Consider an Infinite Negroni
If your Instagram feed is anything like mine this week, you’re seeing a lot of red-hued cocktails. That’s because this is Negroni Week, an annual event that started small here in Portland and has grown into an international celebration of bitter drinks. The classic Negroni is an excellent cocktail, but what makes it worthy of a week-long event is its amazing versatility: its simple three-ingredient structure lends itself to infinite variation.
The traditional Negroni consists of equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth. If you want to riff on this — and bartenders love to riff on this — you can think of the Negroni more abstractly as a combination of three different types of ingredients:
a spirit
a bitter liqueur
a fortified wine
Grab any three bottles representing each of these categories, stir them together with ice in more or less equal proportions, serve the cocktail with a strip of citrus peel, and you’ve created a new Negroni. Congratulations, you’re a mixologist!
What’s surprising is how often this at least sort of works. A Boulevardier swaps out the gin for whiskey. A mezcal Negroni is a popular order these days. Various “white Negronis” use gentian bitters and dry or bianco vermouths for a clearer, sharply bitter drink. I’m unsurprisingly fond of the Trident, which combines aquavit, Cynar, and sherry (plus peach and orange bitters).
This versatility got me thinking a few years ago about infinity bottles. These are bottles that whiskey enthusiasts sometimes make at home. The idea is that you create your own custom blend, topping off the bottle with new additions as you drink it so that it never gets empty. It’s kind of like a solera for sherry in that it changes and evolves over time, with traces of old additions persisting. Every time you add something new to your infinity bottle, it changes a little bit.
If you can do this for an individual spirit, why not for an entire cocktail? When I decided to try this out, the Negroni was the obvious candidate. I actually started with a mini barrel rather than a bottle and started filling it with all kinds of things I had around my apartment. The only rule was that ingredients had to be added in equal parts spirit, bitter liqueur, and fortified wine. Other than that, anything goes.
I’ve long since transitioned to a liter glass bottle that I keep in my refrigerator. My “Infinite Negroni” batch turned five years old last week! It’s a ridiculously complex, probably 100+ ingredient cocktail that I can make on a moment’s notice just by pouring it on some ice, stirring, and hitting it with an orange peel. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s weird, but it’s always recognizably Negroni-ish and fun to try. It’s become one of my favorite drinks to serve to guests, because by definition it’s a cocktail they can’t get the same way anywhere else or even at my own place on a future occasion.
If you want to try making your own Infinite Negroni bottle, this is the week to do it. I suggest starting with a solid base of classic Negroni specs. From there, go nuts. If things go too off the rails you can always top it off with more classic Negroni, which I do find myself doing sometimes to rein it in. This is also a great way to finish off bottles you’ve had sitting around your home bar for too long, if that’s a problem you and I share. For inspiration, here’s a sampling of the dozens of additions I’ve made to my bottle over the years:
Aalborg Jubilaeums aquavit, Suze, Cocchi Americano
Corsair Triple Smoke whiskey, Calisaya, Dolin sweet vermouth
South Sea rum, Peychaud’s aperitivo, Carpano bianco
Tanqueray 10 gin, Amaro Lucano, La Guita Manzanilla sherry
Organic Nation gin, Accompani Blue Dorris, Rockwell single cask vermouth
Trakal, Enrico Toro amaro, Cocchi di Torino vermouth
As a professional bartender and writer, I’m usually seeking reproducibility: a recipe I can make the same way every time for guests or pass on to readers through a book or newsletter. The Infinite Negroni is an opportunity to embrace irreproducibility, a fleeting cocktail that will never be exactly the same ever again. To paraphrase Heraclitus, you can never sip from the same Infinite Negroni twice, so enjoy it as it is in the present moment.
Recent writing
“How can a libertarian live in Portland?” It’s a question I’ve heard a lot since I moved here from DC fifteen years ago, so much so that I finally decided to write up an answer. Let me try to convince you that Portland should be considered one of the most appealing cities for libertarians in the US.
Dealer’s choices
To read: David Quammen is among the handful of writers whose books I’ll buy as soon as they come out, no matter what the topic. Lately his writing has been focused on COVID, having written a prescient book on the possibility of pandemic spillover in 2012. It’s no criticism of his recent work to say that I enjoyed diving back into his nature writing in The Heartbeat of the Wild, a collection of essays originally published in National Geographic and updated with new notes. Even without the accompanying photographs from the magazine, it’s a lively read on chimps, elephants, lions, and other wildlife, tied together with reflections on the challenges of conservation.
To listen: How about some recent covers of two of my favorite southern songwriters, Nanci Griffith and Lucinda Williams? Here’s Molly Tuttle and Billy Strings performing “Listen to the Radio” for a forthcoming tribute album to Griffith, Angel Olsen channeling Lucinda on “Greenville,” and Norah Jones and Alynda Segarra (of Hurray for the Riff Raff) collaborating on “Drunken Angel.”
To drink: Negronis, obviously! If you need more ideas, Peter Suderman has you covered this week with daily Negroni variations.