I've had a thousand Manhattans:
- made with bourbon
- made with rye
- made with really nice vermouth
- made with terrible vermouth
- made with too much Angostura
- made with none at all
- some with some of the sweet, sticky cherry
- some in New York
- some not
- some semi-life-changing
- some this is not getting finished
My finding after all this research is that a Manhattan is not at its best when it's just been made. Built at a bar, the drink finishes the second the stirring stops. That's the skill, and it's one of the most beautiful things to watch: some whiskey, some vermouth, a dash of bitters, stirred over ice, strained into a glass. Done.
Ours is not finished at that point. Ours goes into a batch, and it waits, but what is that actually waiting for? Nothing incredibly dramatic is going to happen. Nothing is fermenting. There is no 19th-century port barrel that was rescued from a shipwreck at our headquarters.
What happens is quiet and hard to name. We use rye whiskey. When we've just made our drink, that turns up really sharp, spicier than bourbon, and quite separate, sits apart from the vermouth. Over the six to eight weeks we give the drink before we bottle it, those two stop arguing with each other. The edges come off. The sweetness stops reading as sugar, and it starts reading as depth. By the time you open it, you're not tasting the parts anymore. You're just tasting the drink.
You can't hurry this process, and you certainly can't fake it. It's the only part of making a Manhattan that no amount of skill at the moment of pouring can stand in for. A bartender more skilled than me at every other part of the job still cannot beat six weeks. That's the honest answer to what you're paying for.
The ingredients are always the best that we can find. A cocktail will only ever be as good as its cheapest ingredient. It's not the making, which takes an afternoon. It's the waiting: six to eight weeks of a batch sitting in the dark, taking up room while nobody sells anything. Then it goes into the bottle, and it still keeps on getting better while it's sitting in there. Then you take it out of the cupboard, stir it over ice, pour it into a chilled coupe, and put a speared cherry in it. That afternoon's work was a long time ago. It's been getting ready for you this whole time.
If you look on the back of your bottle, there's a number on your label. Every bottle we've ever made carries one, written on the day it was bottled. We still have the list going back to number one.
This went out as our weekly letter on Tuesday 11 August 2026. We write one every Tuesday: history, craft, and the last metre. Straight up.
