#4. Appalachian Dawn
Mixer: Jay Dunbar, professional mixologist
Ark of Taste Ingredient: Newtown Pippin
About Jay: I am a professional mixologist and manager of Single Brothers, a craft cocktail bar in Winston-Salem, N.C. Single Brothers is an excellent venue for me to espouse local food values and the need to create a sustainable context for Winston-Salem and its environs. I design our cocktail menu to feature seasonal cocktails along with our list of classics and standards, and our bartenders emphasize quality and care so each drink is a unique creation. Slow Food values are also evident in my private life, as my preferred way to spend my leisure time is by preparing home cooked meals from local ingredients to share with family and friends. And my life would surely be incomplete without time spent tending my herbs and flowers, making compost and building beds in the community garden.
Local Chapter: Not yet a Slow Food member
Recipe
2 oz. Rittenhouse Rye Whiskey
3/4 oz. Foggy Ridge Pippin Gold Cider
1/4 oz. honey syrup (1:1 ratio of George Watkins’ Tupelo Honey to water)
1 dash each Fee Brothers Lemon and Old Fashion Bitters
Add ingredients to shaker and stir with ice. Strain into a rocks glass with lemon zest garnish.
About the Ingredients
This amber-hued libation brings together the flavors of the greater Appalachian region, from the swampy lands of Florida where George Watkins painstakingly harvests the sublime Tupelo honey through Diane Flynt’s heirloom cider apple orchards in Virginia. Balancing these subtle Southern flavors we have the New York State-born Fee Brothers bitters matched with a bold Pennsylvania-style American rye whiskey, Rittenhouse Rye. This autumnal cocktail evokes speakeasy Americana and the spirit of the harvest, when the frost is on the pumpkins and a warming drink is close at hand.
On a personal level, this cocktail embodies different geographic and cultural aspects of my own life — from my childhood and family roots in western Pennsylvania and New York to my adult life in the South. Like so many things American (including myself), this drink is an amalgamation of different products from different places through which its alchemical blending becomes something original and new.
Read on for more summer cocktail recipes! For more Ark of Taste ingredients, check out the catalog.
