The Sazerac, a New Orleans Classic

I would tell you guys when the Sazerac was invented, but this entire video is about when the Sazerac was invented. This is the Sazerac as I was taught it. Is it the 1899 version? I don't really know. Okay, so grab a glass here. I'm gonna do some Peychaud's bitters here, and we're gonna do four dashes. And that is four dashes out of this bottle because we're using the bottle, not the eight that you'd see me do out of the other one. And then we're going to do a sugar cube here. Put that in, let it soak up. And then we're just gonna do a tiny dash of soda water. Tiny, teensy, tiny dash of soda water. And we're gonna grab a spoon with a muddler on the end of it. And we're just gonna muddle this in and kind of make a thick, simple syrup kind of out of it. You want to make sure that it remains a little grainy. Now we're gonna take some rye whiskey. We're gonna be using Sazerac rye here. We'll do two ounces of our rye. Crack that first piece. I wanna crack it some more. There we go. Add some more in here. Give it a little stir. Grab a chilled glass. And then we're gonna give it a nice wash of absinthe in here, just coating all of the surfaces evenly. And then of course, we're gonna strain it. And again, a lemon twist. And again, we're gonna make it look very pretty. We'll do this a little bit differently. I did a parallelogram, but I made it a very thin parallelogram. I like having these little, tiny swaths of like citrus peel on cocktails because it looks really good. And they're easy to manipulate and they stay curled as well. So there is the, I don't know, just the Sazerac, I guess. It's the Sazerac as I learned it. To me, this is it. It's so well balanced. You get the bitters, you get a little bit of sweetness from the sugar. You get that nice Creole kind of anise flavor that you get from the Peychaud's bitters. And it pairs so well with the malty spice of rye. Rye has a really particular flavor. I call it malty. I'm not really sure if that is exactly the right descriptor for it, but for lack of a better term, that's what it kind of hits. It has a little dryness to it. And it also has a little spice to it because rye grain is just spicier than corn, which would be its closest American whiskey counterpart. And it just balances so well. And to me, the sugar doesn't throw this cocktail off balance, but the real test is gonna be when we taste a cognac Sazerac done in this kind of late 1800s, early 1900s style. So there is the, I don't know, the Sazerac as I, I don't know, just the Sazerac, I guess. It's the Sazerac as I learned it.