Featured Cocktail: Goya Awamori & Tonic

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Goya Awamori & Tonic. To make it, you’ll need:

• 2 oz Taniguchi Awamori, blended and bottled by Webb’s Grainworks
• 4 oz of a lightly-bitter tonic water – many of the lighter Fever Tree offerings would work
• 1 “goya” bitter melon, which is a gourd-like vegetable you should be able to locate at your closest international food market

Begin by introducing your senses to (what is likely to be for you) a new food. Rinse the goya bitter melon, then sample its various components by themselves: the skin, the bumpy outer flesh, the seeds, and the tender inner flesh. All these will all have slightly different tastes and textures. 

Next, grab your favorite highball or collins glass, lightly muddle one or two small wheels of goya bitter melon (you may choose to peel it or remove the seeds, depending on the results of your taste test), then add ice, your Awamori, and tonic (in that order), give it a gentle stir, and enjoy.

Those of you who have come to really associate the Gin & Tonic with the sour hit of lime will probably end up craving a splash of citrus in this build, but aside from that, here’s why I think this is probably the best way to start thinking about Awamori cocktails:

1. First, what grows together goes together. It may be a slightly hokey piece of conventional wisdom, but at its core, the logic is very sound. The people who made Awamori for hundreds of years ate this melon on the reg. So why shouldn’t you try and work the flavor into a cocktail?
2. Second, tonic water or syrup is bitter because of quinine, so if you dial back the bitterness with a light tonic, you should have some room to explore the bitterness of the goya. Just like you can have a split base or a split modifier in a cocktail, you can also have a split bittering agent.
3. Finally, a simple highball is one of the best ways to explore what happens when you lower the proof of a spirit via dilution. Not everybody likes to learn about a new spirit by taking it straight to the face in a Glencairn glass, so why not lean into the longer, lighter side of things as you get to know some new flavors?