Curious Elixirs

Curious Elixirs began in Brooklyn with a question most drinks companies skip: not how to imitate a cocktail, but how to make something worth ordering on its own terms. The answer was to build each recipe the way a bartender builds a drink — real fruit juice concentrates, botanical extracts, bitter roots, salt, heat — and then to number them rather than name them, so the range reads as a set of experiments instead of a lineup of substitutes.

There are ten. A pomegranate Negroni, a spicy pineapple margarita with ancho and jalapeño, a cucumber collins, a blood orange spritz, a cherry and cacao drink built on American oak, a coconut colada, a chardonnay-based sparkler, a bitter digestif poured in two-ounce measures, a wine-inspired red, and a barley lager. Each one carries a botanical the house builds into the recipe rather than adds on top — rhodiola, damiana, ashwagandha, lion’s mane, ginseng.

The New York Times has put them on its best-of list five years running. The house publishes a full panel and a full ingredient list for every drink, including the ones that complicate the sell: which contains gluten, which may pick up a trace from shared machinery, which is best avoided in pregnancy. That is rarer than it should be, and it is why this range is easy to write about accurately.