2 minute read
Water & Whiskey: The Perfect BCC Manhattan & Old Fashioned
By Patrick Owens, Beverage Manager
Recently, I tasked our bartenders with creating the perfect BCC Manhattan. Most importantly, I stressed to them we only need to create this perfect cocktail once; then we will figure out how to serve it countless times with consistency. A monumental task for any bartending team. When you make a cocktail at home you pour your liquors over the ice, stir, and pour into the glass. Ice serves many functions in your cocktail. Beyond chilling the drink, the ice melts and dilutes the spirits with water. This makes the entire concoction more than just palatable. The dilution brings the balance of sugars, acids, astringents, and spirits into focus. The dilution provides a clear picture, a glimpse into the mind of the artist behind the craft.
To create 200 perfect cocktails every day, we must take out the inconsistent factor of melting ice and focus on pure water. We measure in very precise milliliters the amount of houseaged Woodford Reserve bourbon, Carpano Antica Vermouth, angostura bitters, and water. By doing this we can make sure every cocktail, every time, is perfectly proportioned, mixed, and diluted. Now, when any member asks for our BCC Manhattan, a bartender takes only 10 seconds to pour from a chilled bottled of the batched Manhattan into a bespoke glass, adorned with a large 2.25” ice cube and three Fabbri Italian amarena cherries.
And the water? We pull it from a special machine that filters out dirt and particulate before using ultraviolet light and reverse osmosis to remove bacteria and mineral solutes from the water. This water makes our cocktails as pure and clean as possible.
Once we had dialed in the perfect ratio of ingredients, we decided we could not stop there-we now had to make the perfect Old Fashioned. When deciding on the bourbon we leaned on Elijah Craig 94-proof Small Batch because of its inherent touch of sweetness and warming vanilla when enjoyed over ice. To this we added housemade demerara gomme syrup (also known as Sugar in the Raw), Fabbri amarena cherry syrup, a housemade concoction of bitters constructed with toasted cacao nibs, West Indies bay leaf from Grenada, and fresh spring figs. After two hours of deliberation, we made 15 sample recipes until we dialed in the exact ratio of each ingredient to craft the now perfect BCC Signature Old Fashioned.
Both cocktails are precisely crafted to be poured over ice, so that the journey of the cocktail begins strong and with bite. It eases the imbiber into the experience. As the ice softens the beverage, it becomes sharper and more focused, with the balance of sugars, acids, astringents, and spirits coming together to create a most satisfying concoction. Five to 10 minutes into the experience, the drink has become dangerously quaffable. Simply gulpable, chuggable, and irresistible. ◆
