Damien mixes: Dry January Special

© Damien Guichard

New year, new me! Of all the short-lived resolutions bartenders and guests alike embark on, a more sober lifestyle is probably the most common one. It usually starts with the classic Dry January. A month of sobriety, a personal challenge for people to kick off the year with better habits.

Now for bartenders alcohol-free drinks are harder to put together than one might think. A lof of the body of the drink and its flavour composition relies heavily on the spirit used in it. For a very long time, sober drinkers were limited to boring glorified, and overpriced lemonades but luckily more and more interesting alcohol-free alternatives are flooding the market, making it all the more interesting for guests and bartenders to enjoy mixing and drinking 0 ABV concoctions. I recently came across the alcohol-free Amaretto from Lyre’s and thought it would be the perfect base for our 2024 Dry January drink. 

© Damien Guichard

I enjoy using tea and herbal tea in alcohol-free cocktails as they usually have interesting tannins and enough bitterness to help bring body to the drink. In this case, we will be using a fermented sakura leaf tea which has beautiful almondy and citrussy notes - a perfect match for our amaretto. Sakura blossom owes its almondy flavour to a component called coumarin, also present in tonka, woodruff and hay.

First, we will be brewing our tea. It is important to find a balance between extracting enough flavour to work against the other ingredients in your drink but be careful not to overextract it either otherwise you might end up with an overly bitter and hay-like flavour. In this recipe I used 4g of tea for 1 L of water. 

I let the tea sit for 30min before turning into a cordial. Adding 1/3 of sugar and 2% of citric and malic acid powders combined allows a nice balance between flavour, body and dilution. Heat it up, but at low temperature.

Once your cordial is ready, it’s time to make a delicious drinkie drinkie. At Wax On we enjoy using force carbonation to offer sparkling cocktails, but the drink will still taste delicious if you add soda water instead. Enjoy! 

Recipe for a “Sweet Resolutions”