NEW YORK – Bartenders call it “the fajita effect”.
As an eye-catching cocktail sails on a tray through a room, it inspires several more orders of the same drink. Fajita favourites in recent years have included the espresso martini, all manner of blue cocktails and any drink on fire.
The latest has something else in common with fajitas besides contagious appeal: layers of colourful ingredients. In a layered cocktail, the liquid components settle out in separate strata, giving the drink a striped or ombre look.
“With the rise of people taking photos of drinks and posting it on social media, there is the aesthetic appeal,” said Mr Conrad Hayes, beverage director at the Ottava bar in Brooklyn, New York. Its current menu includes the Cruella de Vil, a rum drink served over crushed ice, with a crowning scarlet layer of Lambrusco.
There are two ways to layer a cocktail: floats and sinkers. A float is a stripe of liquid – wine, spirit, bitters or juice – carefully applied to the surface of a completed drink. A sinker is poured in last but, owing to the ingredient’s weight, falls to the bottom of the glass.
In both cases, the result is striking – a major reason the drinks are popular in this visual age, when a cocktail’s look is almost as important as its taste.
Floats and sinkers date back to before the Prohibition era, when a popular drink called the Pousse Cafe sported several layers.
The New York Sour, a drink from the mid-20th century whose popularity has rebounded in the last 20 years, is essentially a whisky sour with a float of dry red wine.
The most famous drink with a sinker is probably the Tequila Sunrise, in which red grenadine sinks beneath a mix of tequila and orange juice, giving the drink the picturesque effect hinted at in the name.
Many of the new layered drinks are deceptively simple to make. Brother Wolf, an aperitivo bar in Knoxville, Tennessee, offers a layered twist on the classic Italian spritz the Bicicletta, letting the red-hued Italian bitter Select dwell at the bottom of the highball glass.
The Oaxacan Sunrise at Dante in New York City, with its grenadine sinker, is a Tequila Sunrise made with mezcal. The drink Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, at chef Sara Bradley’s restaurant Freight House in Paducah, Kentucky, is a New York Sour made with honey syrup.
Other cocktails, however, verge on the baroque. At Chez Zou in Manhattan, the Haifa Vice lets the customer apply the float. The drink comes in a glass vessel with two chambers, one filled with a milk punch made of rum, mango, coconut and fruit juices, the other with a mixture of Aperol and pomegranate. The patron pours the orange punch into the glass first, then applies the red float.
There is another do-it-yourself opportunity at LilliStar, the rooftop bar at the Moxy Williamsburg hotel in Brooklyn. The drink Ley Lines is a mango-flavoured Negroni riff garnished with a hollowed-out passion fruit filled with the fruit’s seeds and a passion-fruit liqueur. The customer adds the fruit’s contents to the drink. The bourbon-based Bad Ombre at Bad Roman is a rare specimen armed with both a floater (Barolo) and a sinker (Barolo Chinato).
Bartenders say floats and sinkers provide more than eye candy. The dryness of a red wine float counters the sweetness of some cocktails. Mr Ian Julian, bar director at Red Fish Grill in New Orleans – where there are now three float drinks on the menu, two with rum toppers – likes the added punch they provide. “I think people look for that extra hit of something,” he said.
And the layered look of many cocktails slowly dissolves as the ingredients interact. Mr Joey Smith, bar director at Chez Zou, sees this as a good thing.
“Drinks change over time,” he said. “In general, time is a disservice to a cocktail – either it’s warming up or diluting. I think floats are an interesting way for a cocktail to change as you drink it.”
Ms Christine Wiseman, who creates cocktails at LilliStar, suggested yet another way to regard a float or sinker: “It’s an expensive garnish, if you will.” NYTIMES
