Cocktail Club

This is the batch cocktail you’ll be making all summer

Local bartending expert and Cocktail Club host Jackson Cannon tells us how to make a party beverage.

By Shira Laucharoen

May 26, 2023

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If you’re throwing a get-together sometime this summer, you’ll want to serve a fun and festive drink that everyone can enjoy. A legend in Boston’s bartending scene and the host of Boston.com’s Cocktail Club, Jackson Cannon is here to lead us through how to make the ultimate large format drink of the season. That beverage is called the Summer Garden Cup, which he says is based on the “reverse martini.” It features gin and two kinds of vermouth.

“You’re using the gin to give you layers of botanical flavor, a little bit of a kick. And that’s true in the single-serve reverse martini,” Cannon said. “But here, we’re using it to maybe pull on the lemon peel, pull on fresh strawberries, [on] fresh herbs right out of the garden. The gin will help the vermouth pull those flavors out.”

Cannon opened the famed brasserie Eastern Standard as bar manager in 2005 and Island Creek Oyster Bar in 2010. He was also a partner at The Hawthorne, formerly in the Hotel Commonwealth. Now, he’s planning to bring something new to Boston’s bar scene with Equal Measure, set to open late summer in the Fenway, adjacent to a revived Eastern Standard and two other sibling spots.

We talked with Cannon about how you can make the Summer Garden Cup, as well as what to expect Equal Measure. Read the Q&A and full recipe below.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Why do you think that the Summer Garden Cup is the best batch cocktail drink to make this season?

It’s been very interesting over the last few years to see a little shift in the general palate for people, in terms of what the crowd pleasing cocktails have been. There are two angles that I think about this drink from. One is, that’s giving us some space to play a little bit differently than we [would have] before. When we think of drinks like the Aperol Spritz and the Negroni… these are all trends towards really full flavored, full balanced [drinks]. It’s an area where popular drinking and craft cocktails are bending closer together. I’m always looking for those moments where things that I think are really good, that people maybe haven’t enjoyed, I can expose them to those things.

But a party drink is a place where people still don’t think that can go down. Citrus and sugar, drinks that are built like that, [where you] have a bottle of ginger ale dropped on, those have a pretty short shelf life at a party. They’re not great for anything longer than a few minutes. For me, if you’re going to dislodge people from what they think they want, their usual order… you need to do something that’s visually fun, thematically cool. You have to grab people’s attention and draw them in that way.

Walk us through how it’s made.

You want this drink to be cold when you serve it. But flavors infuse at room temperature, and these are really stable ingredients. I don’t add ice first. I don’t overly chill the ingredients. Putting the gin and vermouth, room temperature, onto some cut citrus fruits and some other fresh fruits for about 20 minutes will bring a lot of magic flavors out. But that can sit in the bowl on the counter. You’re getting ready for the party; you put that stuff in the bowl. You can kind of forget about it for a little while. There’s nothing in there to dilute; it’s not going to over extract.

The night before, if I was really thinking ahead, I would have pulled some flowers and herbs from the garden and put them carefully in my ice mold and frozen some water, with a little bit of a decorative flair. But that is in the freezer, awaiting the moment of truth.

The doorbell rings, and you’re like, “Great, drop some ice on this thing.” It can sit out like that all afternoon, before you add the ice. Once you add ice, the drink will get chilled, which is great, and it’ll start to dilute a little bit. But this drink has a lot of flavor. It can bear up to the slow melt of a large piece of ice.

Can you share a bit about some of the projects that you’re working on?

One that is a little bit flying under the radar — we have a new seafood concept called All That Fish and Oyster. … We’re going to probably be doing business in that space by August.

I’m so passionate about what the chef is doing. It’s relying on the great proteins and produce of the region. But the spice palate is more equatorial. There’s some really cool Asian flavors and Central and South American flavors, some Indian spices that are kind of playing in this, with great seafood from Massachusetts and Maine, and good farm partners. It’s a really fun project to think of, that restaurant. It’s going to be a really heavy cocktails with food style place.

What can you tell us about Equal Measure, opening in the late summer?

The context for a lot of people, when we were bringing Eastern Standard back, was, “are you bringing The Hawthorne back?” [The Hawthorne] was my super-swank, craft cocktail, live event space at the hotel. [It] was a bit more personified by me, instead of necessarily the rest of the group.

There was a lot of space between Eastern Standard and The Hawthorne. This cocktail bar that we were building was going to be a little bit more tightly woven operationally into Eastern Standard than The Hawthorne was. Eastern Standard was not built to do what we did. It was delivered to be this regular old, $3 million a year restaurant. It wasn’t meant to be $10 million a year, half of it beverage, cranking out drinks. I was like, “I can build [the new] Eastern Standard in a way, knowing where that program could have gotten to, and I can think of the standards of the new cocktail bar in a way that they just fit together better.”

For instance, we had different recipes for different classics at those two other bars. But here, I was like, “These programs are going to live a little bit more harmoniously together.” … There’s a lot of shared ingredient things we can do, that are kind of fun. I really want something that plays off of Eastern Standard a little bit, and I just gave it a lot of thought about the concept.

Equal Measure represents more than great cocktails that are built one part, one part, one part. It’s also about the seriousness meeting the frivolity of it all. There’s that half sinner, half saint part of hospitality that I think is kind of key. That’s where the ethos of the bar kind of comes from. … It’s not [a] speakeasy. It has an entrance, but it also has another way to get into it. … It’s an 11-seat bar, with a couple of cool tables [close to] it. There’s a whole other section that’s more couch driven, that’s a little bit away from the bar, kind of its own little world. It also bumps up against the private events space for Eastern Standard, which Equal Measure can sometimes take over. We built the walls to kind of retract, and we can do these larger, walk-around, product-driven, fun parties that The Hawthorne was also known for.

Drinks that you can order there: The Frenchy French, made with Citadelle gin, Dolin dry vermouth, Lillet Blanc, and a brie stuffed olive; the Café Negroni, made with Fords gin, coffee Campari, and allspice vermouth.

Recipe: The Summer Garden Cup

Ingredients

• 1 bottle of gin

• 1 bottle of sweet vermouth

• 1 bottle of dry vermouth

Instructions

Combine in a larger bowl with sliced citrus and other seasonal berries. Let stand at room temperature for at least 20 minutes and up to 2 hours.

Add large pieces of ice. Options include freezing flowers and fruits right into the cubes. Add some fresh herbs and additional fruit on top, and serve.

Jackson recommends reading “The Ice Book: Cool Cubes, Clear Spheres, and Other Chill Cocktail Crafts,” by Camper English, to learn how to make fancy ice at home.

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