The Hundred Year Old Cigar Cocktail

Today we turn to the Hundred Year Old Cigar cocktail as Drink of the Day.

There’s history on March 20.  In 1915 Einstein published the General Theory of Relativity, a sequel to his 1904 bestseller Special Relativity.  It’s not every day somebody provides a unified theory explaining gravity as a geometric property of space and time, but we don’t have time right now to get into special cases of the Riemann curvature tensor.  So we’ll leave it at that.  Also, in 1942 Douglas MacArthur delivered his famous “I shall return” speech in Australia, having narrowly escaped the Philippines as it fell to Japan with, unfortunately, some 90 thousand people left on Bataan.  We all wince when thinking of that little stroll in the park, so that’s off the table too.

Both those historic events are distressingly difficult cocktail fodder, but hope is not lost.  Today is also National Ravioli Day.  And some years it’s also Kick Butts Day (the latter referring to smoking rather than recreational use of the foot).  Ravioli are generally considered a poor cocktail ingredient or garnish, so through this process of elimination we turn to tobacco.  In the interest of family health, though, we’ll step around any tobacco infusions that readers may consider a poor choice for children.  Hence, for a cocktail the whole family can enjoy:  the Hundred Year Old Cigar.

The Hundred Year Old Cigar cocktail recipe comes from Maks Pazuniak at Jupiter Disco in Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn.  It was immortalized in Carey Jones’ book Brooklyn Bartender: A Modern Guide to Cocktails and Spirits.  The drink itself is served up and is a melange of flavors that are curiously somewhat cigar-like.

Hundred Year Old Cigar

While this recipe is perhaps a bit more complicated than average it works brilliantly and is very much worth trying, with rich flavors that are remarkably similar to those of an old cigar.  Even if it is, shall we say, a bit sweeter.

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Equipment

• Mixing glass
• Jigger
• Barspoon
• Julep strainer
• Nick and Nora Glass

Ingredients

  

1x2x3x

• 1 ¾ oz Aged rum Go ahead use the real Cuban stuff if you've got it, but any dark, aged rum will work well.
• ½ oz Cynar
• ½ oz Benedictine
• ¼ oz Laphroaig
• 1 dash Aromatic bitters
• ¼ tsp Absinthe
• Garnish: none

Instructions

 

• Add ingredients up to the bitters to your trusty mixing glass.
• Add ice and stir.
• Rinse your pre-chilled cocktail glass with absinthe.
• Strain drink into glass.
• Drink.