Fat-Washing Cocktails

By Kara Adamo

So, last spring I was hanging out with a few fellow bar geeks. These guys like to enter cocktail competitions and they started talking about the idea of using a fat wash for one of their next entries. It upped the ante when it came to their submissions and ultimately resulted in one of them winning the contest.

That’s one of the things I’ve really started to appreciate about this city: it’s where “things happen” and that doesn’t stop at Penn Quarter and the Hill.

DC is a great city for the industry in that it’s become very much a booze hub: a veritable pressure cooker of talent that results in some truly unique concoctions that have honestly opened my world when it comes to mixology and its possibilities.

It shouldn’t come as a shock, really. Not only is the DMV area, (DC, Maryland, and Virginia for those who don’t live here–it took me a good six months to not think of the Department of Motor Vehicles every time someone said it), home to some of the best schools in the country, but it attracts people from literally all over the globe.

A cosmopolitan melting pot if there ever was one, DC has a truly unique position in that it operates like a small town, but with the resources and population pool to rival most large water-side cities in the world. The combination of cultures and approaches has seasoned the city’s restaurant and bar scene, bringing in interesting techniques and flavors from literally everywhere.

But I digress. There are a million things I could say about the Food & Beverage Industry in DC and, with time, I’ll probably say all of them.

For now, we’re going to roll back to Fat-Washing: what it is, where it came from, and what it means for the future of cocktail design.

Fat-washing a cocktail essentially means that you’re infusing your cocktails with savory notes using fats (oils, cheese, butters, etc.) and then removing those fats to create a smooth final product with unique flavors.

It’s basically magic and it doesn’t stop at butter or oil.

I recently watched an Instagram video where Dan M, innovative beverage director for the Maryland-based Blue Dye Distilling Company (found at @fractionsofzero) infused a rye whiskey manhattan with an honest-to-god bacon and pepperoni pizza and it looked ridiculous in the best way.

Essentially, the fats (or pizza, or grilled cheese sandwich, or whatever) are combined with the alcohol of choice at room temperature. Then, after they sit together for 4-6 hours, you chill the drink for another 3 so that all of the fats solidify and float to the surface. After you skim the fats off and run your mixture through a cheesecloth, you’re left with the flavor components and proteins that have attached themselves to the tannins of the alcohol. Because the proteins and the tannins interact, it also smooths the drink out the way a tannic wine would make a ribeye melt off your fork. The harsh, astringent qualities of the drink are rounded out and you’re left with something wholly unique.

It can be a total game-changer if you do it right.

Fat-Washing started really coming into vogue in 2007, when Don Lee of PDT in New York infamously used a bacon fat-wash with bourbon to make “Benton’s Old Fashioned,” which has since become a New York staple and a must-have if you ever visit the city.

But where did the technique come from initially?

Lee didn’t quite invent the fat-wash so much as reinvent it. The process bears noticeable similarities to Milk-Washing, which has been domestically documented as far back as the early 1700’s, and in Europe began…well, who even knows when. Milk-Washes and Egg-Washes have been used as preservation tactics to make Milk Punches and the like since people started jotting down cocktail recipes and we’re all the better for it.

You can add further infusions, if your’e feeling squirrely. Try fat-washing rum with butter and some cinnamon sticks and nutmeg, or doing bacon with pineapple slices.

Fat-washing is great because it can invoke the oft-ignored marriage between entertainment and culinary that is the bar world, but it can also streamline your bar. By prepping fat-washes, you can pre-batch the essential ingredients for unique cocktails without slowing down your rail and sacrificing on efficiency.

It’s quality-meets-quantity and, like most well-executed infusions, can really pay off in the end.

So what are your favorite infusions and fat-washes? Share them in the comments below. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Until next time,

Cheers.

Kara Adamo is a bartender, booze nerd, and booze writer. She is the author of Fancy Grape Juice: De-Snootifying the World’s Snootiest Beverage; Artimals: Coloring the Whimsical Wild; and Brews & Hues: A Coloring Book About Beer. Adamo currently lives in Washington DC.