Peter Suderman Schools Me (and You) on Cocktails

Dear readers,

I know, I said yesterday that today’s cocktail post was only going to be for paying subscribers. But this is the first edition of the podcast where we’re actually pushing the audio through Substack’s pipes. We’re still kicking the tires on that system — and for boring technical reasons, we couldn’t find a good way to paywall the text while sending the audio to everyone who subscribes to the podcast through players like Spotify. We’re working on it! But in the meantime, that means you all get to read about cocktails. How bad could that be?

It’s almost summer. Well, it’s not almost summer, but it’s starting to feel like it might be about to be almost summer. It got up to 63° on Fire Island last Friday, which isn’t beach weather, but it’s good enough weather to write the newsletter out on the deck. And it’s going to keep getting warmer.

One of the things that makes me excited for summer is that summer cocktails are starting to make sense again.

I love sour drinks. A “sour” is any cocktail containing spirits, citrus juice, and a sweetener. The most popular sour is the margarita, but the most basic one is the daiquiri: two parts light rum, one part simple syrup, one part fresh-squeezed lime juice, shaken with ice and strained into a coupe glass. Every other sour you might drink, including a margarita, is just a variation on the daiquiri — change up the base spirit, include a liqueur as part of the sweetening, use lemon instead of lime, add bitters or an egg white; the possibilities are extensive.

But these drinks make the most sense in the summer — they’re cool, sweet drinks for a hot day. There’s a reason so many of these drinks are served at resort bars in the Caribbean and Hawaii. They feel like they belong near the beach. That said, some sours are beachier than others.

On this week’s Very Serious podcast, we did something a little different: I invited Peter Suderman, author of the Cocktails With Suderman newsletter on Substack, to talk with me about cocktails — how to approach them as an amateur at home and make them especially delicious, without doing anything extremely fussy or expensive. And Peter’s view is there’s a season within a season: late spring is for gin sours, with the rum drinks to come out later, when it’s hotter.

My favorite sour is the mai tai — light rum, golden rum, orange curaçao, orgeat (almond syrup), and lime juice, shaken, strained, and served over ice, ideally garnished with an orchid blossom. I’ve talked before about how partial I am to Hawaii, where Zach and I went on our honeymoon, and part of why I love a mai tai is it reminds me of being there. But it’s also a beautiful, balanced drink, with surprisingly complex flavors — with a high quality orgeat and orange liqueur, you can really taste those almond and orange notes punching through the otherwise-overpowering lime and rum.

But I also think Peter is right that drinks like mai tais are not quite yet in season. I wouldn’t generally serve one in April, nor would I serve one at any time of year as an aperitif. Mai tais are for the afternoon. If I want to greet guests at dinner with a sour, I’m more likely to reach for an aviation: A gin sour made with lemon juice, maraschino liqueur, and creme de violette.

Peter wrote recently about the aviation. It’s one of the great gimmick drinks, because it’s purple on account of the creme de violette, and yet it actually tastes good. I personally like the drink’s astringency — when you use the classic recipe, its balance is less sweet and more sour compared to, say, a margarita — but Peter advises to balance the drink out with a little extra sweetness from honey syrup, and a few drops of saline solution. Yes, saline solution: You salt your food, so why wouldn’t you salt your cocktails? Salt is a flavor enha...