Looking Glass Botanical Blends Bring Craft Cocktails Home
Many of the so-called cocktail mixers throughout history – think premade flavorings supposedly delivering easy and delicious cocktails – have made me yell, in true Red Queen style: “Off with their heads!” The mixes are either more chemical than natural, too sweet or not sweet enough, not well-balanced, or simply don’t mirror the real thing.
In recent years, however, some cocktail mixers have risen to the occasion. And Washington’s Looking Glass Botanical Blends is leading that pack.
Getting to a high level of mixer mastery for the public isn’t just shaking a few ingredients together and straining them into a bottle. Looking Glass creator and proprietor, longtime Seattle bartender Jon Christiansen, started developing these mixers eight years ago, after hearing, as he said, “guests mourn the very serious problem of not being able to have my drinks at home.”
Christiansen is currently mixing drinks at Monsoon and is the beverage director for the Saigon Siblings Restaurant Group. Before that, he was at Tulio, The Queen City Grill and many more. The beginnings of Looking Glass came from his “reverse engineering” cocktails popular at his restaurants. This meant participating in a multitude of experiments to duplicate a drink’s flavors before adding a base spirit, such as gin or whiskey. It was a painstaking task, researching how to get secondary cocktail ingredient flavors, like sloe gin and absinthe, say, and “developing non-alcoholic botanical tinctures that act as my salt and pepper to sprinkle around the more dominant ingredients.”
He started trying to find retail spots where they could be available, while at the same time working on yet another project, a climate change cocktail book, a project he since altered into a website, Drink the Change. That led to him getting in touch with Maxime Bilet, renowned chef, collaborator on the six-volume Modernist Cuisine, co-author of The Modernist Cooks at Home, and founder of Imagine Foods. They clicked like gin and vermouth, filling up a few whiteboards worth of ideas in no time, and their meeting ended with Bilet joining the mixer company.
Since, they’ve refined the mixers, expanded the line, and – with some help and guidance from folks like Brovo Distilling’s Mhairi Voelsgen – learned “how to operate a manufacturing/warehousing facility that is FDA certified.” Moreover, Christiansen sourced custom bottles, found a Woodinville production space, and designed labels and a website. All with the goal of helping home entertainers who, as Christiansen says, “want something special and don’t want to be pulling a bartending shift.”
There are currently four Looking Glass cocktail mixers, Whiskey Rebellion, Sayulita, Hot Charlotte and Tea Time. Two more are on the way, all based on drinks featured at some point on the Monsoon menu. Christiansen developed quite a cocktail palate over his deep bartending background, and Bilet is a “savant” chef, pushing drink alchemy to another level.
Of course, the journey to releasing them wouldn’t mean much if the Looking Glass cocktail mixers didn’t sing when sipped. And they certainly do. For instance, I tried the Whiskey Rebellion with Woodinville Whiskey’s latest harvest release, a straight bourbon finished in Sauternes casks. 1¾ ounces of Whiskey Rebellion shaken over ice came together in a beautiful simplicity with 2 ounces of the bourbon, unveiling a tang of lemon and tannic-ness, swirls of lingering spice and botanicals opening, then opening more as the ice melts, a little fruity smooth sweetness cuddling throughout.
And it’s not even my favorite Looking Glass cocktail mixer. That title belongs to Hot Charlotte. Fabricated after a cocktail from the late legendary bartender Murray Stenson, it goes equal parts with gin. (I used Astrea’s Meadow.) Together, it’s like breathing-in a midsummer garden: cucumber, elderflower, hot pepper, citrus, Champagne, honeysuckle and verbena. Plus, a dollar from every Hot Charlotte bottle purchased goes to the United States Bartender’s Guild charity foundation, helping bartenders in need. That’s positive sipping.
Like its Looking Glass siblings, the Hot Charlotte makes a sophisticated non-alcoholic drink, too – top off 1½ ounces with chilled soda water over ice. While each Looking Glass cocktail mixer has a suggested first base spirit, you can blaze your own path, too. It all comes back to Christiansen’s original goal – providing home drinkers with the ability to “have a great craft cocktail without any work at home.”
Looking Glass cocktail mixers are $23 for a 16-ounce bottle, available direct at lgbotanicalblends.com and select other bottle shops.
Photography by Jackie Mallory Dodd
