Samantha Egelhoff
G&T#3
As summer approaches, cocktail menus increasingly resemble salads. If that sounds gross to you because you inexplicably hate salad, remember that most cocktails are just fermented grains or vegetables mixed with fruit. Craft cocktail menus kick that formula up a few notches, infusing a spirit with local garden vegetables, mixing it with a tart fruit syrup and maybe muddling in some fragrant herbs.
The spring menu at Estrellón, 313 W. Johnson St., demonstrates this salad theory perfectly. New drinks contain apple-rhubarb shrub, rosemary syrup, orange blossom water, even radishes. I chose the G & T #3 for one simple reason: The first word in its menu description was beet.
Infused into St. George Dry Rye Gin with a pinch of salt and a few days of room-temperature cryovacking — the vacuum-packing method also known as sous vide — the beets give the drink a rosy hue, a down-to-earth sweetness and just enough flavor (combined with fresh lemon) to stand up to the rye. Jack Rudy tonic syrup, mixed with soda in-house, also sweetens the blend.
Beet-infused gin is a menu bombshell, but my favorite ingredients were actually farther down the list. First, the gin is paired with Linie Aquavit, an aromatic spirit distilled in Scandinavia with flavors like caraway and dill, then matured in sherry casks over the course of several months at sea. I couldn’t actually taste it, but that’s a great story. And more importantly, the flavor profile made sense, especially because the Collins glass was also bursting with fresh dill. Beets and dill? Basically, sipping this drink is like standing in a garden. As far as I’m concerned, it qualifies as a health food.
