With the Kentucky Derby right around the corner, I am planning on entering my Blackberry Mint Julep into the #JulepOff contest sponsored by Maker’s Mark. Heavy on bourbon, it’s meant to be enjoyed over a period of time. A Mint Julep is nothing but a leisurely drinking experience. So three rounds of testing is what it took me to perfect this drink, but often it’s more and occasionally less. All of the flavors blended, but stayed separate and unique, allowing me to pick up notes of every element in each sip. Smooth bourbon, cool mint, fruity but tangy blackberry with a touch of clean sweetness from the simple syrup. This was the combination that I was searching for. This was much better, but the flavors were a touch muddy and I was losing the mint and blackberry notes to the strong, but smooth, bourbon.įinally, I tried the same cocktail but with simple syrup in place of the sugar cubes and the light went on. This was not my idea of a relaxing bourbon experience.įor my next round, I used a strained blackberry puree, but sugar cubes for sweetness – which I also used the first time, but was so distracted by the seeds I could not accurately judge the flavor of the cocktail itself. I was chomping on seeds and picking them out of my teeth for hours. My first go-around I used blackberry puree that was not strained of it’s seeds. This blackberry mint julep had it’s roots in my Birmingham cocktail, but needed a few tweaks before it was to my liking. Some things work together and some flat out don’t. Usually it’s a tweak of an amount or an addition or an elimination of an ingredient all together. In fact, let’s not think of them as failures but rather learning experiences. Those failures don’t get spoken of as much as they should. In experimenting and developing cocktail recipes, there are a lot of fails among the successes. It was one of the best cocktail decisions I’d made in a long time. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of traveling South to Birmingham and at one of our dinners, I put together a blackberry bourbon cocktail at the make-your-own-cocktail bar. ![]() All of these things spell success in the cocktail world.
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