There are a lot of cocktails that I’ll routinely order if I see them on a menu—a Saturn, an El Presidente, a sherry cobbler—however the Moscow Mule isn’t one among them. The drink, a easy highball of vodka, ginger beer and lime, is commonly too one-note for me. However maybe that’s why it was prepared for the sort of reinterpretation that Portland, Oregon’s Palomar brings to traditional cocktails. 

For his or her tackle the drink, bar supervisor and Finest New Bartender alum Jordan Valls and his crew begin with vodka and lime, however use ginger syrup as a substitute of ginger beer, and add bubbles through carbonated roasted-coconut juice. Served over crushed ice and capped off with a sprinkle of toasted coconut flakes and lime zest, it’s a tropical tackle the traditional. With these additions, Palomar’s Moscow Mule has a a lot higher depth of taste than the unique.

This recipe is emblematic of Palomar’s whole drink-making philosophy, by which the bar begins with traditional cocktails, then finds methods to remodel them by tapping new substances and applied sciences. “All people makes them, however no one makes them like we make them,” Valls says of the roster of drinks, which incorporates the Mule in addition to classics like a Turf Membership and Rusty Nail. “With cocktails like this, it’s not that the unique didn’t serve a function or isn’t nice by itself, however we will enhance it and convey it up to the mark.”

In Palomar’s Moscow Mule, it’s the coconut juice, which Valls force-carbonates, that offers the drink its glow-up. To make the cocktail at residence, you need to use canned Foco Roasted Coconut Juice, which is out there at most Asian grocery shops, and force-carbonate it utilizing an iSi. Or, for an excellent simpler various, you need to use a store-bought coconut soda. “It provides it that savory facet and kicks it in that tropical path,” Valls says. “Due to these totally different facets, it turns [the Moscow Mule] into one thing fully totally different than most folk have tried.” It’s additionally become one thing that can make me suppose twice about dismissing this traditional cocktail the subsequent time I see it on a menu.