This month’s Home Bar Awards theme really came out of nowhere to me; this month, we’re all freezing beets. Here’s the problem: I honestly don’t really like beets. I used to hate them, and pickled beets are still a smell that I can’t really bear to be around. However, I’ve had enough preparations that I’ve been able to almost enjoy that I certainly can’t say I hate them anymore. I can say, though, that without this challenge I don’t think there’s any chance I ever would have made a drink with them. But here we are.
“Everything” isn’t an interesting answer to the question of what I don’t like about beets, but I’ve never been able to pinpoint the biggest offender. So while I certainly set out to make a drink that would showcase the premier ingredient, I wanted to be able to drink the result as well. So, I set about building an ingredient list that could all get thrown into a blender together to result in an icy, earthy, funky, beet-red drink that’s about as far away from a pińa colada as possible. But first, I had to get the beets ready.
Just tossing a raw beet into a blender wasn’t going to work, so I threw the bulbs into a boiling pot and let them stew for about half an hour. They bleed a ton of pigment during this time, but they’re still plenty red at the end of it. This also makes them easy to peel (once they cool) so I threw them in completely raw. I reserved the beet water, made sure all the dirt was filtered out, and reduced that with some sugar to make a beet syrup once the beets were removed. This was a very good decision.
So I had my beets freezing and I had my sugar. For the alcohol, I wanted to support some tiki flavor so I reached for my trusty Tiburon Rum from last year’s trip to Belize. It’s quite sweet and fits great as a float on traditional tiki, but I used a bit here in the blender to incorporate it fully. I focused mostly on just a simple vodka, though; the beets are going to be strong enough without a lot of strong booze flavors competing for space as well. Ketel One is my current choice – I really enjoy that it gets a bit more flavor to it from the charcoal filtering than most. To add just a bit more funk to the mix here, I also added a splash of Maraschino; anything trying to even be tiki-adjacent needs some fruit!
To balance out the earthiness of the beets, I grabbed some fresh basil from the garden. I’ve always appreciated how the sweetness and aroma of basil brightens anything without overwhelming it. I also threw in a good amount of orange bitters for a bit more brightness and some Peychaud’s for some more traditional tiki funk. I threw it all into a blender (exact amounts below) with a little more ice and blended it on low for about a minute to make sure it was all fully mixed.
- 2.5oz Ketel One
- 1oz aged dark rum
- 0.5oz beet syrup
- 0.25oz Maraschino
- 1 medium-size beet, frozen after being boiled
- 1 handful fresh basil
- 5 dash orange bitters
- 2 dash Peychaud’s bitters
Honestly, I liked this more than I thought I would especially after the first sip was very beet-y. It came out more well-rounded than I expected, with the basil really helping pull it together on the finish. It definitely came out tiki, which was my top goal, and the fruitiness cuts through the earthiness to help calm it down well. All of that said…this really isn’t the drink for me, but I do believe that someone that loves beets will love this drink!
After the blender, though, I still have a ton of beet syrup. One of the better drinks I’ve made in the last few months was a very simple beet syrup Old Fashioned. I used Buffalo Trace bourbon, a favorite of mine, and a lot of Angostura bitters and wow is it good. The earthiness of the beets come through strong, but the beet flavor doesn’t – it’s a perfect syrup for a sweeter bourbon.
