Latest / Into The Barchive / Beyond the Negroni: The Kingston Negroni & Rosita
Transcript
- ITB: And two. Next comes alive, forgotten drinks will revive. ⁓ we thrive. Sip the tails, let them die. Welcome to the bark. Hello, Barkhavist, and welcome to Into the Barkive, the podcast where we dive deep into the stories, people, and cocktails that have shaped the way we drink. I'm Tim Wright, Mixologist, ⁓ your kind of curious drinker in a slightly tipsy tour guide through Boo's history. And I'm Dr. Blake Jones, historian, mixologist, and certified specialist of spirits, here to pour out the stories behind what's in your glass. And today we're talking about something we've already spent a fair amount of time talking about. The Negroni. For a third week, we're talking about the Negroni. Absolutely. Okay. You know, we're coming off of Negroni week, so this was the time to do a little mini-series of sorts. Okay. But today we're going to ask a deceptively simple question. How much can you change a Negroni before it stops being a Negruni? I'm going to I don't think that's the deceptive. I think that's a dangerous question to ask. Like, think about logging up to a bartender and asking them, you know, what can you do? How much can you change this? And you have maybe some of those ballsy bartenders be like, Hell, I'll show you. I can change it a lot. Mm-hmm. Well, the Negruni, in fact, may be one of the blank cocktail canvases of the world. Three ingredients, equal parts, stirred, chilled, Orange twist. And you change one of those ingredients and suddenly you've got an entirely different drink. ⁓ today we're going to look particularly into like the two examples, right? The Kingston Negroni, which was famously like a funky Jamaican version of the Negroni. And then one of my favorite, the Rosita, which is the tequila and compare version of this cocktail that has a fascinating history of it being rediscovered. And then modified, forgotten, and then rediscovered again. Yeah, and along the way, we're going to talk about what bartenders actually mean when they talk about a cocktail variation. Because there's a big difference between changing a garnish and fundamentally altering the architecture of a drink. Very much so. So grab a glass, grab a bottle of Kampari, and maybe a sweet vermouth, and let's get into the barcive. For our first cocktail today, we're going to make a Kingston Negroni. So the first thing we're gonna do is take our rocks glass and we're gonna grab a large format clear ice cube and pop it in our glass to let it start tempering. So once the cocktail is done and we strain it over the ice, it doesn't immediately start cracking. So the first thing we're gonna do, the Ingredient that makes a Kingston Negruni a Kingston Negruni is Smith Cross Jamaican rum. So Joaquin Simo came across this new product on the market way back in like 2010, and instantly he thought this would go great in a Negruni. And hence this drink was born and became a popular. item on the Death and Company menu. So we've got one ounce of the Smith and Cross rum. Then we're gonna add one ounce of Campari. Again, we're sticking to that equal parts formula. So I mean you can see instantly the color change with to the bright red of the Campari. And then we're gonna add one ounce of Carpano Antica Formula Sweet Vermouth. Again, it's a much bolder sort of vermouth, but it's gonna stand up well against two bullies of an ingredient in the Smith and Cross and the Campari. So add our one ounce of Antica formula vermouth for the mixing glass and then we're gonna add ice to our mixing glass. and kind of make sure that you got plenty of ice above the wash line along the way. We'll get one more scoop in there. And then we're gonna stir 30 to 45 seconds. And so as we're doing that, just watching for the ice above the level of the liquid to start being submerged. That's one of our visual cues to know that this drink is done. Now, unstirred cocktails, if you're gonna strain it over an ice cube like this, you can Probably do the 30 seconds instead of 45 on like a drink you're gonna stir and serve up like a Manhattan or a martini because that rock of ice is gonna keep it chilled and then add a little more dilution as it goes. So after we're done stirring, we will strain the cocktail over our big chunk of ice. And for the garnish, an orange peel. Take our cheese plane and kind of grab that orange peel like so. And then we'll express the oils over the surface of the drink, wiping around the rim of the glass, and insert into the cocktail. And we have the Kingston Negruni. Cheers. The Rosita is going to be the next variation of the Negroni that we'll make. much like before, let's go ahead and temper our ice in our glass. And we're tripping that ice because we want to make sure that if you were using a clearer ⁓ vessel, that when you go to pour your cocktail on top of it, it doesn't shatter and have all those cracks on it, bringing it up to kind of that room temperature so it's not shocked. But the Rosita, it actually goes with a split base for the vermouth. ⁓ and also the specs change is set up equal parts. And this ⁓ we'll start with an ounce and a half of Refesado tequila. And it's very important. To note that the specs are changing because this tequila, while it does have beautiful flavors, it's not as big and bold as and a bully like that Jamaican rum, ⁓ from what we did with the ⁓ the Kingston Negroni. So an ounce and a half of the Reposado, and we're only going to do now a half ounce of compare. And really from here on out, it's a half ounce of the other ingredients. We are now introducing a dry vermouth to to the party. And so we're gonna do a half ounce of a dry vermouth. Followed up with a half ounce. Of sweet vermouth. Using that same ⁓ antika that we used in the Kingston. And like all the Negronis that we've made before, we are now going to ice down the stirring glass. And we're gonna add just two dashes of angosora bitters. I mean one dash of bango soda, but since it's a Japanese dash, they're gonna be two dashes. For that extra little pop. We're gonna stir for 30-45 seconds. Or until your cocktail's cold. Again, I thought it was very interesting with this cocktail that we've always talked about equal parts, equal parts for all the other variations, but this specific one shows you that the base spirit kind of helps dictate of what needs to happen with all the other ingredients. with it not being that big bully, this repressado tequila, we needed to kind of balance it out a little bit with adding that driver move and backing off with that big bully of a Campari. Once we've finished stirring our cocktail, the string. Into our glass. You can already see it's got this lighter color, it's not as dark, it's not as rich red because of the the lack of ⁓ that big one ounce of kambari. And then on this one, for the first time, we're switching the garnish as well. We're not doing a an orange twist, we're actually going to do a lemon twist. So just grab that swath of a lemon peel. Spread some of those oils across the top, rub rim, and tucker in. And here we have our Rosita. Now that we've built the cocktails, let's build the context. Before we start swapping out ingredients, let's remind ourselves again what we're swapping. The classic Negroni, at its basic, right, at its simplest is gin, sweet verbooth, compare. One ounce of each. We're going to stir it on ice. We're going to strain it ⁓ over a fresh ice cube and then put an orange twist on it. That's it. Yeah, and what's fascinating about that structure is how balanced it is. You've got the botanical alcoholic backbone of the gin. You've got the aromatized, fortified wine character of the vermouth, and then you've got Kimpuri providing bitterness, sweetness, citrus, herbs, and spice. Three ingredients, three different jobs. Which is why the Negroni is such a useful template, though, right? Like you can think about it almost as a three-legged stool. Take one leg away, and now you've got a problem. But you replace one of those legs with something else, and it technically can perform the same structurally, right? But all of a sudden you got a new stool. Yeah, and this is something bartenders have been doing for generations. We sometimes talk about modern cocktail culture as though the idea of riffing on classics is something that emerged in the past 20 years. But bartenders have always adapted recipes. What's different in the modern era is that bartenders have become much more conscious of the idea of the template. True, true, true. Instead of saying, I'm gonna comp invent a completely new drink, they're often saying, What if I take this established structure and change one variable? So the gr Negroni is basically begging for that. I mean, change the gin. Change that vermouth, change the bitter component, change the portions, change the garnish, like add other ingredients inside of it and remove ingredients. You're changing the temperature and texture. I mean, that Negroni is just saying, flirt with me, play with me, do whatever you can, but you can almost keep going indefinitely. ⁓ yeah. And some of these changes may be subtle, some changes are far more radical, and some become so successful. That the variation eventually takes on a life of its own. Okay, then let's start then with yours, the Kingston Negroni, right? Go for it. Yeah, so this drink is credited to bartender Joaquin Simo, who was associated with New York City's Death and Company, and then later pouring ribbons. And again, like I send the demonstration, story goes that Simo encounters Smith and Cross Jamaican Rome. He immediately thinks, this would be great Nanegroni. ⁓ and the drink appeared on Death and Co's menu about 2010 and became one of the defining modern Negruni riffs. But that particular rum is very important, right? We're using a Smith Across today. It's high proof. ⁓ it's a high-proof Jamaican rum specifically, with enormous amounts of character. I mean, it's funky, fruity, spicy. It's got intense aromatic, right? ⁓ This is not a rum that's just going to politely sit there in the corner. It's going to bring some heavy power to your cocktail, which is precisely why it works. Yeah. And in designing the Kingston Negruni, Sima's going back to that old Death and Co. Mr. Potato Head formula. You take an existing drink and swap one component for another. Same basic structure, different ingredient. In this case, Smith and Cross. For the gin. ⁓ so very different result. Yeah, but then Simo's choice of vermouth was very significant too. Like that caparna and Tika, I think you say stated in your demonstration of making the cocktail, like it too is not a weak ingredient. It can be a bully. It was purposefully selected because it needed to be a bully in that cocktail. It's fairly assertive in its sweetness as well. It's rich, vanilla for it. I mean. considerable it has this like viscosity, this body to it as well that lends very great to the cocktail. I mean, that in itself, Simo sp specifically described the rum being capable of matching this for moose richness. He paired them perfectly together. Yeah. And those two ingredients then temper the bitterness of Kimpuri along the way. And I mean if you think about the classic Negroni gives you the juniper and botanicals from gin. But here you got that huge Jamaican rum aroma, the funky fruit, the allspice, the character from the fermentation, ⁓ some tropical fruit, and of course that unmistakable Jamaican rum hogo. Yeah, so what makes it such an intrusive vari or instructive variation of this is Negroni's architecture survives because again, equal parts. That specific structure is there. But its personality completely changes. ⁓ it goes from this compari being compari to compare now being a co-writer, almost riding shotgun in the cocktail. The vermouth is still the vermouth, but unlike in the classic Negroni, where it it is almost playing a side saddle to the cocktail, it's now truly playing a good balancing backbone. But the underneath foundation is that in regular Negroni has been completely transformed. Absolutely. So now slightly switching back over to my cocktail, the Rosita. Yeah, so the Rosita has been traced ⁓ back to at least the 1974 edition of Mr. Boston's official bartender's guide. The original recipe called for tequila Kimpari, dry vermouth, and sweet vermouth, which essentially means it's a tequila cousin of the Nagramin. Yeah, and that's where the story gets wonderfully like bar kai, right? Like because the Rosita disappeared. Like it went poof, gone. And then somebody rediscovered it. And then the person who rediscovered it then actually realized that it had been a cocktail previously. They found out that it was. written b about before. And not only had it been written about before, that he himself had written about it years earlier. So Gary Regan, also known as Gaz Regan, encountered the drink through the drinks writer Terry Sullivan in the 2000s. And initially S Sullivan couldn't remember where he found the recipe. Eventually he traced it back to Regan's 1991 book. The bartender's Bible. And then Regan discovered the recipe he had included in that 1991 book had itself come from that 1974 edition of Mr. Boston. So essentially, sometime in the 2000s, Gaz Regan like rediscovered his own cocktail archaeology, which I guess is one of the great hazards of being a prolific cocktail writer. You forget your own recipes. Yeah, I'm I'm drinking, I'm writing, I'm drinking, I'm writing. ⁓ this is a great recipe. I'm gonna publish in it a book. Twenty years later, I come across a recipe. ⁓ I'm gonna make that recipe. Damn, that's a great recipe. Where did it come from? ⁓ shit, I made that. Right? Like that's but it's that barkiviness that keeps us coming back to these types of stories, these types of dreams, right? adds a little bit of color into the color of a cocktail, which goes to say that the bitters are an important ingredient as well. The original Rosita didn't necessarily have them in there, right? Regan's version did because, hmm, Regan's bitters, maybe? Same one? Well, he those are the orange bitters, but he used angostura here. And it's a beautiful example of a bartender taking an existing recipe and then adding their, like I said, spice to it. And it changes the drink character. Yeah, and and I would encourage our listeners and viewers to pay attention to the difference between the Rosita and the Kingstonagruni. You know, both have Kimpuri, both have Vermouth, both are stirred, both live in roughly the same bittersweet neighborhood. But tequila gives us an entirely different foundation. Exactly. The Kingston is big and funky. I mean, it's like you mentioned, it's tropical fermented, almost kind of exuberant in its flavor profile. But the rosita is brighter, more herbal, more earthy, and vegetable, I guess, depending on the tequila that you're going to use, right? And then the split of the sweet ⁓ of the vermous is a significant difference in this cocktail as well. Yeah. Well, before we move on to the vermouth, we need to remind ourselves that a lot of the early versions of the Rosita just called for tequila. Yeah, my initial ⁓ spec when I was first making it, because ⁓ more blanco tequila around than I had Reposado or even on Yeho was I would just use Blanco tequila to tequila in this. It is slightly brighter of ever so more vegetable but vegetable because that barrel proof of the ⁓ the reposado does bring it down to a slightly bolder, more bitter version of this. Yeah. Well, and then, you know, so the you could use blanco, you could use reposado like we did in this demonstration, but the other key difference here is the vermouth. Yes. Because the dry vermouth is pulling the drink away from the classic roundness or sweetness of a classic negruni. Which makes the whole thing feel a lot leaner, a little more austere, sharper. And then of course, as you mentioned, the tiny few dashes of Angostura help change everything and bind it together. I I think that of the variations, this one leans more on a bitter side than what I would say a bolder side. Yeah. ⁓ I think you're exactly right there. So I mean let's stop here for a second because The Kingston Nagruni gives us a r and the Rosina give us a really good way of thinking about cocktail variations. Okay, so then what makes a good riff a rift then? Yeah. So there are a couple of questions a bartender can ask. The first is, what can I change? Okay. And the more interesting question, of course, is what happens if I change it? Right. Because if you substitute like vodka for gin, technically you just you've made a variation, but you're Mostly removing flavor from that cocktail, right? Like, whereas swapping Jamaica rum for the gin, it's actually adding flavor, it's adding aromatics too, or at least adding different aromatics. Entirely different aromatics. And and this gets into the idea of substitution with intention. You're not simply replacing gin because you happen to have rum behind the bar. You're choosing rum because its characteristics interact with the campari and the vermouth in some sort of interesting way. And that's one of the reasons that the Negroni has proven to be so adaptable, right? Its ingredients aren't just redundant. Each one has a role. And when you change one of those, you're effectively changing the dimension of this drink. Yeah, and bartenders have experimented with all three dimensions, like the three legs of the sword, the metaphor you provided earlier. So if you start with the base spirit, in the Kingston Negruni, we've got the rum. Yep. In the Rosita, we've got the tequila. Bourbon and rye can produce n whiskey negruni variations, but that's another episode. ⁓ brandy works beautifully. ⁓ Mezcal can take the drink in a smoky, earthy direction. Even ⁓ Geneva or Aqua Bean or other botanical spirits can fundamentally reshape it. So now you're talking about the base spirits, but now we were talking about those vermouths. So the vermouths, you can have different sweet vermouths. Antika again, we chose it because it's big bold, but you could choose a softer, more subtle sweet vermouth. And then split that sweet vermouth, that big bold one, with a dry, and it takes away some of that backbone just to say, hey boy, calm down. You basically can use a blunt. Vermouth, if you wanted to. You can replace some or all of the vermouth to another aromatized wine or fortified wine, right? You don't have to just stick with a vermouth in this place. And once you do that, you started moving towards drinks that aren't simply Negroni variations anymore, though. You're kind of playing in that little gray area. Yeah, and then there's the final the bitter component. And Camparias so strongly identified with the Negruni. That people sometimes forget it's the role of the ingredient that's important. So you could experiment with other Amari or other bitter liqueurs. ⁓ you know, one of the things we've seen is American craft distillers have been making their own versions of Campari or the bitter red liqueurs. So, ⁓ whether some of our favorite guys ⁓ with the Leopold brothers in Denver, Colorado, they have A bitter apertivo, ⁓ St. George Spirits, another craft distiller out of Alameda, California. Their Bruto Americano kind of fills the same role, or Tempest Sugit has one. I mean, you get the Grand Classico. So I mean, there are other things you can sub that are meant to be like Kimpuri, but you can also use like Chinner. You could use Aperol, you could use, I mean, any number of Italian Amari. Because the ber the compari in this one doesn't have to be the loudest voice. You can actually try to tamper it down without trying to adjust those specs like I did. Yeah. Man, that that raises a larger point, I guess. Like a cocktail template isn't just a recipe. Like when we think of the Negroni, a recipe tells you what to do. When we talk about the Negroni template, it tells you what the drink is trying to do. Trying to do what it's trying to accomplish. Yeah. So we've gone from the classic Negruni in the last episode to Jamaica to Mexico. And somehow we've managed to avoid just shorting the cocktail entirely. I mean razors thin at times, but but that's what I would call a successful episode then, right? Absolutely. So the Kingston Negruni shows us how dramatic a simple substitution can be. Swap gin for a powerful Jamaican rum, and you've got an entirely new personality while preserving the basic architecture of the drink. And the Rosita reminds us that a cocktail's history isn't always a straight line. Sometimes a drink gets published, then it's forgotten, then it's rediscovered by the same person that discovered it. And eventually becomes part of the modern bartender's vocabulary. And perhaps that's the best way to think about the Negroni itself, not as a fixed recipe, but as a remarkably durable idea. Let us know on social media about changes you're making to your Negronis. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen on your podcasts. And if you're enjoying our shows, leaving a comment or giving a thumbs up does help future bark of this find us. So like us, subscribe on YouTube, Instagram. TikTok, and then for those for the podcast, Spotify and Apple. So next time on End of the Barchive, we're turning our attention to one of the most influential American bartenders of the modern cocktail era, Dale deGroff. DeGroff helped define what the modern American bartender could be. And he helped bring classic cocktails back into serious bars, champion fresh ingredients and proper technique. And became one of the great teachers and ambassadors of the cocktail renaissance. And of course, we're gonna talk about the drinks. Because with Dale de Groff, they're plenty worth talking about. So until next time, keep exploring the past one drink at a time. As we dive deeper into the bark.