After Dinner (Special) Cocktail

The Savoy Project Day Six – After Dinner (Special) Cocktail

The Savoy Project is an online chronicle of Cocktails, 365 editor Mark A. Vierthaler’s quest to make every single cocktail in The Savoy Cocktail Book. Each recipe contains the original recipe as it appeared in the book, as well as which brand I used in parenthesis next to the ingredient.

After Dinner (Special) Cocktail | ® 2017 Cocktails, 365

• 1/2 Apricot Brandy (Bols)
• 1/2 Curaçao (Hiram Walker)

Shake well and pour into a cocktail glass.

Mark’s Thought

It must be noted that the majority of apricot brandies that are on the market aren’t ACTUALLY apricot brandies. Those dusty bottles of Dekuypers and Hiram Walker are actually apricot-flavored liqueurs. Heavy, saccharine, sugary bits of sickly sweet. Of the lower-end “brandies” Bols is probably your best bet, as it has a bit more of a natural apricot flavor than the others.

There are some honest-to-God apricot brandies out there. And while they are increasingly easier to find, they can still be somewhat difficult to track down unless you happen to have access to the most well-stocked of liquor stores. If you’re able to, however, I’d recommend the Marie Brizard Apry or the Rothman and Winter Orchard Apricot Liqueur. Both aren’t nearly so sweet as the others, but they do have liqueur with them so they still lend some sweetness to the cocktail.

Even with those adjustments, this cocktail is likely to give you diabetes just from smelling it. It’s heavy, cloying and unbalanced.

To salvage it, I would recommend a couple of dashes of fresh lemon juice to bolster the citrus in the curaçao and cut through the sweet.

If you want to make it sparkling, adding an extra-spicy ginger beer gives it some peppery bite and a some effervescence.