This recipe is excerpted from The Bartender’s Pantry by Jim Meehan and Bart Sasso with Emma Janzen, a cocktail book that dives deep into the provenance, cultural significance, and production of foodstuffs that have made their way into cocktails. The book collects recipes for a pantry of homemade staples, including a special coffee brewing process from coffee expert Michael Yung used in the making of this cocktail. For the sake of convenience, we’ve included local substitution options in collaboration with Meehan.

Falling Water

I created this heady flip for my short-lived Chicago bar, Prairie School. It featured coffee from Ria Neri’s Four Letter Word, prepared via the slow-drip Kyoto-style cold-brew method. The name “Falling Water” is an allusion to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous house and a literal description of this cold-brew method that helps preserve the stone fruit notes of the Ethiopian coffee. This brewing apparatus is large (and expensive!), so Ria brewed it for us at her roastery and dropped it off in quarts with our whole bean deliveries. To recreate the drink, you can use a Kyoto cold-brew tower if you have one, or Japanese-style flash-brewed iced coffee. Yields one serving.

Ingredients

1 ½ ounces flash-brewed coffee (a concentrate brewed directly over ice), homemade or sourced locally from Electrica

1 ½ ounces Cardamaro vino amaro

¾ ounce Rhine Hall plum brandy, or Clear Creek Blue Plum Brandy

¼ ounce simple syrup, (equal parts white cane sugar and water stirred or gently heated to combine) 

1 large egg

Ice cubes, about 2 cups

3 coffee beans for garnish

Procedure

  • Add the coffee, Cardamaro, brandy, simple syrup, and egg (yolk and white) to a Boston shaker (the style in which one metal or glass cup fits upside down inside the lip of another, creating a vacuum seal). Shake without ice for 10 seconds, then add a scoop of ice cubes (roughly 2 cups) and shake for another 10 to 15 seconds. The first “whip” shake is to emulsify the egg proteins for texture and the second “hard” shake is to chill, dilute, and aerate the mixture. It’s properly chilled once the outside of the shaker is frosted and uncomfortably cold in the hand.
  • Double-strain through a Hawthorne (the paddle-shaped gizmo with a spring on the bottom that came with your cocktail shaker kit) and a fine-mesh strainer into a chilled coupe. Float the three coffee beans in the center of the drink.