Birch Tree by Nomad Bar

My Father’s Day gift to Michael was the Nomad cocktail book. It was a bit less of a gift than the promise that I would make him a lot of the cocktails in it. One thing that we quickly noticed was the omnipresence of Linie aged aquavit throughout the book. The other was that there is a fantastic “dark spirits” section in the middle of the book, which we have frequented in the past few weeks.

The Birch Tree’s subtitle is written as a “cognac Manhattan reminiscent of root beer flavors”. This is spot on. Without telling him anything about the drink, Michael sipped and determined it to taste like “root beer” and “caramel-y”. The drink tastes boozy and complex – exactly up my alley. To be honest, ours veered a bit too much on the sweet and syrupy sweet side because we substituted St. George’s coffee liqueur for cold brew concentrate (going with 3/4 the portion… but it still was not a substitute).

Ingredients

• 2 dashes chocolate bitters (theirs called for 2 dashes Sarsaparilla Tincture, which is made from sarsaparilla root powder and vodka)
• 0.5 oz. Amaro Nonino
• 3/8 oz. of St. George coffee liqueur (original called for 1/2 oz cold brew coffee concentrate)
• 0.75 oz. Linie aged aquavit
• 0.75 oz. Cocchi Vermouth di Torino
• 1 oz. Pierre Ferrand 1840 cognac

Glass

Nick and Nora Glass

Instructions

• Combine ingredients into a mixing glass with ice. Stir.
• Strain into a Nick and Nora glass and garnish with a brandied cherry (modification note: we did not have that, so our drink is sadly ungarnished)
• Express a grapefruit twist over the drink and discard the twist. Since we did not have grapefruit peel, I just added a dash of grapfruit bitters and called it a day :). It still tasted damn good!