One of the main features of a viral cocktail is provocation. When someone puts parmesan cheese in an espresso martini, as a man called Jordan Hughes recently did on TikTok, you have to wonder: is he just trying to make me angry?
Sometimes the online posters themselves don’t seem to know. In his viral espresso-martini-with-parmesan video, Hughes, a self-described “cocktail guy” who is also known as @highproofpreacher, claims a bartender friend told him to do it. “He could just be trolling me,” he says, “but we’re going to try it anyway.” This is another feature of the viral cocktail: never ask why.
Cheese-based cocktails in general are having a moment, although it might be fairer to say we are still living through the afterglow of the moment they were having about two years ago, when trendy bartenders made extensive use of a technique known as “fat washing” with insufficient regard for the consequences. Simply put, you can infuse any alcohol with fat – butter, bacon, sesame oil – thereby leaving behind certain flavour compounds. If you are so minded, you can do this with cheese.
Genuine cheese-infused cocktail recipes tend to be complicated and perversely technical – “The liqueur is made by delicately cooking the cheese with verjus, sugar, and a spirit via sous vide” – and the ingredients are often maddeningly specific. I decided it might be worth trying some of the most approachable ones I could find. Many still called for particular local cheeses and designer gins. Much substitution was required.
Espresso martini with parmesan
On TikTok, Hughes gamely fashions himself an espresso martini, then grates parmesan all over it, then tastes the result. “I regret to inform you that was kind of awesome,” he says. I regret to inform you: he is wrong.
This should come as no surprise. None of the ingredients in a normal espresso martini – a shaken blend of vodka, espresso and coffee liqueur – suggest parmesan cheese might be a good addition. It looks wrong, it feels wrong and it tastes wrong, even if it’s not quite as revolting as you might think.
But I also regret to inform you there are far more disgusting cheese cocktails out there.
Blue cheese negroni
Elsewhere on TikTok, a man produces one of these, without giving reasons. I think he might be trolling me, but I’m going to try it anyway.
Following his instructions, I put a lump of blue cheese into a glass of brandy and microwave it for 30 seconds, straining the grey, lumpy result through a cheesecloth before popping it in the freezer. A few hours later, this infusion is lumpier still, as if it has undergone some kind of reaction. As a precaution, I strain it again.
It is with a heavy heart that I add this glop to an otherwise ingestible negroni. This combination of bitter citrus and ripe cheese, which might work on a plate, should not be sharing the same glass. It tastes like a compostable food waste sack on the night before bin day.
The “bubbles and silk”
Two bad experiences on the trot should be enough for anyone, but I regret to inform you we cannot simply stop here.
The “bubbles and silk” by wine and cheese blogger Wendy Crispell is, in my hands, an unholy combination of lemon juice, simple syrup (a mixture of sugar and water), fizzy pink wine, Angostura bitters and a spirit washed with brie (ie, cheese left in some gin in the fridge). Even after four hours of steeping, not that much brie flavour has transferred to the gin, which is a mercy. It wouldn’t ruin a good drink, but this is not a good drink.
A liquid Waldorf
The stilton-washed gin, also a Crispell concoction, I have made is a lot more pungent. I shake it with ice and Angostura bitters (the recipe technically calls for black walnut bitters and celery bitters, but I don’t have either) and garnish with apples and grapes. When poured into a chilled martini glass, the smell of this is enough to drive my family from the room. If your drains smelled this way you would call a plumber. I didn’t need a new reason to never eat a Waldorf salad again, but I have one now.
By this point I am beginning to feel a little unwell. Unsure whether I can stomach another cheese cocktail, there is one more I want to try. This one doesn’t technically have any cheese in it, anyway.
The burrata breakfast martini
According to a recipe supplied by liquor.com, this was created by a Brooklyn bartender – or “beverage director” – called Piper Kristensen. It contains no burrata, but it makes use of the water the soft cheese comes in. The idea is that this salty whey serves the same textural purpose that egg white does in a whisky sour.
Kristensen’s formulation calls for “mandarin distillate” and “gomme syrup”, but we’re not in Brooklyn now; we’re in my kitchen. So the adapted recipe goes like this: equal parts simple syrup, lemon juice and cheese water to two-and-a-half parts cheap gin. Pour over ice, shake, serve, hesitate, drink.
The burrata water actually does give the drink the foamy head the recipe predicted. And the best thing I can say about burrata water is that it’s mostly inoffensive – a little milky, a little saline, with no aftertaste capable of ruining an otherwise perfectly good drink. My only criticism would be that the burrata martini really doesn’t seem like a breakfast drink.
But it isn’t bad. After a first, cautious sip I think: I could actually finish this. After another sip, I do.
