Honeycrisp Shrub Highball

The Honeycrisp is one of the few things you can credit to a specific institutional act and a specific date. The apple was developed at the University of Minnesota's Horticultural Research Center in Excelsior, with significant breeding work tracing back to the University's Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and Agricultural Research Station programs, and it was released for commercial production in 1991. Before the Honeycrisp, the supermarket apple was either a soft and aging Red Delicious or one of the harder, more acidic varieties that did not particularly want to be eaten raw. The Honeycrisp changed the assumption about what a supermarket apple could be. It is crisp in a way that previous apples were not, the cells exploding in the bite rather than mashing, and it carries a sugar-acid balance that gives it actual flavor architecture rather than the blunt sweetness that dominated the category before it.

That structural balance is what makes the Honeycrisp such a strong base for a shrub. The shrub form — a drinking vinegar that combines fruit, sugar, and vinegar in approximately equal weights — is one of the oldest beverage technologies in the American repertoire, predating refrigeration and predating most of what we now consider cocktail culture. Shrubs were the way the colonial and post-colonial American kitchen preserved fruit beyond the harvest window. They were nonalcoholic by default, drunk diluted with water as summer refreshment, and they have returned in the last fifteen years as a serious tool in the contemporary bar program.

The Acid-Sugar Balance

A shrub is built on the relationship between three variables: the fruit's own sugar, the added sugar, and the vinegar's acid. Get the proportions right and you have a syrup with the fruit's flavor concentrated and intensified by the vinegar's bite. Get them wrong and you have either a cloying syrup that drinks like jam or a thin, sharp vinegar that drinks like a salad dressing. The Honeycrisp's natural sugar makes the balance easier than it is with a tarter apple. Use equal weights of chopped apple, sugar, and apple cider vinegar; macerate the apple in the sugar overnight in the refrigerator first to draw out the juice, then add the vinegar and let the whole construction sit for another two to three days before straining. The result keeps in the refrigerator for a month easily, and it gets more interesting in the first week as the flavors integrate.

The shrub is the bar program's answer to a few different problems. It adds acid without adding the watery character of fresh citrus. It carries fruit flavor without the texture of a puree. It contributes sugar and acid simultaneously, which simplifies the build of a long drink. And it is shelf-stable in a way that fresh fruit is not, which means a small bar with limited refrigeration can build a serious cocktail menu around a few good shrubs rather than chasing seasonal fruit availability week by week.

Building Tall

The highball is a discipline as much as it is a glass. A tall drink — built tall, drunk slowly, diluted continuously by ice and time — has a different relationship to the room than a stirred drink served up. It is conversational rather than declarative. It accompanies an afternoon rather than punctuating it. The classic Japanese highball form has gotten a lot of attention in American bar culture in the last decade, and for good reason: it is a drink that rewards good ice, careful pouring, and a measured proportion of spirit to soda. The Honeycrisp shrub highball uses the same logic. The gin is the structural spirit, kept restrained at one and a half ounces. The shrub provides flavor and acid in a single move. The soda lengthens and lightens everything. The apple peel express is the aromatic top note that connects the drink to the fruit it is built on.

Use a gin that does not fight the apple. A London Dry style with assertive juniper will muddy the balance; a more contemporary, citrus-forward gin or a botanical-light Plymouth-style gin works better. If you can find a gin distilled in the upper Midwest, that is even better — the regional distilleries have been doing thoughtful work in lighter, more apple-friendly styles for several years now, and pairing them with a Minnesota apple shrub puts the whole drink in a single region.

October Porch Drinking

This is a drink for the specific moment in Minnesota when the apples are coming in and the afternoons are still warm enough to sit outside in a sweater but the evenings are cold enough to be honest about. Late September through mid-October. The leaves have started to turn but not finished. The orchards along Highway 65 and out toward Hastings and down through the river valley are full, the farm stands are selling apples in fifteen-pound bags, and there is enough apple in any Minnesota refrigerator in October to support a continuous shrub-making operation for the entire month.

Combine shrub and gin in a highball over ice, top with soda, and express a strip of apple peel over the surface. Drink slowly. Refill when the ice has done about a third of its work.