Supreme Cocktails—the Organic Way

Tasty cock­tails are an adven­ture that organic cock­tail author and blog­ger Paul Abercrombie hap­pened upon quite by acci­dent. “Some years ago, my then girlfriend—now wife—and I were over in Italy,” Abercrombie told Organic Connections. “While we were tromp­ing around, we wound up going to the Grand Hotel in Florence and asked the bar­tender there to just make us some­thing good. He mixed us a drink called a Negroni.”

It didn’t hurt that Paul was order­ing the Negroni at its source. Consisting of one part gin, one part sweet ver­mouth and one part bitters—traditionally Campari—the Negroni was invented right there in Florence in 1919. “It was prob­a­bly the first time I’d ever had a really grown-up cock­tail that wasn’t basi­cally like a depth charge with beer and vodka or some­thing hor­ri­ble,” Abercrombie related. “It was a rev­e­la­tion; I had no idea a cock­tail could actu­ally taste that good.”

When Abercrombie returned home, he became a self-described “cock­tail nerd” and learned the basics of this and other inter­est­ing mixed drinks. In his day job, he is a pub­lic rela­tions con­sul­tant and free­lance writer, and a cou­ple of the areas he became involved with were food and travel. In that work, he came across an increas­ing num­ber of bar­tenders around the US who were mak­ing cock­tails using fresh organic ingre­di­ents. He began writ­ing about this in arti­cles con­tributed to pub­li­ca­tions such as the Washington Post, Wine Enthusiast Magazine and Gourmet.

With the growth in organic ingre­di­ents being served in restau­rants, Abercrombie didn’t under­stand why cock­tails wouldn’t also be organic. “You go out to meals and get great arti­sanal fresh veg­eta­bles and organic beef, but if you ask for a cock­tail before this meal, you are given some weird con­coc­tion made with day-glo cher­ries and some weird syrup that wasn’t found in nature,” he said. “I just couldn’t under­stand the dis­con­nect between those two. That’s why I started track­ing down peo­ple who were into this stuff, who couldn’t see why you wouldn’t put in your glass what you were putting on your plate.”

After numer­ous arti­cles, Paul thought that organic cock­tails would be a good sub­ject for a book. He ran the idea by his agent, and the final result was Organic, Shaken and Stirred: Hip Highballs, Modern Martinis, and Other Totally Green Cocktails from Harvard Common Press. Since the pub­li­ca­tion of his book, Paul has also cre­ated a blog called The Green Bar, through which he com­mu­ni­cates the lat­est on ingre­di­ents, organic liquors, cre­ators, and where organic cock­tails are being served.

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As with organic food, Paul sees the rea­son for much of the con­tin­u­ing growth in pop­u­lar­ity of organic cock­tails being the supe­rior fla­vor of the ingre­di­ents. “With cer­tain organic fruits and fresh veg­eta­bles you can really dis­cern the dif­fer­ence in taste,” he remarked. “For exam­ple, an organic banana tastes more banana-y. Things taste like you’d expect, instead of these fla­vor­less kinds of fruits, veg­eta­bles and herbs. This stuff just tastes a hell of a lot bet­ter than the tra­di­tional ingredients.”

And in the end, Abercrombie thinks it is that taste that wins peo­ple over. “You know, it’s funny—some peo­ple still can’t quite get their heads around it,” he said. “They think I’m kid­ding. Their first thought is, ‘Oh, so, will it be bet­ter for me?’ It’s a dif­fi­cult thing to say with a straight face that if you have eleven organic gim­lets you’re going to be health­ier. That’s sort of insane. It’s a cock­tail for God’s sake; it’s actu­ally sup­posed to be a lit­tle naughty. It’s really more a func­tion of the pro­duc­tion: they don’t use chem­i­cals, pro­duc­tion is nat­ural, and it just tends to taste bet­ter. In actual fact, it’s sim­ply a mat­ter of, do you want a cock­tail that’s truly fan­tas­tic, tast­ing like it should?”

Paul’s book Organic, Shaken and Stirred: Hip Highballs, Modern Martinis, and Other Totally Green Cocktails is avail­able through the Organic Connections book­store.

Visit Paul’s blog at www.organicshakenandstirred.com.