The Advocate Cocktail Series #5: Sopchoppy Sling

Sopchoppy Sling

Sugar is a polarizing commodity these days, and those of us behind bars are increasingly getting calls for cocktails devoid of any sweetening agent; which is akin to asking a chef for a really nice steak with no salt. As bartenders continue to focus on craft spirits, local produce and house-made ingredients in their drinks, they’ve become equally concerned with what is used to balance out these flavors, what actually makes a cocktail a cocktail by definition: the sweet stuff. When Chef Joe brought in a sample of his family’s cane syrup, pressed and kettle cooked from raw cane in the Florida panhandle (in Sopchoppy, to be exact), I’ve never seen a group of bartenders “ooh” and “aah” over something so delicious, yet would send your average Atkins dieter into an impromptu juice cleanse.

The flavor of Mt. Beasor Farm’s cane syrup is akin to roasted agave: earthly, vegetal, rich and unlike any cane syrup I’ve tasted from St. Barts to Brazil - it’s decidedly down home. The challenge in creating a cocktail to showcase such beautiful, subtle flavors, is of course to not overshadow them with layers of needless ingredients. A lime driven, caipirinha-styled cocktail seemed the best way to accent Mt. Beasor’s labor of love as both cachaça and cane syrup are made from pressing raw cane into juice once a year, at peak ripeness. While rum is made from molasses, a byproduct of manufacturing sugar, whole pressed cane spirits like agricole or cachaça convey the unique flavors of the environment where the cane was grown, ensuring no two are exactly alike. Avua cachaça is made four hours from Rio in the south of Brazil and smells unmistakably of bananas: waxy and green, with a touch of sweetness. In order to amplify the nose of the spirit, and tie into the terroir of the cane syrup, we chose a French-made liqueur of Brazilian bananas and spiked it with coconut to round out the tropical undertones.

At this point I realized we were one step away from an electric-colored frozen beach beverage a la the Piña Colada, but didn’t want to go full blown tiki as once again the aim was to let the cane flavor shine through. Since opening the Advocate in August, we’ve been sitting on a lemon verbena infusion from GM Corin’s backyard that never found a home on the initial drink menu, and this seemed the perfect place to insert an herbal component to balance out the predominating fruit flavors. Slightly bitter, but overwhelmingly bright at the forefront, verbena provided the perfect compliment for the sweet, mellow flavors of banana and coconut.

The result is a cocktail that passed our time-honored test for quaffability with flying colors: namely, could you easily down it in one go if you were about to miss your train? Tart lime and rich, earthy syrup balance the initial attack of un-aged sugar cane spirit, giving way to softer notes of tropical fruit through the mid palate, all tied together nicely by the bright herbal bitterness of verbena to finish.

Matthew McKinley Campbell