The red in your cocktail might be from bug blood
That vibrant red color in your craft cocktail? It may be from crushed-up bugs — cochineal. Though Campari, makers of the eponymous essential ingredient in the drink Negroni, stopped using the dye extracted from cochineal in U.S. versions of the spirit, artisan distillers are embracing the tradition.
The Negroni is an iconic Italian aperitif: equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari, served on the rocks and garnished with an orange peel. Gaspare Campari concocted his eponymous bitter liqueur in Italy in the 1860s from a still-secret recipe of 60plus ingredients. To the herbs, tree bark and fruit peels, Campari added a natural red dye called carmine that gave the liqueur its distinctive red color for nearly 150 years. That dye was made from a
aka cochineal, a scaly insect that thrives on prickly pears in South America and Mexico, living off the cactus juice. To defend themselves from ants and other predators, female cochineals developed a brilliant strategy: engorge themselves with carminic acid. Squish one in your fingers, and that stuff is bright-crimson red.
To the Aztecs, that bug juice was nochezli, “blood of the prickly pear.” They used it as a textile dye, body paint and food coloring. However, with the advent of synthetic dyes — and perhaps, the increasing market clout of vegans — Campari (now owned by the Campari Group) ceased using cochineal in the U.S. market in 2006, opting for something created in the lab.
How can you tell? Check out the bottle’s back labels in your cupboard and home bar. If there’s mention of cochineal, cochineal extract, carmine (as in Mentos and Yoplait strawberry yogurt), carminic acid, crimson lake, carmine lake, natural red 4, C.I. 75470 or E120, you’re sipping bug blood.
Some craft spirit makers, meanwhile, are not squeamish about using the bug dye. Tempus Fugit Spirits, out of Novato, Calif., uses cochineal in its Creme de Noyaux, a vivid red, almond-flavored liqueur. St. George Spirits of Alameda, Calif., employs cochineal in its Bruto Americano, a more direct Campari substitute. Mix it with one of the brand’s killer gins, and you’re two-thirds of the way to a CaliforNegroni.
For that true Italian cochineal Negroni experience, see Francesco Amodeo, president and master blender at Washington’s Don Ciccio & Figli. He features cochineal in three of his bracing aperitivi: Cinque, Luna and Donna Rosa Rabarbaro.
“It’s an expensive endeavor,” he says, “more expensive than chemicals,” since it’s estimated that it takes about 70,000 cochineals to produce 1 pound of water-soluble extract. Fifty grams of cochineal costs $75, that’s about a third of the price of the same weight in Tsar Imperial Ossetra caviar.
It’s also quite potent. “We use one drop for every 5 liters of our aperitivo. That’s 0.07 grams to be exact,” says Amodeo. For what it packs in color, cochineal presents no barrier to taste. It became the favored red dye centuries ago precisely because it was vibrant, stable and safe for use in food and drink (barring a rare bug allergy), without affecting flavor at all. “You can get it in five-gallon barrels, but we buy the smallest container.” Between Don Ciccio’s boutique production and the dye’s intensity, it would take Amodeo three years to go through that five gallons.
Amodeo tried 12 different cochineal dyes before deciding on the right one. “It’s very consistent. We’ve been using it for two years now.” After all that research, it’s little surprise that he won’t give up the name of his source. As for outcries from vegans, he says: “We tried a million times to mimic the color with (non-cochineal) natural products, but it is impossible.”