The Art Of Ageing

What you need to know—and a little more—about ageing cocktails and spirits

- Sim Ee Waun

There are many advantages to youth. Energy, zest, unbridled enthusiasm, a bold gungho for life. But these can also translate, in misguided times, to recklessness and arrogant fool-hardiness. Those among us who have accumulated a few more years in life realise that extra time mellows one, rounds off rough edges, while perspectives deepen and become more complex with experience, even as things slow down in general. In the great scheme of things, this same pattern holds true for many foods too—from aged cheese to aged premium cuts of beef, wines and cognacs mellowing in the cellar, and indeed cocktails.

Ageing cocktails is not absolutely new, but it has been gaining momentum in recent years and seems likely to stay as a necessary feature of any really good craft bar. The ageing process can transform a drink from a boozy spirited concoction to a mellow, sophisticated and complex one, and it is just the thing that increasingly sophisticated drinkers want.

The only way to truly appreciate the metamorphosis is to drink it. Comparing an aged negroni to one freshly made by Gabriel Carlos, the assistant head bartender of Manhattan, the mature cocktail is clearly the more elegant elixir. Rounded and balanced, with deeper, subtle flavours of caramel and vanilla, it has had its edgy acidity smoothened out, resulting in a mellow, silky, complex nectar, compared to the zingy forwardness of the fresh one. “Once you have tasted an aged negroni, you can never go back to a fresh one,” he says with a wink. Indeed, how true. And like with age, this is something to be savoured slowly, not rushed through.