New cocktail to try: Sbraga's The Muse
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Some drinks are served on the rocks. Some are served neat. Others, like the martini, are served up. Very, very few are “served down,” according to Jesse Cornell, cocktail man at Kevin Sbraga’s eponymous restaurant. “I’m a sucker for drinks that are served down. I feel very manly drinking brown liquor out of a rocks glass without ice.”
The Muse, a haunting Cornell invention, is served down at Sbraga. The amber elixir of Laird’s bonded apple brandy, Drambuie, Dolin blanc vermouth and Cynar rises less than halfway up the shallow rocks glass. I lift, I drink. The cocktail slides around the cup in lazy swells, leaving leggy streaks around the inside like a pour of off-dry Riesling. You want to sip it slowly — preferably by a campfire on a cool summer night, though Cornell’s perch at the Sbraga bar ain’t so bad.
The Muse is a redux of an older drink on Sbraga’s menu that involved krupnikas, a Lithuanian honey liqueur. When Cornell started having trouble importing the rarity, he set to work systematically replacing it with other spirits. He settled on apple brandy and Drambuie with Dolin Rouge and Cynar, but “it was sweet on sweet on sweet then Cynar.” When he put the work-in-progress on the service bar for staff sampling one night, server Nicole De Jessa suggested swapping out the sweet vermouth for blanc.
“The Dolin blanc added levity, it was much brighter,” says Cornell. “I told her I was going to name the drink after her, but I figured the Nicole didn’t have a good ring to it, so I came up with The Muse.”
Make It:
• 2 big peels of orange rind
• 1 ounce Laird’s bonded apple brandy
• 1 ounce Drambuie liqueur
• 1/2 ounce Cynar
• 1/2 ounce Dolin blanc vermouth
• 3 healthy dashes Angostura bitters
Twist one of the orange peels, run it around the inside of a mixing glass and discard. Add ice and the rest of the ingredients except the second orange peel and stir. (Cornell does about 40 revolutions.) Strain into a rocks glass. Twist the remaining orange peel over the drink and drop it in.
