Episode 234

Chinola Liqueur with Andrew Merinoff

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Chinola Liqueur with Andrew Merinoff

Episode 234

What’s shakin, cocktail fans?

Welcome to Episode 234 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast!

Thanks for joining me for this interview episode, where we track down the best and brightest minds in the spirits and cocktail world so that we can share their secrets with you.

This time around, we’re joined by Andrew Merinoff. He’s one of the co-founders of Chinola Liqueur, which is an innovative – and I mean truly innovative – passion fruit liqueur. Recently, Chinola has been taking the bar world by storm, and we’re about to find out why.

In this flavorful, entrepreneurial conversation with Chinola Liqueur co-founder Andrew Merinoff, some of the topics we explore include:

Andrew’s family legacy in the spirits world, including his very real ties to Canadian whisky magnates and Prohibition-era New York Bootleggers.
How Chinola started in a blender in a Dominican Republic apartment and blossomed into a category-defying cocktail ingredient thanks to some old-world European liqueur expertise.
Why many people are under the mistaken impression that passion fruit is pink – and what the Chinola team is doing on the agricultural front to ensure that their fruits remain delicious, all-natural, and sustainable.
We also dig into the very important ways that Andrew and his team actively partner with the community in the DR so that they’re not merely showing up appropriating a native fruit, and exporting its flavor to the US market.
Along the way, we learn why passionfruit evokes a feeling of nostalgia in many people (myself included), the surprising similarities between Chinola and a product that many people call “bartender’s ketchup,” why the Spanish word for “one who gossips” might come up at your next brunch, and much, much more.

Featured Cocktail: The Saturn

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Saturn. If you’d like to make the original recipe for this tropical drink, you’ll need:

1½ oz gin (any gin will do, but I like a classic dry gin in this application)
½ oz Lemon Juice
½ oz Orgeat (which is a spiced almond syrup)
¼ oz Passion Fruit Puree
¼ oz Velvet Falernum (which is like an inverted orgeat – heavy on the spice, light on the almonds)

Combine these ingredients in a blender with a cup of crushed ice, blend until smooth, then pour into a large rocks glass or tiki mug over more crushed ice.

The garnish for the Saturn cocktail is a fun one. Basically, you’ll want to grab a nice, pithy stripe of lemon or lime peel, and use a cocktail pick to form a “saturn’s rings” shape around a brandied or Luxardo cherry before balancing it on the rim of the glass. To do that, pass the cocktail pick through the very center of the citrus stripe, then through the very center of the cherry, leaving a little bit of space, then wrap the ends of your citrus peel to form a closed loop and pass the cocktail pick through where they overlap in order to secure them.

Now, there’s a lot to love about the Saturn cocktail. I’ve seen it popping up on a lot of drink menus around DC recently, and honestly, its flavor profile kinda reminds me of a very sophisticated “Pez” flavor – like those little hard candies. But for our purposes today, the most interesting thing about the Saturn cocktail is that you could skip the ¼ oz of passion fruit puree, and you could even omit the ½ oz of Lemon juice in favor of a simple ¾ oz pour of Chinola liqueur.

This episode was made possible with editing and sound design by Samantha Reed and brand building and tropical fruit insights courtesy of Andrew Merinoff, Co-Founder of Chinola Liqueur. This has been a Modern Bar Cart production, copyright 2022.

This episode is also brought to you by Near Country Provisions. If you live in the Mid-Atlantic and want to enjoy ethically raised (and delicious) meat from local farmers delivered to your door every month, then you need Near Country in your life.

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Chinola Liqueur with Andrew Merinoff

Featured Cocktail: The Saturn

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