Festivities on the rim of a cocktail glass have traditionally been reserved for Margaritas and Sidecars (in addition to the Sidecar’s predecessor, the Brandy Crusta), however recently the occasion’s getting a bit rowdy. Now, the world of cocktail rims goes past the ever present salt and sugar, reaching interstellar heights as bartenders invent new methods, and even new components, to embellish the glass with eye-catching colours and sudden flavors.
Mariena Boarini’s mind-bending iridescent cocktail enhancer, Electricdust, for instance, is utilized to the rim of the glass to stimulate the palate, making a tingling sensation in your lips and tongue that looks like a pulsating present. Made with dehydrated buzz button flowers, Electricdust was engineered to leverage the super-tasting energy of the ingredient; Boarini famously used it on the Chandelier Bar in Las Vegas to garnish her iconic Verbena cocktail—a recipe that includes the flowers alongside blanco tequila, yuzu, ginger and lemon verbena.
Buzz buttons, also called Sichuan buttons, are the flowers of a plant (Acmella oleracea) named for having sensory properties much like these of Sichuan peppercorns. Boarini’s Verbena and her work with buzz buttons impressed a era of bartenders, like Kate Gerwin of Comfortable Accidents in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to experiment with them as cocktail garnishes.
Chewing the recent flower awakens the salivary glands and heightens a tasting expertise, however there are drawbacks. “You possibly can’t management the impact that individuals get with the precise flower,” Gerwin says. “So typically individuals would eat the flower, and after a number of drinks, they’d get an enormous impact and begin drooling throughout themselves.” The masticated botanical clumps that clients left behind weren’t glamorous both. (Her workers referred to as them spit-flowers.) “We stopped utilizing buzz button flowers due to that.”
So when Boarini launched Electricdust, Gerwin leaped on the likelihood to redeploy the cosmic ingredient. At Comfortable Accidents, which can be a distillery, Gerwin sprinkles the space-age blue Electricdust vertically alongside one facet of the Hey Love cocktail, with their home gin as a base alongside glowing sake, lychee and coconut syrup. The drink’s title is an homage to her buddy Emily Mistell’s bar in Portland, Oregon. Mistell reciprocated at Hey Love with a cocktail referred to as the Comfortable Accident, which she makes with gin, elderflower, white cranberry and peach, with an Electricdust rim.
The primary sip delivers a soothing menthol burn, however with out numbing the palate. Your style buds really feel effervescent, a sensation that intensifies with extended contact with the rim of the glass. Nuances in a cocktail that you could have missed come into focus.
Boarini, now the resort mixologist on the Wynn Las Vegas, approaches cocktail design with an epicurean eye. “Cocktails are an amorphous liquid, so you possibly can’t management how individuals style every distinct a part of the drink the way in which cooks do with meals,” she says. “That’s why I’ve all the time been fascinated with including totally different layers and textures to cocktails—whether or not it’s bursting boba pearls, foams or inventive rims.”
Ornamental cocktail rims have taken on a nostalgic bent lately, too. The resurgence of the cocktail rim is itself nostalgic, calling to thoughts not solely Jerry Thomas and his directions for sugaring the rim of a Crusta in his pioneering Bartender’s Information from 1862, but additionally the saccharine cocktail rims of the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s. Over time, a few of these rimmed cocktails, just like the (albeit considerably maligned) Lemon Drop and Tony Abou-Ganim’s Cable Automotive, have grow to be trendy classics.
As of late, nostalgic bars—like All Night time Skate within the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn—are getting playful with cocktail rims by introducing sudden components. The bar’s kitschy inside is tricked out with a disco ball overhead and an incandescent neon signal to evoke the within of a curler rink, with a concession stand–like bar to match. There, they serve the Poppin’ Off, a mezcal Margarita sweetened with strawberry syrup and served in a hobnail-style rocks glass rimmed with crushed watermelon Pop Rocks that crackle with each sip. “We wished to create an escape from on a regular basis life,” says Olivia Hu, one of many bar’s house owners.
At Trina’s Starlite Lounge within the Boston space, the bar workforce additionally experiments with quirky rims to convey extra enjoyable to their drink menu. Final 12 months, they featured a seasonal cocktail with a salted Tang rim; referred to as It Takes Two to Tang-o, the Tang Margarita included St-Germain and orange blossom water. One other drink, The Fallen Angel, is a Trina’s staple: The tequila-based cocktail (with mango and chile syrup) is served with a “BBQ-dusted rim” that tastes like smoky barbecue-flavor potato chips. “We strive to not take ourselves too severely,” says Rosa Ortiz, the bar’s common supervisor, “however we by no means add something only for enjoyable. We all the time be sure that it provides to the drink itself.”
Likewise, Hu hopes that All Night time Skate guests gained’t mistake the kitschy sweet rim on the Poppin’ Off as an indication of a cupcake beverage program. “Gimmick is a part of it,” she says, “however we hope that our friends can see that what’s behind the recipes is true ardour and talent.”
