What I’m Drinking Now: Nicole Yarovinsky and the Sour, in Green

Nicole Yarovinsky is the beverage director at Daisies in Chicago.

This drink is an oddly accurate liquid representation of the color green. Not necessarily something super herbaceous, but instead more of a juicy, complex “green.”

The drink draws inspiration from how delicately floral and aromatic underripe strawberries are; and the anticipation of the quality of that flavor changing as the berries turn red in the coming weeks. Almost a phantom expectation, created by the combination of the present and future. 

The base spirit is Empirical’s Soka, a sorghum distillate produced by a Denmark-native spirits company that distills just north of us in Wisconsin, using carefully selected yeast and a single farm harvest – aka everything we love at Daisies. We chose Del Maguey’s Puebla mezcal as a modifier to ground Soka’s grassy qualities.

The fore mentioned green strawberries, from local Mick Klug Farm, are cooked down in filtered water with sugar, and then acid adjusted. This is to maximize the flavor, as well as support our attempts in using acids alternative to citrus, which is far from local to the Midwest and highly perishable once juiced.

To add additional complexity and more “green,” we fermented strawberry tops reserved from our pastry department, along with tarragon, and sugar adjusted that to use as the syrup for this drink.

A smidge of fresh cracked black pepper on top almost comically resembles a salad, but the aromatics really help us take this all the way home. A few drops of chlorophyll to assist the visuals and add that last rich herbaceous echo, and you have yourself an oddly accurate liquid representation of a color. 

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