Hello, it’s been a while, and in that while I've been busy. I’m rereading one of the greatest books ever written, Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, and I could sum up my last few months with a quote:
“Always keep moving. There may be something behind you.”
And indeed I have been moving. It’s been a nonstop forward motion, luckily more like rolling down a hill than falling down the stairs (sometimes it’s the latter).
My team at Axios has grown by nearly 200% in the last 6 months, and we're not stopping there, onward and upward
I’m now 100% done with the slides and lectures for my dataviz design course, and I'm beginning to record the lectures and prepare materials
I got to work with some really amazing people on an exciting freelance project. Can’t say much about it at the moment but hopefully it’ll all be public soon enough
Fun fact: my alternate choice for the quote above was “Always move fast. You never know who’s catching up.” (seriously if you’ve never read Pratchett, go pick up Going Postal, it’s incredible)
We’re wrapping up the beta phase of the dataviz membership program I run with Duncan Geere, Alli Torban, and Gabrielle Merite, and we’re preparing to launch the full thing publicly. The beta phase has been a smashing success and I’m so proud of what we've built! If you’d like to be notified about the public launch, you can join our wait list
As I was writing this, I realized that in my pitch for this newsletter I promised some cocktail content, and I have not delivered on that promise. To remedy that, I downed a few Manhattans, started typing, and, well the rest is all a bit foggy. But when I woke up the next morning, I had a headache and a thousand words about a Negroni. I have no idea who has time to read that much about a drink, but if you make it all the way to the bottom, I salute you.
For the last year, I’ve been on a campaign to discover the perfect strawberry Negroni.
Why?
Well, my lockdown hobby was to get really into cocktails—like order a half dozen books, empty my bank account buying alcohol, and spend my nights browsing cocktail forums kind of into it. It’s an insufferably snobbish hobby, but I will also make you delicious drinks, so you can’t really be too mad about it. Anyways, I’ve always enjoyed a Negroni, and with my new cocktail obsession, I was in the market for a variation on the classic. It was spring, so strawberries seemed appropriate.
If you just want the specification, here it is. If you want my disjointed ramblings on how I developed the spec, why it works, and why Negroni purists are wrong, then read on.
Step 1: How to get strawberries into the drink
The real fork-in-the-road for this drink was how to make it taste like strawberries. Option 1 came from a recipe by Trevor Easter and Devon Tarby in The Cocktail Codex: adding a clarified strawberry syrup to the drink. Option 2 is more obvious: infuse one of the liquors with strawberries. So I went for a head-to-head test.
Strawberry syrup is easily made by blending strawberries with sugar. But this creates a cloudy syrup full of solids and pectin, suitable for shaken drinks, but not stirred ones like a Negroni. You can remove the solids in the strawberry syrup, clarifying it. This is usually done by spinning the syrup in a centrifuge. I don’t have a centrifuge, so I attempted to clarify it by squeezing through a small mesh bag several times, and then passing through a coffee filter. It took 3 days until I gave up, after eeking about half an ounce of clarified syrup out of my original pound of strawberries, and at one point spilling sticky strawberry goo all over my kitchen.
The strawberry infused Campari was much easier to make: cut up a bunch of strawberries, soak in Campari for a few days, then filter and move to the fridge. If you have an iSi whipper, you can fast-infuse the Campari.
For the taste test, I made a standard Negroni with the strawberry infused Campari and put it up against the strawberry syrup recipe from above. The syrup version was disappointingly average—a rather weak strawberry flavor and diluted by the syrup. Easy win for the infused version! (and for me since I didn’t have to buy a centrifuge)
Step 2: The liquors
A simple cocktail like a Negroni lives or dies by the details—a different gin or vermouth can make a totally different drink. I usually prefer a London dry gin for a Negroni. You need that big juniper punch to cut through the powerful flavors of the vermouth and Campari. The subtle floral or citrus notes of a modern gin just get overwhelmed. But with this being a strawberry drink, I thought the floral/citrus thing might be a nice complement. With that in mind I auditioned three candidates:
Beefeater: a classic London dry, always reliable and an excellent all around gin
Roku: an herbal and citrus forward gin from Japan
Barr Hill: an exceptional gin that’s distilled with just two botanicals, juniper and honey
Barr Hill was the clear winner, the bold juniper flavors shine through even the heaviest vermouth, and the subtle floral notes from the honey are the perfect complement to the strawberry flavor. It’s hard to overstate the way this gin elevates the drink, it’s almost a totally different cocktail, but if you find yourself in a bind, Beefeater is a solid runner-up.
When it comes to vermouth, I really only have two options: Carpano Antica or Dolin Rouge (sadly my local liquor store doesn’t have much of a vermouth selection, and these are the only two worth trying). I love the cherry and vanilla notes of Carpano Antica when paired with darker spirits, but in this case it just clashed with the subtle floral strawberry thing. The cleaner profile of Dolin Rouge was the clear choice.
Step 3: the ratio
Traditionally, a Negroni is an equal parts drink: 1 of gin, 1 of vermouth, and 1 of Campari. But I find that version a little on the sweet side, and I prefer to add a touch more gin to dry the drink out. The strawberry variation, with the added sweetness from the honey in the Barr Hill gin, was clearly too sweet as an equal ratio. I tried a couple options, inching the amount of gin up until I hit the sweet spot (or the dry spot, as it were). 1.5 of gin, 1 of vermouth, 1 of Campari, that’s the winner.
Step 4: seasoning
The strawberry syrup based recipe in cocktail codex didn’t end up working out, but it did contain one interesting suggestion, the addition of a cocoa nib tincture. I liked the idea of an added seasoning to bring out the strawberry flavor, so I tried the cocoa nibs, and pink peppercorn tincture (pink peppercorns have lots of nice floral notes that compliment strawberry). The cocoa nib tincture brought a great floral complement to the drink that blended right in with the rest of the flavors, the peppercorns on the other hand were a fail, the bite was distracting. This would be a great place to experiment with your own seasonings: lavender, lemon, orange, lots of things could work.
The final addition was a couple drops of saline (a 25% solution). If you’ve never tried adding salt to your cocktails, I highly recommend it—we salt our food, so why not our drinks? If you have any doubts, just check out this excellent article on adding salt to cocktails, it tempers the sweetness and binds all the powerful flavors together.
The final cocktail is sensational. It’s balanced, nuanced, and makes me want to keep drinking. I could have one every night, and in fact, I think I’ll go make one right now. Cheers!
Bonus content
If you’re thinking, "Wow that drink sounds great, and it’s so festive looking, that would be great for Christmas!" then you’d be right. But if you don’t have time before the holidays to source all the ingredients and make all the infusions, here’s a couple of recipes for similar drinks that are equally delicious and festive and are much easier to source.
Boulevardier
1.5 oz. Rittenhouse Rye (or other rye whisky)
0.75 oz. Campari
0.75 oz. Sweet vermouth (Carpano Antica is nice here, but Dolin works too)
Stir with ice until chilled (again better to under-dilute here) strain into a glass with a large ice cube.
Fallzoni
1 oz. Bourbon (I prefer a high-rye bottle like Grand Old Dad overproof)
1 oz. Campari
0.75 oz. lemon juice
0.5 oz. simple syrup
7 red grapes
Muddle the grapes in a cocktail shaker. Add the rest of the ingredients, then add ice and shake vigorously for ~5-10 seconds until chilled and aerated. Double strain into glass with a large ice cube. Garnish with a comically large amount of grapes on the vine.