SPRING FLOWERS MAKE COCKTAILS BLOSSOM
Take advantage of spring flowers to make cocktails blossom
What I’ve been seeing on spring cocktail menus are not your garden variety drinks. Except, well, they are garden variety drinks. Literally.
From flower-infused syrups to floral liqueurs to petal garnishes, flowers are a growing trend in the cocktail world. They gussy up the glass and scream “spring!” in a way that a rogue olive or lime wedge just can’t do.
Besides looking lovely, flowers can also impart unique flavors. For example, lilacs can have a lemony flavor, dandelions can be downright bitter, and rose petals can taste just as sweet as they look. If you use them strategically, flowers can definitely up your cocktail game. Or, leave it to the pros at bars and restaurants around town and let them gild the lily, so to speak.
Here are a few ways to bring the garden to the glass.
Syrups & waters
It’s the granita that makes Stoic & Genuine’s Spring Fling Queen so darned refreshing, and a key component to this cocktail is rose water. Bar manager Sarah Welch created the drink — a grown-up slushie made of St. Germain liqueur, cava and rose water — specifically for spring, and using floral elements was a very intentional
decision.
“A floral presence can elevate a cocktail by adding an easily recognizable sensory response from the aromas,” Welch said. “Imagine taking a deep breath and smelling freshly blooming flowers tickling your nose and reminding you that everything is coming back to life around you.”
Another way to incorporate flowers into drinks is via simple syrups. Lemonade tastes even better when made with light, earthy lavender simple syrup in place of plain sugar. (And we won’t tell anyone if you make it a little more “spirited.”)
Making a flower-infused simple syrup is easy: Just heat equal parts sugar and water until the sugar melts, turn off the heat and add flowers. Voilá: You just became the neighborhood Martha Stewart by boiling water.
Liquers
Union Lodge No. 1 is known for mixing up the craftiest cocktails in a craft cocktail-heavy town. It’s no surprise that it’s got all sorts of floral tricks up its sleeves, including bar manager Colin Overett’s Angel’s Touch cocktail, a vibrant blue beauty (thanks to the Butterfly Blue Pea-infused gin) garnished with a rose bud.
“Typically if you infuse something with a flower, it will take some of the oils and flavors of the flower and bring out different notes from the liquor,” Overett said. “For the pea flower, it doesn’t have an overwhelming change in flavor, but it’s the color that predominantly gets extracted. Pea flower gives the base spirit that beautiful blue color, but then it kind of gives it a slight floral note to it too.”
Of course you don’t have to do the infusing work yourself; there are plenty of liqueurs out there made from flowers, like St. Germain (elderflower), crème de violette (violets), and crème rose (roses). Welch’s drink at Stoic & Genuine relies heavily on St. Germain, one of the most popular floral-derived liqueurs in recent years, for its warm citrus notes.
Garnishes
Is the flower garnish impractical? You bet. But it’s pretty, so let’s be good Americans here and judge this trend solely by how it looks. A flower — or its petals — perched delicately in a drink is a thing of beauty. And it looks really, really cool on Instagram.
Jessica LaValle, who tends bar at one of the city’s most in-demand watering holes, Green Russell, uses a lot of flower garnishes in her drinks. This month she created the Spring Showers, a blend of mezcal, gin, honey, aromatic bitters and freshsqueezed grapefruit and lemon. She tops it with a viola to symbolize spring’s renewal and growth. The flower garnish takes the drink from ho-hum looking to gotta-have-it territory.
I tried using flower garnishes at home with dandelions from my yard. At first I was convinced that I’d end up in the hospital, but two dandelions down and I was still kicking. Not to mention that I simultaneously weeded my yard and prettied up my Lynchburg lemonade. Talk about a win-win.
Taste changers
If you have one very special flower, it can turn your whole tasting world upside down. The Szechuan button is a magical, dandelion-looking flower that can give off an effervescent, tingling sensation and change how you experience certain flavors. At Jing in Greenwood Village, bartenders created a drink — the Drunken Buddha, a play on a lemon drop — to best enhance the button’s effect.
“You take a sip of the cocktail and bite off the bud of the flower. You chew it, move it around and coat the side of your cheeks and your tongue. It lifts up the taste buds a little, adds a bit of an aggressive palette,” said Jing’s manager, Mike Delgado.
The actual sensation after biting the button only lasts about two or three minutes, but it’s a pretty unique couple of minutes.
Besides getting your hands on the weird and wonderful Szechuan button, the flower cocktail trend is very DIY-friendly. Anyone can sprinkle flower petals into a cup, mix up a floral simple syrup or pick up St. Germain on their next liquor store run. Just one caveat: Do not use storebought flowers or flowers grown in a garden where chemicals may have been used. The goal is pretty, not pretty sick.