebody writes down, and a great many similar pairs from that era have no attribution either.
What kept it in circulation is that it is very good and takes about twenty seconds.
The Two-Bottle Arithmetic
Spirit plus its own sweetened liqueur is one of the oldest patterns in drinks, and the Rusty Nail is the best-known modern example: Scotch and Drambuie, which is Scotch with honey and herbs in it.
The Hunter runs the same structure on darker ground. Cherry brandy is not made from rye, so it is not quite the same relationship, but it functions identically: a spirit and a sweet modifier occupying adjacent territory, at a ratio you adjust to taste and weather.
The pattern's virtue is that it needs nothing else. No citrus, no bitters, no sugar. Two bottles and ice.
Which Cherry
There are two cherry liqueurs in general use and they are not interchangeable, which is worth stating because the names do not make it obvious.
Cherry brandy in the Heering style is dark, sweet and richly fruity, with a faint kernel bitterness underneath. It reads as cherry the way a jar of preserved cherries reads as cherry.
Maraschino is made from whole Marasca cherries including the stones, and it is dry, pungent and faintly medicinal. It reads as almond as much as fruit.
Put maraschino in this drink and you get something closer to a Fancy Free. Neither is wrong; they are different drinks, and the recipe means the first one.
Why It Suits a Flask
This is the practical argument and it is a real one.
Nothing in the drink spoils. No citrus to oxidise, no juice to separate, no foam to collapse. A flask of it made in the morning is exactly as good in the afternoon, and it dilutes on its own in cold weather without any ice at all.
Very few stirred drinks travel. Most of the canon depends on fresh citrus or ice or both, and the ones that do not tend to be two-bottle drinks like this one.
How to Serve It
Over one large cube in a rocks glass, stirred for about fifteen seconds, with a good cherry if you want one.
Indoors that is the serve. Outdoors, straight from the flask, and cold air does the work the ice would have done. Make one beside a Rusty Nail for the two-bottle family's fruit-and-honey comparison.
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 Hunter cocktail?
Rye whiskey and cherry brandy at two to one, stirred over ice and served in a rocks glass. It comes from the bar books of the early 1900s and is the simplest member of the whiskey and cherry family.
Which cherry liqueur should I use?
A Heering-style cherry brandy: dark, rich stone fruit with a kernel note underneath. Maraschino is the other cherry, dry and made from whole Marasca cherries including the stones, and it makes a different drink rather than a variation.
Can I use bourbon instead of rye?
You can, and it comes out flabbier. Cherry brandy is sweet, and rye's pepper is what stops the fruit settling into cordial. Bourbon's own sweetness on top leaves the drink with nothing to push against.
How does it relate to Remember the Maine?
Same bottle, different scale. Remember the Maine threads fifteen millilitres of cherry through a Manhattan as a seasoning; the Hunter pours thirty straight against the rye as a partner. Seasoning there, partnership here, and the same bottle in both.
Master the Techniques
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Remember the Maine
Remember the Maine comes with a war correspondent attached. Charles H. Baker Jr. recorded it in The Gentleman’s Companion in 1939, having drunk it in Havana in 1933 with machine-gun fire in the streets outside, and his instruction survives alongside the spec: stir it briskly, and treat it “with the respect it deserves”. The name reaches back further still, to the battleship Maine, whose sinking in Havana harbour in 1898 lit the Spanish-American War under the headline the drink borrows. What Baker wrote down is a Manhattan that has been somewhere. Rye and sweet vermouth as expected, then cherry liqueur deepening the vermouth’s fruit into something darker, and a quarter-teaspoon of absinthe threading anise through all of it. Baker’s books are better literature than they are bartending, and a good many of his recipes need editing before they are drinkable. This one he transcribed straight, and it needs no correction: one of the great named Manhattans, with the rare quality of tasting like its own history.
Rusty Nail
The Rusty Nail is two Scotches talking to each other: whisky neat, and whisky that went to finishing school as Drambuie, honey and herbs smoothing the same spirit into a liqueur. Versions of the pairing drifted around under various names from the 1930s, but the drink found its identity in mid-century New York, where the 21 Club poured it for the Rat Pack era and the name finally stuck somewhere around 1963. It is the definitive two-bottle cocktail: no citrus, no bitters, no technique beyond ice and a stir, which made it the house drink of an era that liked its glamour unfussy. The whole recipe is a ratio, and the ratio is a conversation. Heavy on the Drambuie it is a honeyed after-dinner drink; dried out toward four-to-one it becomes a Scotch drinker’s Scotch drink with a Highland accent. Fashion abandoned it along with the rest of the liqueur-led canon, and the cocktail revival quietly took it back: a drink this simple lives and dies on the quality of its two bottles, and the bottles got better. Made with a Scotch you would drink neat, it remains what it always was: the easiest serious drink in the cabinet.
Fancy Free
The Fancy Free is an Old Fashioned that uses maraschino liqueur instead of sugar. Rye, 15ml of maraschino, and two kinds of bitters. That is the entire drink. The swap does more than sweeten. Maraschino is made from whole marasca cherries, stones included, and the stones give it a dry almond note that has very little to do with the cherry flavour people expect. So the drink lands drier than the ingredient list suggests, with an aromatic, faintly nutty edge that plain sugar could not supply. The two bitters are not a flourish. Angostura sits at the back with its clove and cinnamon, orange bitters sit at the front with their peel, and dropping either one collapses the drink from stereo to mono. It appears in the mid-century American collections, usually cited to Albert Stevens Crockett's Old Waldorf-Astoria books. The name is the temperament: an Old Fashioned with its tie loosened.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits
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