I’ve been back and forth from Mexico City to Vancouver a lot in the last year. A good cocktail menu can be found all over the world, but its not very common.
This article is a primer in how to read/build a good cocktail list. We’ll get into what makes a successful one and how to decipher it. Working at Odd Society Spirits for so many years I developed a system, a series of boxes to be checked so that every drinker would find something they liked, and that a wide range of spirits would be represented. I hate repetition on a cocktail menu. It should be streamlined, ergonomic both in execution and in flavor. Lets explore.
This is the Odd Society Spirits cocktail menu from 2021 when craft cocktails could still be priced at $12 CAD. Today in 2024 Odd Society cocktails range from $13 - $20 as an adaptation to inflation and the market. Our cocktails are still on the cheaper side compared to other establishments with similar quality level. A distillery bar should always be a little under the market value for cocktails since they use mostly spirits that are produced on site for no mark up and less ecological waste (we walk the bottles from the back of house to the front and re-use bottles whenever possible). If you want value and low carbon footprint, drink at a distillery bar.
There are twelve cocktails on this menu, which for me is the minimum I found that managed to satisfy all tastes. Other seasons I was offering fifteen cocktails, but for a pandemic summer I wanted to make things easy breezy for the customer and for the bartender. Others might say less is more, but I am obsessive and have trouble limiting myself. I believe a good cocktail menu should have between 8-16 drinks, although strategies vary. What’s important is guests can come back and try different drinks each time they come if they would like, but also not have an overwhelming task of choosing.
Before I delve into each drink and the role they all served, I will mention the unique requirements of making a menu at a distillery bar. The concept was always to give attention to all of the different spirits that were made in-house. Each product that we produced must make its way onto the menu at least once, and not dominate the menu despite any personal preference. I would also work with the back to feature stock that they had in excess. Also, the type of customer is always a big consideration when designing a menu. Odd Society drinkers are generally not the most novice but also not the most adventurous or sophisticated, no offence. People wanted big flavors. Esoteric flavor profiles or excellence in simplicity were overlooked. More on this later.
My basic categories of drinks are the following, numbered to correspond with the order they appeared on the Summer List of 2021:
1. Sweet/Creamy/Tiki
2. Boozy/Clean/Herbal
3. Savory
4. Smoky
5. Fruity
6. Spritz (Bitter/Bubbly/Low-proof)
7. Sour
8. Fresh/Tall
9. Negroni (Boozy/Bitter)
10.Coffee
11.Mezcal or Tequila
12.Citrus/Herbal
*Sorry, Summer 2021 menu did not feature a milk punch. Every menu after did have one. The milk punch does not have to be a category of its own but could be designed with a flavor profile to fulfill most of numbers 1-12. Read about how to turn anything into a milk punch here.
**I don’t always have a spicy drink on the menu but some spicy
additions should be considered.
***The ingredients should be presented with a consistent logic which makes a menu easier to read, meaning the drink can be imagined before tasting it. One way to do this is the first ingredients listed are the alcoholic ingredients, in order from highest to lowest volume used. The complementary flavor components are listed after in order of their overall impact on the drink and volume contribution. They are written as an ingredient without form. For example, concord grape syrup would appear as concord grape. Listing “syrup” can make the reader assume that the drink is sweet, although it is the RATIO of acid to sugar in a drink which makes a drink sweet. A drink with grape syrup could in fact be very sour, and writing “syrup” would be misleading. I usually emit sugar or syrup from my drink captions. In this case, a small fiction that creates a correct premonition of a drink’s taste is more truthful than facts which create a wrong impression. Finally, it is more romantic to think about the essential flavor of spruce tips, for instance, contributing to the harmony of a drink rather than spruce syrup or spruce bitters which is overly technical and mundane. Each word on a menu should generate anticipation. A personal vendetta, I HATE RANDOM CAPITALS.
**** A good cocktail menu should have a variety of different glass styles. Summer calls for more ice and more Collins glasses. Winter calls for more rocks glasses and boozy drinks served up.
THE DRINKS
I will describe each cocktail on the Summer List 2021 in terms of what it provides as an elite member of twelve, it origins, related anecdotes, and of course, the recipe.
BEACH ROVER (Sweet/Creamy/Tiki)
mongrel, mia amata amaro, coconut cream, pineapple, orange, nutmeg
(note the order and format of ingredients as listed)Description: This is the cocktail you crave when you’re trapped somewhere unpleasant or tedious while dreaming of a holiday vacation, recalling the smell of sun and surf. It even looks like a beach, with a sand of coconut shavings, and nutmeg. Dive into the fluffy, tropically fruity, spiced and spiked coco-cream ocean of East Van.
pictures by me Lets go back to the summer of 2021. Full-pandemic. Everyone in Canada in the hospitality industry was either masked up or on unemployment. I was living in Mexico City and thought I would never bartend again when the Odd Society bar manager gave two weeks notice. It was impossible to find a bar manager at this juncture in time since no one wanted to go back to work. My mom/boss called me crying, and I agreed to come back and work for the summer. That summer turned into two and half years.
My vision when creating this menu was easy, beloved, universal and exceptional. I sifted through the inventory of all the drinks ever made at Odd Society to fill each category. It was an all-star line-up with drinks from the diverse roster of bartenders who have made a mark on the bar over the years. Cocktails at Odd Society have been well-documented except for those two years when Chad Rivard and I were co-managing, both of us disorganized in their own way, a wildly creative spell for which there is no record, a menu which changed every week, recipes recorded on scraps of paper lost long ago. The drinks that made it out alive from those years are Odd Society’s true classics. The Beach Rover is one of them.
chad rivard at odd society The Beach Rover is a Chad special. He was our in-house tiki expert, and contributed a lot of bangers to the menu. A much more sociable person than I, he has a saintly patience and was loved by all. The Beach Rover is essentially a Pina Colada but with rye moonshine instead of rum and a hefty portion of the chocolatey, plummy, licoricey, piney, orangey, bitter liqueur I created mia amata amaro.
Its hard to improve upon the Beach Rover. Is is very simple in terms of prep, and highlights the mongrel and mia amata perfectly. (if you are making this outside of British Columbia you could substitute mongrel with white rum and mia amata with an amaro such as cynar or amaro nonino or even jägermeister). Bitterness from the amaro liqueur cuts through the sweetness of a Pina Colada and provides a depth and richness lacking in the original tropical serve. The mongrel is 100 proof so it makes you tipsy and care-free like you’re at the beach. It is fun to invent new sweet, creamy drinks but even with more complex builds I haven’t been able to beat the Beach Rover. People will order it when its not on the menu, and they come in to the bar for the sole purpose of drinking a frothy Rover. This is what you want in a drink. To make it even more perfect, the tasty garnish of nutmeg and coconut shavings looks like the sand on a beach.
this one gets a large coupe, illustration by Geri Grohs Beach Rover Recipe
1.25 oz mongrel
0.75 oz mia amata
1 oz coconut cream
2 oz pineapple juice (can use canned, Dol)
1 oz orange juice (squeezed/strained)
whole nutmeg, coconut shavingsMethod
Shake first with ice, then discard ice and dry shake until fluffy (adding one ice-cube and shaking until it dissolves is a good technique if there is time)
Dump into large coupe
Garnish coconut shavings, fresh grated nutmeg
Ingredients
Coconut Cream
Combine contents of one can of coconut milk (Thai Kitchen or Savoy are best) with equal parts granulated sugar in 1L jar
Put lid on and shake until combined
Katie So must have emulated this stock image for the illustration on the Odd Society menu 
AMBROSIA (Boozy/Clean/Herbal)
wallflower gin, akvavit, vanilla bianco, rose geranium leaf,
lemon acid, angelica
Description: Ambrosia translated from Greek is immortality, and as a food or scent is meant only for the Gods. My sublime elixir is available to anyone who knows how to follow a recipe, or knows someone who does. Its power is concealed, it appears transparent, innocuous as water. However the drink is strong like a martini, with extra body and a touch of sweet floral, with a lemony lift, heavenly vanillin roundness, brought to earth with a touch of carraway, and grassy green notes of angelica, plucked from the Garden of the Hesperides.
This cocktail is my magnum opus. It is a clean, herbal, light martini variation that can be customized with seasonal herbs. It can be pre-batched and stored in the fridge since it has an infinite shelf-life. A version is currently being served at Lila in Vancouver.
The key formula is gin, martini bianco vermouth (1L bottle) infused with two split vanilla bean pods, citric acid solution, a herbal syrup and bitters. The possibilities are endless. One version I made eliminated the akvavit component. For the syrup, instead of rose geranium I have made versions with wintergreen as well as toasted fennel. Instead of angelica bitters I have used a few drops of Japanese umami bitters, and also ginseng bitters.
Ambrosia Recipe
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