The Up in Smoke is a unicorn. It is a strange and wonderful cocktail, brilliantly inventive, resolutely delicious, and utterly unique. Have you seen professional basketball players watching Michael Jordan highlights and be simply astonished at what he could do? That’s what the Up in Smoke is to me. I’ve been making cocktails professionally for the last 15 years, and the creativity and excellence of this drink renders me speechless. I’m in awe.
Some cocktails are obvious, both in their conception and their deliciousness. The Old Fashioned. The Hot Toddy. The Daiquiri is so simple and elemental it’s as if it were immaculately conceived. Other classics are just simple substitutions or additions: Everything tastes good with ginger, so we have the Moscow Mule, of course, but also the Mamie Taylor (which is just a Moscow Mule with scotch) to say nothing of the Dark ‘n Stormy (a Moscow Mule with rum) and the Kentucky Buck (a Moscow Mule with bourbon and a strawberry). All of these cocktails are excellent, and they’re excellent in a clear and vivid way—one glimpse at the ingredients and you already know it’s going to be good.
The Up in Smoke, on the other hand, is a different kind of drink. It was created by the New York bartender Phil Ward in 2010, as gifted a flavor-whisperer as you could ever hope to find, and whose talents have never been on fuller display than they are here. It starts with Laphroaig 10—the briny, medicinal, monstrously smoky single malt scotch from the island of Islay, and about as polarizing and intense a spirit as exists—to which is added lime juice, fuji apple syrup, and, improbably, 3 to 4 ounces of Allagash Curieux, a 10+ percent alcohol, bourbon barrel aged Belgian-style Tripel beer from Portland, Maine.
Related: The 50 Best Single Malt Scotch Whiskies of the 21st Century
Not to belabor the point, but to start with Laphroig is already crazy, and then to top it with Curieux is crazy twice. And then to have the finished product be not only good but wildly, uniquely delicious is insane, a 7-10 split of flavor. It doesn’t even come across your palate in a normal way, because it’s as if there are three planes of the experience— high with apple and lime, mid with beer, esters, and oak, and low with smoke—and all three of them are playing their notes all at the same time, and you would think that would clash but it doesn’t, it’s a harmony, because of how precisely these bottles were chosen.
It’s too much to call the Up in Smoke a “crowd pleaser.” It’s objectively delicious, but to enjoy it you’d have to at a minimum like smoky scotch, and I suspect it helps to be interested in the mechanics of flavor combination. You also need these specific ingredients: I tried messing with the type of apples, the type of smoky scotch, and the type of Belgian beer, and all three tweaks made a cocktail that was pretty good but failed to synergize into something great.
Ward made this on a consulting project, for the opening list of a bar called Craft & Commerce in San Diego, where it stayed on the menu for a couple years and then was never to be heard from again. Maybe the polarizing nature of smoky scotch is what stopped it from gaining wider acclaim, or perhaps it was the pain in the ass of sourcing three specific and unlikely ingredients for a single drink. For my part, for the last 13 years I haven’t been able to look at a bottle of Laphroig 10 or Allagash Curieux without thinking about the other, and if you’re not put off by the smoke or the inconvenience, do try it out. It’s really something.
Up in Smoke
- 1 oz. Laphroig 10 Single Malt Scotch
- 1 oz. Fuji apple syrup
- 0.5 oz. lime
- 3-4 oz. Allagash Curieux
Add scotch, apple syrup, and lime to a cocktail shaker, and shake hard on ice for 6-8 seconds. Strain into a tall glass half filled with ice and top with beer. Garnish with an apple slice, a lime wheel, or nothing at all.
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS
Scotch: I strongly recommend Laphroaig 10, but you can mess around with this variable if you want to. Ardbeg makes a pretty good version. I didn’t try it with Lagavulin, but I suspect it would be good, too, but not as good as Laphroaig. Avoid the peaty scotches that have a barnyard note like Octomore, it’s too much and the earthiness grows unpleasant.
Fuji Apple Syrup: When I make this at home I simply throw a wedge (about 1/8th) of an apple into a cocktail shaker and muddle it, and then use regular old simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water). This works well—the apple was never designed to be a huge presence, and when I tried it with a syrup made from apple juice it was too much. Also, it’s OK with granny smith apples, but better with the sweeter, milder kinds.
To make the original recipe: simmer apples in simple syrup for 30 minutes or so, 1 apple for every 12oz of simple syrup (or, if you’re making the syrup at the same time, 1 apple for every 8oz sugar and 8oz of water. Simmer, covered, for 30 minutes, and then strain out the solids. You’ll want to add back the water you lost to evaporation so measure and see how much you have, and add enough water to get back to where you started.
Allagash Curieux: This is a great beer and it’s worth buying in and of itself, which is good news, because you really do need it for this. As mentioned, I tried versions with regular, non-barrel aged Belgian Tripels, and you really do miss the oak, which grounds the midpalate and acts as a floor for the beer, lime, and apple flavors to stand on (the smoke, to extend the metaphor, is a ghost that haunts you from under the floorboards).
