The reward at the bottom of your cocktail glass

Cherry season is approaching again in the Niagara region. A Manhattan served to me recently by a friend with some very good homemade cocktail cherries (Me: “What kind of booze did you preserve them in?” Her: “I don’t remember!”) made me realize that I need to start planning my own batch of cocktail cherries for the coming year.

The maraschino cherries you normally find at the bottom of your cocktails are a only a simulacrum of the original, pre-Prohibition product, a Marasca cherry preserved in maraschino liqueur. (You can read more about it on eGullet.) Every summer for the past few years, I’ve taken local cherries and preserved them in alcohol to serve as cocktail garnishes. Unfortunately, because the provincial liquor board no longer carries maraschino liqueur – and Niagara farmers don’t grow Marasca cherries – I can’t reproduce the original product exactly. But I still have a lot of different choices about what I can make.

My first batch was simple: sour cherries, with their pits left in, covered with Wild Turkey bourbon and kept in the fridge. The problem was that the resulting garnishes had a fibrous texture and tasted more of bourbon than of cherry. Some people I served them to even said the cherries tasted more alcoholic than the cocktails they were in! So when it came time to make my next batch, I drew on my damson gin experience and added sugar this time. (Plus, I bathed them in gin, rather than bourbon.) These ones came out tasting much more like cherries, with a better texture. And while I ended up with cherry-flavoured bourbon the first time around (quite good in a whiskey sour, especially when made with ginger syrup and a couple of dashes of Bittermens Xocolatl Mole bitters), the second batch produced a cherry-gin liqueur. I still haven’t found the perfect use for it, but I’m thinking about exploring a variation on my favourite damson gin cocktail, the Modern No. 2.

For my third and fourth batches, I used the method outlined at the Chanticleer Society, first with unpitted sour cherries and then with pitted sweet cherries. Both batches were briefly simmered in a syrup before having rum added and being stored in the fridge. These were the sweetest of all, and the most likely to end up as a dessert topping rather than a cocktail garnish. Once you’ve eaten all the cherries, you can use the syrup as a sweetening agent in other drinks; it makes a nice Daiquiri variation.

All of these approaches have been successful to one degree or another, which has me wondering what I’m going to do this year. In most of my previous batches, I left the pits in the cherries, since this is supposed to contribute some of the “bitter almond” flavour they contain (from benzaldehyde). To be honest, though, I’ve never found this flavour to be all that apparent, and the pits can be a choking hazard for the unwary drinker, so I’ll probably pit them this year. As for the spirit itself, I’ve used whiskey, gin and rum in the past, so I’m leaning toward brandy this time around, maybe with the recipe from The Art of the Bar (which is similar to the Chanticleer Society version). Then again, I bet you could do something interesting with tequila…

What’s your favourite cocktail to garnish with a cherry?