How to Make a Summery Bourbon Cocktail

“Can you make me a Hollow Point?”

As a young cocktail bartender, the first few years of your career are attended by a baseline hum of anxiety that someone will ask you for a cocktail that you don’t know. We all like to pretend we’re omniscient beverage wizards, but few-and-far-between are the bartenders that never need to look something up, or do some hasty googling in the back by the soda boxes to check a detail or two about a half-remembered cocktail. Most of the time, the drink for which you were asked is fair game, something you should reasonably be expected to know—you look it up, find the recipe, make it for the guest, and vow privately to commit it to long-term memory. Everyone wins.

But every great once in a while, some doofus comes ambling into your bar and asks for a cocktail you’ve never heard of—a “French Goodbye” or a “Two Eyed-Pirate” or something—and you say “absolutely!” and hurry to the back to do some secret research only to find that it’s neither a classic nor a neo-classic, that it is in fact not something you could be expected to know because you can’t even find anything about it on the internet. And in those cases you have to go back to said doofus and respond with either “would you remind me what’s in that?” (if you’re feeling generous) or “is that something you’ve just made up?” (if you’re not).

So it is with the Hollow Point. Literally no one has any idea where it originally comes from, but it comes to us via the Everleigh in Melbourne, into which someone walked a number of years ago and asked for a Hollow Point. The staff had no idea what that was, but they’re pros—the more years you spend in this industry, the more confidence you build in your own knowledge base—so they just told him point blank (as it were) that it wasn’t a drink they were familiar with. They were also feeling generous. “We didn’t know it,” they write in their excellent book A Spot at the Bar, “but asked if we could give it a shot. He rattled off a few ingredients and we threw them all together. The result was pure magic.”

So what’s a Hollow Point? It is a stirred and bitter mixture of bourbon, sweet vermouth, campari, and apricot liqueur, very clearly just a Boulevardier with a touch of apricot liqueur and a lemon peel instead of an orange. The Boulevardier is a pretty good cocktail to draft off of—it is, in addition to being the best of the Negroni’s hundreds of children, itself a versatile template, easily birthing neo-classics of its own like the Left Hand and the Kingston Negroni. In the case of the Hollow Point, the introduction of apricot liqueur changes the whole game—it opens with lemon and bourbon’s punchy front, then rises the fruit of the vermouth amplified by the apricot, and on the finish, apricot and the bitterness of Campari play a little duet accented by the piquant zing of the lemon, back for a final word. It’s a Boulevardier but with a summer spin, one that highlights one of our more delightful and under-used seasonal stone fruits. 

It’s not well enough known that you can just amble (doofily or not) into a bar and order a Hollow Point. But who knows—maybe if you do, the bartender will hurriedly scroll past this very text on the way to the recipe below, and once having made it and tried it, they’ll never forget it. 

Hollow Point

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice, and stir for 15 to 20 seconds. Strain up into a coupe or on a big piece of ice in a rocks glass, and garnish with a lemon peel.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Bourbon: My advice here is actually the opposite of that for a Boulevardier. When making a Boulevardier I find higher rye bourbons to be better, here I feel the opposite—the “sweeter” bourbons, like Buffalo Trace or Woodford Reserve, really shine with the apricot. All bourbons I tried work so it’s not too important either way, but too much rye does have a tendency to stick out a bit.

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Sweet Vermouth: The Everleigh specifically calls for Cocchi Vermouth di Torino here and I agree, it has the right balance of vanilla richness and lightness of body.

Apricot Liqueur: I admit I didn’t toggle this variable too much. THere are a few apricot liqueurs to choose from but once I found the Giffard Abricot du Roussillon I just more or less decided that was the one I liked, and called off the search. That said, Luxardo tends to make great stuff, and the Rothman and Winter can be quite good as well.