Ab Ovo #28: The Miami Heat Edition
One weekend at the Miami Grand Prix made me rethink my entire summertime cocktail regimen.
A few weeks ago, I had the extreme good fortune to spend a weekend at the inaugural Miami Grand Prix. This was Formula One racing’s latest splashy effort to win over American fans and cultivate a massive new audience for its feature product, which is — as best I can tell — a compelling soap opera featuring several handsome young men engaged in a great deal of off-track melodrama and internecine backbiting (as well as a bit of motorsport). And by all indications, this latest effort to convert Americans to F1 fans worked exactly as designed.
Miami, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, provides an ideal backdrop for a sport that revolves around big personalities and very expensive cars. On an extremely hot race weekend — temperatures lingered in the mid-90s throughout — a quarter million fans passed through the raceway turnstiles en route to various grandstands and pavilions where they could sip frozen Piña Coladas, ice-cold Rum Old Fashioneds, and literal truckloads of Heineken in a collective attempt to cool off. Many, many more people turned up in Miami for the weekend simply to indulge in the traveling yacht-party that is Formula One.
Like many in the U.S. who claim F1 fandom, nearly everything I know about the sport came to me fairly recently via the wildly successful Netflix documentary series “Formula One: Drive to Survive” (which you should definitely watch). This masterstroke of sports marketing has in a few short seasons made this esoteric motorsport accessible to millions of Americans, quickly bringing viewers up to speed with drivers’ individual narratives and all the off-track drama between and within racing teams that really make the whole sport so interesting. We haven’t always felt this way about formula racing in the U.S., long preferring the folksy, aw-shucks-iness of Jeff Gordon and NASCAR to the cosmopolitan, jet set trappings of Formula One. Races in Monaco? Singapore? Azerbaijan? Buddy, this is America. We prefer our racetracks ovular and our cars swathed in the colorful iconography of chemical companies and popular laundry detergents, thank you very much.
Formula One has previously attempted to win over U.S. fans with races in various U.S. cities, with uneven results. Austin currently holds the contract for the United States Grand Prix through 2026, but it’s not exactly the most glamorous race on the F1 schedule. The grandstands sell out, sure. But for all its cachet as one of America’s most-happening cities, Austin simply doesn’t do for F1 what Miami does. Austin hosts an automobile race. Miami throws a five-day, $400 million party.
If you’re curious what any of this has to do with drinks — the usual topic of this feed — I would counter by asking what part of this didn’t have to do with drinks? At Carbone Beach, a $3,000-per-plate South Beach pop-up dinner experience hosted by NYC’s Major Food Group, Lebron James held court for two nights running as the bar poured copious amounts of Lobos 1707 tequila for a celebrity clientele (James is an investor in Lobos 1707). At nightclub E11even, Travis Scott performed while swigging regularly from a bottle of prominently displayed Don Julio tequila that remained conspicuously close at hand throughout his set. An aerial drone show lighting the sky above a Calvin Harris performance at the Fontainebleau hotel eventually coalesced into the logo for Johnnie Walker whisky. Spirits brands were omnipresent during F1 Miami, in many cases collaborating with top-tier local bar programs to develop cocktails uniquely suited to this unprecedented (and very, very warm) Miami weekend.
I’ve been thinking about the Miami Grand Prix this week because we’ve just had our first truly warm summer weekend up here in NYC, which naturally got me thinking about the things I like to pour when the days get longer and warmer. And the Miami Grand Prix offered a multi-day masterclass in crafting interesting and inventive warm weather cocktails. For anyone taking notes (and I was taking lots of notes), those few days in Miami provided a free clinic on how to drink well all summer long.
Take the Rum Old Fashioned, for instance, a cocktail that I’d forgotten I very much enjoy (far more than a classic whiskey-based Old Fashioned, which doesn’t really excite me these days). The basic recipe is simple: A couple of ounces of good aged rum, a sugar cube, a few dashes of bitters (adjusted to your liking), stirred and served over ice with a lime twist or an orange peel expressed over, and then dropped into, the glass. For ease in making any Old Fashioned at home, I opt for a barspoon of simple syrup in place of granulated sugar, as it more easily integrates into the drink, but make it however you like with whatever you have. I consumed a few of these during the course of the long weekend in Miami (Cafe La Trova in Little Havana served up the best), and they quickly regained a spot in my summer cocktail rotation.
Below I’m including the simple how-to for the Flor de Caña Rum Old Fashioned served on site at the Miami Grand Prix, which includes an optional splash of sparkling water that stretches out the cocktail a bit — not the worst idea on a hot summer afternoon. But I’m also throwing in recipes for a few other unique things I came across during the Grand Prix as well. My advice: Steal these specs and work them into your summer sundowner repertoire. They’re all winners.
Flor de Caña Rum Old Fashioned
1.5 oz Flor de Caña 12-year-old rum
4 dashes Angostura bitters
1 tsp sugar
Splash of mineral water
Pour ingredients (in order listed) over one large ice cube, if you have one. Garnish with an orange peel.
Hendricks Pit Stop 28
Developed specifically for race weekend by Ashish Sharma, beverage director at the Four Seasons Hotel at the Surf Club, this cocktail delivers a good deal of complexity via a simple recipe (provided you have some Chartreuse and Fernet laying around). This one does its best work on a breezy patio as the sun sinks into the horizon.
2 oz Hendrick’s Gin
0.5 oz sweet vermouth
1 barspoon Fernet
1 barspoon Green Chartreuse
1 barspoon maraschino
4 dashes Peychuad’s Bitters
Stir everything in a mixing glass with ice and pour over one large cube in a rocks glass, or a wine glass, or really whatever you’ve got handy. The big Bordeaux glass (pictured) is a nice presentation, and given all the aromas at play here it’s also a logical serving vessel.
Glenfiddich Mule
I really appreciated this particular cocktail, not least because single malt Scotch typically doesn’t find its way into warm weather cocktail conversations. This simple riff on the Mule leans hard into the light, fruity character of Glenfiddich 12 to produce something that is fresh, effervescent, and surprisingly weightless. Remember this next time you need to whip up something suitable for summertime temps and all you have is a bottle of Speyside Scotch on the bar.
2 oz Glenfiddich 12
1/4 oz fresh lime juice
Ginger beer
Pour whisky and lime juice over ice and stir. Top with ginger beer. Track down a sprig of mint if you can, and garnish.
Hendricks Tropical Negroni
The team at the Lobby Bar at the Miami Beach EDITION batched up this Tropical Negroni, which is easily the most complicated of these cocktails if only for the front-end legwork. The payoff here is in the Coconut Oil Campari, which lends not only a subtle tropical fruit note to the finished cocktail but also a lovely texture. I’m including the recipe as it was presented to me (for large-format batching), but the ratios in this recipe make it very simple to scale down to suit a much smaller gathering. The coconut oil Campari should keep nicely in the fridge for at least a couple of weeks. Make a single bottle ahead of time and break it out when friends arrive for cocktail hour.
6 liters Hendrick’s Gin
6 liters Coconut Oil Campari*
6 liters Cocchi Torino
3 liters Italicus Bergamot Liquor
Incorporate all ingredients. Serve in an Old Fashioned Glass with one big block of ice. Garnish with banana leaf.
*Coconut Oil Campari
48 oz unrefined coconut oil
6 liters of Campari
Melt coconut oil in microwave. Split 3 liters of Campari between large containers and distribute the coconut oil evenly between them. Cover and leave sitting unrefrigerated, giving each one a good shake every half hour for four to six hours (keep the shaking in mind when choosing your containers). Place containers in freezer overnight. In the morning, remove the coconut oil that separated overnight from the top of each container and strain the remaining liquid through a coffee filter into a single large container. Dilute this coconut/Campari mix with remaining three liters of Campari.
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What We’re Drinking: Ferrari Trento Brut
No drink at a Formula One event tastes quite so good as that swigged directly from a Jeroboam on the winners podium. Going back to the beginning of the 2021 season, that drink — often confused with, or assumed to be, Champagne — is a Trentodoc from Ferrari Trento (no relation to, you know, Ferrari). Produced in the foothills of the Dolomites in Northern Italy, these wines are made via the Champagne method using Champagne grapes (predominantly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir), but they’re uniquely alpine in their character, with racy acidity, bright fruit, and a lovely mineral quality imparted by their high-elevation volcanic origins. I wrote a whole thing about the many virtues of Trentodoc wines for Men’s Journal awhile back, if you’re interested in exploring further. The key takeaway: Trentodoc wines are quality everyday sparklers that retail for a whole lot less than increasingly expensive Champagne, making them perennial champions in our book. ($25)
What Else?
A mathematical formula for the right time to show up at a party • Condé Nast threatens to sue a mom-and-pop pub in a Cornish hamlet of over use of the name ‘Vogue’ … and then promptly apologizes • Can multi-vintage wines offset some of winemaking’s more unsustainable practices? • A poisonous, leaf-destroying “black skeletonizer” moth was discovered in Napa and people are freaking out • Understanding the history of Chianti Classico will answer a lot of your questions about Chianti • A national network of cooks, restaurateurs and bakers has rallied to provide meals for Ukraine’s military and civilians • Vinepair has compiled a taxonomy of canned ranch water based on which ones actually contain tequila.