How to Make a Palo Santo Cocktail

To be honest, I don’t even really like smoked cocktails.

I seem to be in the minority here. Everyone oohs and ahhs over smoked cocktails—the show, the great arc of the cloche removal, the cloud vanishing like magic to reveal a perfectly posed glass—but it’s not for me. I don’t mean to say that I don’t like smoke, because I do. I love mezcal and Islay scotch and barbeque, and at a campfire I’m the guy who’s essentially cremating his marshmallow before eating it. It’s that I tend not to like smoked cocktails, because they tend to be smoked, shall we say, poorly.

A smoked cocktail is when you use actual wood to smoke a drink or ingredient. It started around 2007, when bartender Eben Freeman at Tailor in New York City smoked a Coca-Cola syrup with alder- and cherry woods, adding an incredible depth and complexity to what was essentially a Jack & Coke, and catapulting the technique into the mainstream. Before long, smoked cocktails were everywhere. It was precisely the kind of trend that bartenders pounced on—showy, dramatic even, complex enough that most amateurs won’t do it at home and bold enough to significantly change the flavor of what you’re working with. It made you feel like a mixologist.

The problem is that it’s a blunt tool and easy to get wrong, both in quantity and quality (A couple seconds makes the difference between a well-smoked cocktail and one in which the smoke is stale and overpowering.). I’ve had north of 50 smoked cocktails in my life, and I’d say five of them were good, five more were “interesting,” and the rest were undrinkable. Smoke is hard.

The Palo Santo was never supposed to be a smoked cocktail. I just wanted to find a way to use palo santo wood and cinnamon together, because palo santo has insanely evocative aroma, earthy and soft, and combines with cinnamon in this ambrosial way that reminds me of nothing so much as the “spice” they’re always prattling on about in Dune. I tried infusing palo santo wood into whiskey and rum, tried making a tincture to spray over the drink or use in drops, but nothing really took (palo santo is bizarrely mercurial on the palate). Only then did I turn to smoke—not by smoking the cocktail, but smoking the cinnamon syrup itself and then using that as a component in the larger drink. 

The Palo Santo cocktail is an Old Fashioned, essentially, with bourbon, palo santo-smoked cinnamon syrup, allspice liqueur, and chocolate bitters. The smoke is gentle, a wisp, subtle enough to allow the other ingredients to shine but still adds complexity. It’s not smoked in front of the guest—you lose the show, c’est la vie—but in its place is a drink that people actually love, which seems like a good trade off to me.

Palo Santo

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass with ice and stir for 10 to 25 seconds (shorter for small ice, longer for big ice). Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice and garnish with an orange peel.

*See the recipe for the smoked syrup below.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Bourbon: This drink is good with any bourbon but really shines with a sweeter (as opposed to spicier) style. Buffalo Trace knocks it out of the park, but it can be occasionally hard to come by. Four Roses Small Batch is good too, as is Elijah Craig Small Batch, and others.

Allspice Liqueur: I use the St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram, because I’ve always liked it, and you don’t need two bottles of allspice dram. St. Elizabeth now has a couple competitors that are well reviewed but I’ve personally never tried—it’s only 1/8th of an ounce, use whatever you like.

Chocolate Bitters: I use the Fee Brother’s Aztec Chocolate Bitters here, which, frankly, I really don’t like at all. This is the only drink I’ve ever tried where Fee Brother’s works better than its rival chocolate bitters. I don’t know what to say about that aside from that this is why you need to test every ingredient—I lined up four different otherwise identical versions of this drink and tried four different bitters (Bitterman’s Mole, Scrappy’s Chocolate, Angostura Chocolate, and Fee Bros. Aztec Chocolate). I included Fee’s almost like a control group and was shocked that I liked it best. It just works. Drinks are weird.

Cinnamon Syrup: You need to make this. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy—get two or three cinnamon sticks, one cup of water, and one cup of white sugar, and combine in a pot. Smash the cinnamon sticks so they’re in a few pieces. Heat on medium, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Once it starts to simmer, cover and reduce the heat, and simmer for about 10 minutes. Then strain out the solids.

One important point that’s nearly always forgotten: You need to measure the amount you have left. You lost an unknown amount of water to evaporation, and it will change the concentration of the sweetness (reducing by 60 percent would yield a much sweeter 0.25 oz. of cinnamon syrup than reducing by 30 percent), so you have to add the lost water back. If you used one cup of water and one cup of sugar, you’ll want 1.5 cups of syrup (sugar reduces volume by half when it dissolves), so add back the water you lost to evaporation until you hit 1.5 cups.

Palo Santo Smoke: There are two ways to do this:

If you’re going to make a bunch of these, smoke the cinnamon syrup. Get yourself a cheap smoking gun and pipe smoke into a container that has the cinnamon syrup, then close the lid. Invert a few times to infuse for about seven to 10 seconds, then open the container and blow off the smoke. Ten seconds is all you need and is probably on the high side—if you’re doing less than 12 oz. at a time, start with five seconds and then taste. You can always add more, but you can’t take it away. Oversmoked syrup is literal trash.

If you’re just making one or two, you can always smoke the glass. First, make the drink in a mixing glass. Then, put a piece of palo santo wood on a non-reactive surface (stainless steel, a cast iron pan, or just a larger piece of different wood) and burn it with a blowtorch until it starts to smoke. Invert your glass over the smoke and let it infuse there for eight to 10 seconds, then flip the glass right-side-up, allowing the smoke to escape. Then add ice and cocktail. The glass obviously won’t pick up much smoke, but it’ll pick up a little, and will give your cocktail a subtle smoke.