Lined with turn-of-the-century structure and well-manicured foliage, downtown Lawrence, Kansas, presents itself as an easy place to seize a pitcher of beer and catch a KU recreation. However on an unassuming alley nook, down a set of 130-year-old stairs, an unused-looking service entrance results in John Brown’s Underground, a bar providing impressed cocktails that defy expectations.
Working accomplice Dante Colombo sees alternative reasonably than limitation on this Midwestern school city, the place even a cocktail ice program is a DIY endeavor. “Like lots of people, we do that as a result of the worth of full and complete artistic freedom is so necessary to us,” he says. “If we determine we need to do one thing, we mainly must determine it out ourselves.” This freedom has created a rum-focused cocktail program with playful drinks, set in opposition to the dim candlelight and low ceilings of a speakeasy-style area centered on “concentrating flavors and translating disparate items right into a cohesive entire,” in response to Colombo.
Every menu at John Brown’s Underground begins with a theme, from iconic chair design to climate phenomena. Bartender and artwork director Cammie Mitchener’s menu design comes subsequent, and is used as inspiration for the cocktails that observe. “The design drives the content material,” says Colombo. “The drink-making has to occur, if not after the paintings, not less than along side it.” This methodology lends the employees a story place to begin for creation. With Mitchener’s pictures unfold in entrance of them, the bar crew asks, What sort of individual belongs on this scene? What would they drink?
However a number of choose drinks transcend their respective themes. The bar’s Let Me Be Clear has grow to be a home staple by way of 4 menus, and displays the bar’s typical subversion of expectations. Impressed by the Jungle Fowl, it seems not as a frothy crimson concoction, however as a twinkling yellow combination poured over a crystal-clear ice dice. It reveals itself in eager citrus notes that soften into grassy molasses, and pops with a crisp, bitter end. “This drink, greater than some other, defines how we take into consideration drinks,” says Colombo.
Let Me Be Clear, like lots of the bar’s cocktails, factors to his conflicted love of rum classics. “I’d lengthy been a fan of Jungle Birds, but additionally felt like the unique is a little bit inefficient,” he says. “It’s actually cool, however is it finest serving the Venn diagram of candy, bitter and bitter?”
To reply this query, Colombo started tinkering with the drink for the Revisionist Histories menu, a theme that sought to re-envision cocktail eras by way of the ages. He anxious that the mixed water content material of the pineapple juice, lime juice and ice muted the subtler flavors of the elements. His resolution got here within the type of one significantly complicated ingredient: clarified, acidified pineapple gomme syrup. “It’s a multiday, multifaceted course of, however to take away all the additional water within the drink, I needed to mix three components of the basic into one,” he explains.
First, the pineapple juice is combined with an agar-agar resolution, which bonds with the particulate matter within the juice. After an evening within the freezer, the ensuing yellow ice block is thawed and strained, shedding a lot of its coloration and pulp alongside the best way. The remaining juice is mixed with gum arabic for added texture, mixed with sugar, then cooked sous vide at low warmth to keep away from caramelizing the juice. Lastly, the addition of citric acid brings the pH to lime’s degree. The method yields a silky syrup, the colour of Suze, that provides sweetness, acidity and physique multi function—and offers the one trace of coloration within the completed drink.
The syrup is joined within the glass by a trio of rums, fittingly led by Tattersall clear blackstrap rum alongside Clairin Le Rocher, which Colombo describes as having “barbecue pineapple notes,” and Rum Hearth, with its signature overripe banana taste. Luxardo Bitter Bianco replaces the standard Campari so as to add the anticipated bitterness with out the anticipated coloration. “We wished one thing that was wealthy with out being candy, that lets every rum grow to be one thing greater than the sum of its components,” says Colombo, “and it’s shaped the template for the way we strategy drinks.”
Now this piece of revisionist historical past units the tone for the way forward for John Brown’s Underground. The drink serves as an inventive entry level into a brand new theme for Mitchener with each new menu. “As soon as we nail down an idea,” she says, “the primary place my thoughts goes is, What’s the Let Me Be Clear going to be?”
