Antenna Magazine – Winter 2010
( R ) ROOT
A Quaff of the first American liqueur made in a century? Make mine a double.
By Matt Bean
Cordial Encounter
I NEEDED a drink. Not just any drink: a new drink. A strong drink. It was late, and a beer had begun to carom off my Teflon liver like BBs off a backcountry road sign. Dangerous territory when you’re caught out in the wild.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m the kind of guy who expects his moonshine to grip the palate the way a real man shakes hands. It does not issue forth from an ice luge. It is not foisted toward your lips between the pendulous mounds of a barmaid. It faces you straight on and announces its intentions. “This is who I am. No good? Stick a cocktail umbrella in your ass, fucker.”
So: I needed a drink, and the words written in chalk before me at the Standard Tap in North Philadelphia might as well have been scrawled into the slate by Dionysus himself – “ROOT: Four bucks.”
“You’ll like this stuff,” said the barkeep, startling me with his stealth. I’d reached the stage of the night where swift movements appeared judo-like, his proffer of the cylindrical bottle like the opening parry of a mystical and potentially dangerous fighting form. “They make it here, actually.”
“What?” I said.
“Root, they make it here. It’s a liqueur.”
“Right!” I said. “A lick-ooooer.”
“here,” he said tilting the bottle toward the glass he’d slid across the lacquered wood. “Just taste it.”
Sweet Jesus. The golden, smoky substance was an elixir, an ambrosia, the sweet, spice-infused nectar of the gods. Birch bark, smoked black tea, cinnamon, winter green, spearmint, clove, anise, orange, lemon, nutmeg, allspice, cardamom and pure cane sugar: my mouth was alive with a rich liquid musk. It was a salve for the soul. I shivered, slung it back, savored, and then lifted my glass toward my man behind the bar. “Again!”
And so it went, until my memory fails me.
The next day, possessed of my wits, I set about provisioning. I’d taken Amaro and Aperol lately, the bitter, Italian after-dinner drinks, and a friend had smuggled back a complex and alluring herbal liqueur from the Czech Republic called Becherovka. Other liqueurs – Sambuca, Ouzo, Kahlua – I found either too sickly sweet or gasoline-like. Root hit the sweet spot, though; a complex, careful concoction that masked its 80-proof payload in all of the right scents and smells. The recipe, I learned, was revived from a Native American formula by a Philly-based art collective called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductions.
Art in the Age, it turns out, doesn’t just make booze. Named after seminal, 1936 essay by philosopher Walter Benjamin, the group acts like a middleman for artisans, from Mennonite quilt-makes to gifted Philadelphia T-shirt artists. They proclaim: “We weave our offerings into the collective surface of myriad personal contexts.”
But founder Steven Grasse, a former ad executive, knows from good drink. Grasse helped create Hendrick’s Gin and had already overseen the launch of Sailor Jerry spiced rum, considered the fastest-growing rum in the country. Choosing a time-tested recipe and using local, organic ingredients was a masterstroke. Root’s core elements have remained unchanged for 200 years, through during Prohibition, a neutered version gave rise to what we know as Root Beer. Yawn.
But this stuff, it has balls. And as I lifted another glass toward my maw, the rallying cry offered by Art in the Age caught my eye, as bold as its brew: “In this troubling epoch of industrial commodification, standardization of reproduction, and fomentation of a society of shallow spectacle, Art in the Age issues a challenge and rally cry. We fight fire with fire, subsuming the onslaught of watered-down facsimiles and inaccessible displays with thought-provoking products of real cultural capital.”
I’ll drink to that. Won’t you?
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