• Michael Gebert
  • Pour slowly, says Greg Seider.

Put me in a home kitchen and I could kludge almost anything to at least edibility with some wine, garlic, and rosemary. But having grown up in the era of the Pina Colada song, the low point for mixology in America, I’ve never felt like I had a comparable intuitive sense of the principles of cocktails. So when I saw that New York-based mixologist Greg Seider (the Summit Bar, the cocktail program at Le Bernardin) had written a book called Alchemy in a Glass: The Essential Guide to Handcrafted Cocktails, and was coming to Chicago, I cadged myself an hour of his time to have him run me, and you, through the basics of making drinks that don’t suck. As a visitor, he’s no stranger to our city’s offerings—he’s a frequent shopper at Roderick Markus’s Rare Tea Cellars, and a couple of brightly colored beakers of alcohols with rooibos teas from Markus’s company steeping in them sat on the bar awaiting use. We meet in the Double A, the basement bar at Mercadito.

  • Rizzoli

He gets out two different bitters, Scrappy’s and Angostura bitters. “For the bourbon we do equal parts, but for the rye version, because it’s spicier, you don’t need as much bitters.” For the sweet element, “I only use agave,” he says. “It just has a natural flavor from the cactus. Sugar would really be a different flavor, that artificial cloyingness. It doesn’t meld in, where this is kind of seamless.”

The last thing he does is grab an orange and peel a strip of the outside, then pinch it an inch or two from the glass, spraying a fine mist of oil over the drink. “I don’t like this thing where it’s superorangey and you just crush it and spread it all over,” he says. “You know, if you were a girl and your mother taught you how to put on perfume, you’re not like, spish-spish-spish. Just let it fall over it. It changes your palate if you get too much orange.”

The rooibos plays an even more central role in the margarita he makes next—in fact, it completely replaces one of the common elements, fresh fruit. A bright maroon liquid in a jar is the rooibos, which contributes the notes of fruitiness without turning the drink into dessert; the multiple flavors of a tea, tannic and floral, and more, instantly make the drink more complex and adult.