How to Make the Chartreuse and Fernet Drink

The recipe for the Industry Sour sounds like a dare. It sounds like a punishment for a misbehaving barback, or the kind of thing a father would force his teenage child to finish in an attempt to scare them off of alcohol for all time. And while it certainly could function as all of those things, what you need to know about the Industry Sour is that it wasn’t created to. It was created out of love. 

The Industry Sour is essentially a mashup for three different things—Fernet Branca, Green Chartreuse, and a Daiquiri—all of which you are expected to love if you work in the service industry. And if that sounds pretentious to you, well, it sounds pretentious to me too, but again, this was not the spirit in which it was invented. “This was a cocktail I created on a Saturday night for an industry person,” wrote Ted Kilgore for Esquire, in September 2012, on occasion of his Industry Sour being chosen as the publication’s Cocktail of the Week. “I basically thought to myself, ‘what if I put all of my favorite things into a glass and just give it to him?’”

What are all his favorite things? First, there’s Green Chartreuse, a beguiling and almost hallucinogenically intense combination of 132 secret ingredients, which have been infused and distilled into high-proof alcohol by silent French monks since at least 1764, and probably quite a bit longer than that. Green Chartreuse tastes like a forest, meadow, and herb garden in one; it is the undisputed heavyweight champion of herbal liqueurs, and is so vivid and explosive you expect your pupils to dilate after every sip.

Next, there’s Fernet Branca, similar in intensity to Green Chartreuse but with an opposite polarity. If Chartreuse is tasting the essence of the forest from Gaia’s own breast, then Fernet is more like shaking hands with the devil. It is brash and unfriendly, acutely bitter, a persistent attack on your taste buds from the first shocking moment to the long tail of the last. Fernet Branca, made in Milan since 1845, tastes of menthol, eucalyptus, aloe, saffron, and much much more, and is about as acquired a taste as you’re likely to find behind a bar. Which, of course, makes it an industry darling, because we in the industry like to think of ourselves as acquirers of great taste. And if that sounds pretentious to you, I can’t say you’re wrong.

So anyway, in 2011 Kilgore is working at a bar called Taste by Niche in St. Louis when the aforementioned industry person walked into his bar, and he decided to take these two garish liqueurs and shove them into the frame of a Daiquiri, equal parts Green Chartreuse, Fernet Branca, lime, and simple syrup, and called it the Industry Sour. To be clear, these two liqueurs have almost no natural affinity for each other at all: They do not appear together in any other major drink, classic or otherwise, yet here they are, two divas, trying to sing two different solos at the same time.

There’s some room for improvement in the Industry Sour. It’s an interesting idea (and was I’m sure a revelation in 2011), exciting in its counter-intuitiveness, but just because it works better than it sounds like it should, it doesn’t mean it works. To my palate, the ingredients fight each other too much, and the overall impression is that of a hard candy you might be offered in Eastern Europe, semi-unpleasant with flavors you’ve never experienced and can’t parse, the kind of thing you politely finish and even kind of enjoy but would never purposefully have again.

That said: All drinks can touch greatness, it just depends on how far one is willing to stray from the original recipe. So on the occasions I’m asked for an Industry Sour behind the bar—after getting permission to mess with it a little—the following is what I come back with, something that I hope still embraces the spirit of the original, but a little more of a sour and a little more “industry.” And if that sounds pretentious to you, well, so be it.

Industry Sour (Modified)

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. If using an egg white, dry shake without ice for about five seconds to whip the egg. Then in either case, add ice, and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with a lime wheel or peel or nothing at all. 

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Proportions: Palates change over time, and are different of course from person to person. I’ll say personally, to my taste, the original is too sweet, and the Fernet stomps all over the Chartreuse. Reducing each of those components by 25 percent helps.

Orgeat vs. Simple Syrup: This is the biggest foundational change I make to the Industry Sour, but I just like it so much more. With simple syrup the clash of the liqueurs is too sharp, the flavor equivalent of swords clanging together. The orgeat (almond syrup) offers a low warm sweetness, a floor on which the other flavors are allowed to play. 

See Also

Pernod Ricard Saw a Decline in Sales and Profits

Egg White: The egg white here does the same thing it does in the Pisco Sour, which is to say, reign in the wildness of the highs and lows and make the whole thing a smoother and more continuous experience. I personally don’t actually use one when I make these—egg white softens the flavors, and this isn’t meant to be a soft drink—but I do acknowledge that if you were trying to maximize for greatness, as opposed to maximizing for the spirit of the original cocktail, egg white is the way to go.

Smith & Cross: This is a kind of stupid idea but it’s fun, and it works. A bit of funky Jamaican Rum ( less than 0.25 oz.) offers—like the orgeat and in concert with it—a lower, broader base of flavors to stage the liqueurs. I don’t even necessarily recommend it the way I do orgeat, I just found this tweak in my attempts to make the cocktail more palatable, and I thought it was fun and weird. Try it if you have some funky Jamaican Rum at home, but definitely don’t buy a bottle just for this.