- Julia Thiel
- The Bitter Bourbon Buck, Letherbee Fernet
I stopped by Parson’s earlier this week for the launch party of Letherbee’s new fernet—a type of amaro that’s incredibly popular in Argentina (even more so than in Italy, where it originated) but less well known in the United States (outside San Francisco, anyway). Distiller Nathan Ozug says he’s been into Italian bitter liqueurs for a while, and has wanted to make his own version of fernet since he first began working for Letherbee a year and a half ago.
One way in which their fernet is different from others, Engel says, is that they tried to give it a silky, almost oily texture to make it well-suited for use in cocktails. “We didn’t want it to feel drying or harsh,” he says. Parson’s bartender Charlie Schott developed the Bitter Bourbon Buck slushy incorporating the fernet, based on a recipe that Ozug used to make when he worked at Longman & Eagle. The buck is a classic cocktail that involves ginger beer, citrus juice, and liquor; Ozug’s version used Fernet Branca and Schott tweaked it slightly to account for differences with the Letherbee fernet (and making it into a slushy). It’s still a simple cocktail: bourbon, ginger beer, lime, and just a quarter ounce of fernet. It’s a small quantity, Schott says, because “it comes through really strong; it’s got really pronounced flavors that cut through everything.” It’ll be available off and on throughout the summer.
