one hundred cocktails

drinking with a purpose

The Algonquin Cocktail

02 Feb 2011

After the first cocktail in the book, the Algonquin Cocktail seemed positively mundane. Three ingredients are needed, and all are easily procured:

rye
dry vermouth
pineapple juice

My kind of cocktail ingredient list, let me tell you.

Ingredients for the Algonquin cocktail.

Shaken with ice and then strained, it makes a cold, sweet, yellow thing:

A finished Algonquin cocktail.

I like rye. I tolerate a rinse of dry vermouth with my martini. I don’t understand this cocktail at all, however. It’s sweet, and just doesn’t make any sense in my mouth. Running it by another taster, I got some pretty amazing awful faces. I tried two different ryes, no luck. The critical issue may be the pineapple juice used, but I don’t see how good pineapple juice was going to rescue this concoction. The earthy brown liquor flavors of the rye work well with the pineapple, if producing something a little sweet. The pineapple and the dry vermouth … a stretch, but not an abomination. The dry vermouth and the rye aren’t really fast friends, but maybe under the right circumstances something good could happen. All three together are a train wreck. This is not my cocktail of choice.

More soon; I’ve been suffering through, of all things, a gin shortage, which is slowing my progress.