This story is part of a partnership between “City Lights Collective” / WABE” and Rough Draft Atlanta called “The Beverage Beat with Beth McKibben.” As a regular “City Lights Collective” contributor, McKibben joins the program monthly to highlight her most recent Rough Draft story on Atlanta’s cocktail, wine, coffee, and nonalcoholic beverage scene. This story airs Sept. 9 at 1 p.m. during WABE/City Lights Collective.
Now that Labor Day has come and gone, college football season is underway, and school is back in session, the lazy days of summer are coming to a close.
But in Atlanta, we have another month of summertime temperatures, and maybe another month after that of warm days and cool nights before it truly becomes fall in the South.
Atlanta tends to sputter into fall, evidenced by rounds of fake fall in late August and early September, followed by a couple of weeks of summer 2.0, all part of the 12 micro seasons occupying the nooks and crannies of the big four: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about cocktails that bridge the hyper-seasonal gap between summer and fall in Atlanta, when patio drinks like margaritas and Aperol spritzes give way to cozier brandy-based Applejacks and whiskey-laden hot toddies.
This time of year, transitional cocktails blend light and refreshing flavors with weightier spirits like Old Tom Gin, smoky mezcals, and caramelly bourbons. Other ingredients tinge cocktail flavors with baking spices or hold profiles melding sweet and savory.
Several classic cocktails fit the transitional bill, such as the Sidecar, a sour-like cocktail with cognac, orange liqueur, and fresh lemon juice, or the Casino, made with Old Tom gin, maraschino liqueur, lemon juice, orange juice, and orange bitters.
Consider the fizzy gin cocktail French 75, made with fresh lemon juice, sugar, and Champagne.
While never out of season, a bourbon Old Fashioned makes for a perfect in-between-seasons cocktail, especially if you swap out the simple syrup with a seasonal replacement.
The low-ABV, medium-bodied Adonis comes with equal parts sweet vermouth and fino sherry.
Or maybe opt for a Martinez (the martini’s bolder cousin) made with Old Tom Gin, sweet vermouth, curaçao, and orange bitters).
When coping with Atlanta’s moody weather patterns during the late summer and early fall, bartenders need to get crafty with the cocktails they create for seasonally driven menus.
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Lucky Star beverage director Kirk Gibson said it’s imperative to keep track of what’s in season around this time of year, which varies from one day to the next, and even from year to year.
“In September and October, that would include watermelons, peaches, figs, certain species of blueberries, and corn,” Gibson said. “I also think about techniques in terms of lightly preserved fruits. So not ingredients that are salt-cured or sugar-cured where you’re expecting that ingredient to last a year, but rather syrups and shrubs of common fruits.”
Gibson is known for his love of cocktail science and isn’t afraid to experiment with ingredients and techniques to coax out the flavors and textures he’s after in a drink. At Lucky Star, Gibson recently served a clarified mimosa, along with the Little Lantern made with nopales-infused tequila, mezcal, and house-made tomatillo syrup. These are two examples of drinks you might also find on the menu at Gibson’s weekly cocktail omakase.
Offered on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, the omakase comes with five petite-portioned, seasonal cocktails paired with small bites from Chef Jason Liang, owner of Lucky Star at Star Metals and Michelin-star restaurant O by Brush in Buckhead.
Creating cocktails in September can be particularly challenging for bartenders in Atlanta, Gibson explained. The weather is all over the place, with temperatures topping off in the high 80s during the day, and dropping as much as 30 degrees once the sun goes down. The types of cocktails you should be drinking this time of year depends on when you’re drinking, Gibson explained.
“Watermelons and cucumbers are still in season, and I think there’s a lot to be done with corn in cocktails during the day,” said Gibson. “At night, when it dips into the 60s, I think about heavier spirits and the syrups, like an Old Fashioned with lightly toasted caramel syrup, or the Oaxaca Old Fashioned that Death and Co. does, which calls for reposado tequila and agave syrup.”
Gibson favors ingredient versatility found in cocktails such as the classic Lion’s Tail. With a bourbon base, the drink consists of allspice dram, lime juice, simple syrup, and Angostura bitters. Swapping out the simple syrup with a syrup or sweetener made from late-season fruits, makes the Lion’s Tail a prime example of a transitional cocktail to experiment with during September and October.
However, bars around Atlanta are also whipping up equally worthy original cocktails to ease the transition from late summer to early fall in the South.
The Rye of Sunshine at Bar{n} booze {n} bites in Dunwoody mixes rye with elderflower liqueur, simple syrup, lemon juice, and apple juice.
At Kimball House in Decatur, under the direction of Miles Macquarrie, the bar focuses on hyper-seasonality. An end-of-summer interpretation on the Alaska, a bold and weighty, botanical-leaning cocktail in the martini family traditionally made with Old Tom Gin, is currently on the menu.
Called the Puget Sound, the cocktail sees a super fresh gin carrying notes of juniper and candied citrus fruits mixed with with clarified cantaloupe nectar, a melon aperitif, herbal liqueur, and dry vermouth. Macquarrie finishes it with “honeydew olive,” or honeydew compressed in the Kimball House olive brine, used for its martinis.
The Sheba and Sheik at Marietta Proper in Marietta features bourbon, merlot, peach liqueur, apricot syrup, and lemon bitters. The bar serves the cocktail in a lightly smoked glass.
Last year, Southern National in Summerhill served a cocktail called On the Nose with bourbon, lime, ginger soda, and a dark rum float. But try the perennial Punch Royal at Southern National, made with VSOP cognac, lemon, pineapple, and Champagne.
At Lucky Star, Gibson recommends ordering the blueberry cherry cobbler, using foraged blueberries from the Southwest Beltline he preserved in syrup earlier in the summer.
For Lucky Star’s corn painkiller, Gibson juices fresh white corn and combines it with pineapple rum, Jamaican pot still rum, pineapple juice, a smidge of coconut milk, and simple syrup. The result is an early fall tiki drink that’s fresh yet not aggressively sweet, with the corn giving the cocktail savoriness.
