Duke – Recipe from the ‘Old Waldorf Bar Guide’

Dash of Orange Bitters

Two dashes, each of Absinthe and Anisette

One jigger French Vermuth

Frappe

How to get me to drink something? Put Absinthe inside.

And when it’s hot I prefer the lighter low alcohol drinks that these vermouth-based drinks offer.

Recently there’s been talk of promoting socially conscious drinks of the ‘low alcohol’ variety, I find this a little confusing as there is no real definition, is a low alcohol drink one where the proportion of alcohol to volume is low (like beer for example) or is it one where the overall quantity of ethanol in the glass is lower, for example

50ml double G+T at 42% = 21ml of ethanol

500ml pint of 5% beer = 25ml of ethanol

75ml Gin at 42% in a very dry martini = 31.5ml of ethanol

250ml glass of 13% wine = 32.5ml of ethanol

Because that throws up some surprising results, if you want to drink less alcohol you should switch from wine to martini’s.

As it happens the above ‘low alcohol’ drink was absolutely delicious, there’s wormwood in good vermouth anyway so the absinthe helps pull out these flavours and your left with a nice light, dry aniseed summers drink, almost as perfect as pastis for a hot summers day.