6/3/2023 0 Comments Mint julep recipes![]() ![]() Ditching the bourbon in Kentucky sounds borderline sacrilegious. If adding ingredients isn't enough to tweak this Kentucky Derby tradition to your taste buds, you can always substitute ingredients entirely. Do I have to add bourbon to a julep cocktail? Brian's company, Make and Muddle, sells several, and she says the strawberry basil pairs very well in a mint julep recipe. Making or buying a flavored syrup can work as the "sweet" on a mint julep, too. Once you’ve picked a flavor or two, you can muddle it into your cocktail like you would with a mojito. You may like: Churchill Downs has released Kentucky Derby glasses for 85 years. That's an easy, unintimidating way to play with the flavor palate without committing yourself to drinking something less appealing than what we started with. He's had great luck using teas to make mint juleps, and he says even something as untraditional as matcha works really well in the official drink of the Kentucky Derby.īrian recommends smelling your ingredients before you make a cocktail to really get a sense of what works well together. It's OK to think outside of the box, too. There are obvious flavors that pair well with mint such as blueberry, strawberry, blackberry, watermelon, and cucumber. Plevan recommends thinking about cocktail ingredients in the same way you think about food. So, that means there are plenty of things we can add to it. "When you start thinking about (a mint julep) from 30,000 feet - OK, it's spirit, it's sweet, it's herbs," Brian said. My problem isn't with the ingredients or even the presentation. I like all the ingredients - sugar, crushed ice, bourbon, and mint - individually. The bartenders at the track weren't always making them by the trayful, as they do today, of course, but spirits, mint, and horseracing have gone hand-in-hand in Kentucky for decades. Mint has grown at Churchill Downs since the earliest years of the Kentucky Derby, and it was a natural fit to accent cocktails. "It's easy to play with once you know what the foundation is." What kind of ingredients can I add to a julep cocktail? "Knowing the master recipe is what gives you the freedom to experiment," Brian said. This was a breakfast-time cocktail that frontiersmen were drinking, not a seasonal staple choked down while wearing a beautiful, yet, comically large hat.ĭerby 101: Mint julep recipes 2023: What to know about the Kentucky Derby's signature cocktail It needed that sweet to make it remotely drinkable. Whisky, back then, looked more like moonshine and less like the fine, aged Kentucky bourbon we know today. It was a hair of the dog remedy, she explained, that largely used "inferior spirits." Ice didn't become readily available in the United States until the mid-19th century, Brian said, and even that dramatically shaped how we thought about the beverage. ![]() ![]() It could be brandy, rum, whisky, rye, or really, whatever you had on hand. In its simplest form, a julep has two ingredients: a spirit and sweetness. Local cocktail consultant Eron Plevan, Jennifer Brian of Make and Muddle, and Tara Sneegas of Log Still Distillery genuinely had some fantastic suggestions for elevating, twisting and even perfecting the traditional drink of the Kentucky Derby.įirst, let’s go back in time and consider what a julep was before Churchill Downs ever even thought about running a horse race. Or even, if there was a way that I could keep the tradition alive without actually drinking something that tastes like a mint julep. I wondered if there was a best practice, so to speak, for this cocktail in which it could be elevated. So I tracked down a few Kentucky cocktail experts in the hopes of learning how to keep with the tradition yet make something more palatable. I have no problem admitting I don't like them, and I somehow end up ordering them at Churchill Downs year after year. Not having a mint julep on Derby Day, is about as faux pas as not wearing a hat to the track. While I have certainly sipped on my fair share of them, I'm not sure I’ve ever actually enjoyed doing it. Yours truly tends to consider the official cocktail of the Kentucky Derby an attack on perfectly good bourbon. People either love it or hate it, and there is little in between. The mint julep is the candy corn of the Kentucky Derby season. Watch Video: How to make The Scarlett Rose, Rose Julep Competition winning cocktail ![]()
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