Spilling the Tea on American Single Malt

Featured Cocktail: Malted American Trilogy

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Malted American Trilogy. To make it, you’ll need:

• 1 oz American Single Malt Whiskey
• 1 oz Applejack
• A couple dashes of Orange bitters
• Some kind of dark, brown sugar – either a quarter-to-half an ounce of rich demerara or panela syrup, or a dark brown sugar cube. 

Combine these ingredients in a cocktail mixing glass with ice – and of course, if you’re using that sugar cube, do your muddling with the bitters and a splash of soda water first. Give everything a good stir, mixing until the drink is properly diluted and chilled, then strain into a rocks glass over a single large cube, garnish with an orange twist, and enjoy.

The American Trilogy cocktail was developed at the famous NYC cocktail bar, Little Branch, in 2006, and it traditionally employs rye whiskey, rather than American Single Malt. But simple cocktail formats like this modified Old Fashioned are a great opportunity to test the character of a whiskey – so why not give it a shot with American Single Malt (which is beginning to play the role today that rye whiskey played when the drink was invented)?

I like how the fruity notes from the applejack and the orange bitters play almost like antagonists in this cocktail, threatening to start floating away into the orchard. So even though there’s only one ounce of whiskey in this cocktail, that single ounce needs to do a lot of work in order to assert itself. I’ve learned over the years that it’s important to not only analyze spirits in the perfect, cloistered void of the Glencairn glass, but also to see how they react to other ingredients. This moves you past a static list of “food word” tasting notes and encourages you to consider the actual dynamics of the spirit–how it moves and evolves in response to changes in any number of variables.