The menu of spring pairings at a recent cocktail dinner at the Stagecoach Tavern in Sheffield and featuring spirits from Berkshire Mountain Distillers. Photo: Andrew Blechman

The four-cocktail dinner: Emerging culinary trend makes local debut

It was the task of chef Laurel Barkan and bartender Rafael Russi to invent creative ways to pair Berkshire Mountain Distillers’ spirits—in this case, vodka, gin, bourbon and rum—with food and drink that complimented one another.

Sheffield — When it comes pairing drink with food, the “Mad Men”-era two martini lunch comes to mind, as does the well-established brilliance of wine pairings. In recent times, with the launch of the craft-brew movement, beer pairings have also become a thing, albeit in a typically simpler manner with barbecue and the like.

A newcomer to this movement is an emerging trend of pairing multicourse meals with multicourse cocktails. Unlike the martini lunch, the object is less about boozing up than complementing complex flavors that can interact in chemical wonder when approached with expertise, much like a tannic red can cut through the fatty delicacy of lamb in just the right way.

And yet never far from a participant’s mind is the lingering question: Will I survive this? Four cocktails are something of a, well, mouthful. And to the uninitiated, one can’t help but question whether strong spirits like gin, vodka and bourbon can actually complement a meal versus overpower it in more ways than one. Curiously, from the standpoint of wedding complex flavors, cocktails have one huge advantage — unlike beer or wine, they can be endlessly manipulated.

A recent cocktail pairing at the Stagecoach Tavern combined this emerging trend with one that is already well established here in the Berkshires: a quest to use locally sourced ingredients in consistently thoughtful ways. The spirits were from just down the road, craft-distilled onsite using mainly local ingredients, at the national award-winning Berkshire Mountain Distillers. The pairings were coordinated at the Stagecoach Tavern by chef Laurel Barkan — who, in less than a year, is already making her mark on the local food scene — and Rafael Russi, a talented Brazilian-born bartender with a passion for alchemy.

Bartender Rafael Russi adds a mixture of Berkshire Mountain Distillers’ rum, lemon and honey to a carafe filled with cinnamon smoke. Photo: Andrew Blechman

Aside from the meal itself, it was the trio of passion — distiller, chef, bartender — that made the biggest impression.

Founded in 2007, Berkshire Mountain Distillers’ handful of employees craft spirits in small batches using locally sourced grains from Sheffield and Great Barrington and herbs grown in their own greenhouse. In the near future, they hope to harvest their own juniper berries, a laborious project given that juniper takes nearly a decade to mature and the berries themselves take two years to ripen. Even the vodka, a reasonably flavorless spirit, is made more distinctive through the addition of sweet water from the distillery’s own mineral spring.

It was the task of chef Barkan and bartender Russi to invent creative ways to pair the distillery’s spirits — in this case, vodka, gin, bourbon and rum — with food and drink that complimented one another. One guiding principal for the shared challenge was to incorporate local seasonal delicacies such as fiddlehead ferns, rhubarb and maple syrup.

A selection of spirits from Berkshire Mountain Distillers used in the cocktail dinner. Photo: Andrew Blechman

With this in mind, Russi harvested birch bark and young sprigs from his wooded backyard and soaked them in the vodka to add a seasonal, earthy flavor to a generally bland spirit. To that base, he added a splash of Pims, lemon juice, agave syrup and muddled fresh rhubarb. The cocktail, yet to be named, was accompanied with a fiddlehead fern salad with lemongrass, ginger, cilantro and fried shallots.

“It was a matter of sitting down together, sampling the different spirits, and figuring what they’d pair well with and what was seasonably available,” Barkan said of her collaboration with Russi. “Rafa’s drink was sweet and tart, which paired particularly well with a fern salad that’s spicy and pungent.”

The fern salad, accompanied by local, birch-infused vodka. Photo: Andrew Blechman

Russi said his cocktail recipes originated with existing cocktails that he’s enjoyed but adapted for local and seasonal considerations. “I looked at the recipes and asked myself, ‘What would this cocktail look like if it were native to the Berkshires and in season?’ That was our path to coming up with something seasonal.”

Added Barkan, “I’ve never done this before, but I’m always trying to explore what flavor combinations and textures go well together, so it’s really an extension of what I do every day.”

The four-course meal also included a bourbon cocktail infused with bacon and Maplewood smoke, accompanied by buttermilk fried chicken with rhubarb-bacon jam; BMD’s Ethereal Gin with rubbed sage and paired with a locally sourced pork rillete; and a rum cocktail infused with cinnamon smoke paired with ginger-pecan prailine.

“When you have a good bartender thinking of these creations and a chef who is similarly passionate working together to make a dinner like this as special as possible, it’s nice and makes my job easy,” said Michael Sharry, of BMD. “Blending spirits with this sort of creativity is like the marriage of art and science.”

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In addition to being an author and a self-professed foodie, Andrew Blechman is also a bartender at the Stagecoach Tavern.