When Cocktails Were Larger And Filled With Fruit

Continuing the foray into The PDT Cocktail Book, I alighted on the Eclipse Cocktail (page 113), which involves tequila, Aperol, Cherry Heering and lemon juice. As any good bartender will tell you, the first rule of mixology is to use ingredients you have; we had those ingredients.

The combination is good (most cocktails are “good” though, aren’t they?), less sweet and more nuanced than last night’s Persephone. Still fruity, but good. Tonight it occurred to me that we might be living a sort of cocktail time capsule in this book though — it was published in 2011, and I wonder if the trends from four years back were more fruitacious than today. The few times I’ve been out at real-life cocktail places recently it seems like the drinks were more angular and challenging than fruitacious. (“Angular” just popped into my head; I remember guitars being described as “angular” in days of yore; I have no clue what that means.)

To go back to the Eclipse, the proportions kind of blow the typical three-ounce cocktail out of the water: 2 ounces tequila and 3/4 ounces of each other ingredient adds up to [thinking] 4 1/4 ounces of beverage: yikes!