Edible San Francisco

The Alembic’s bar manager, Daniel Hyatt, is a modern-day alchemist who regularly brews up exotic mixers like cardamom syrup, sangria soda, and root-beer bitters. “I spend a lot of time on the stovetop,” he says.

At The Alembic in Haight-Ashbury, cocktails are one part science, and two parts magic.

By Catherine Nash - Photos by Lucy Goodhart

The first drink I ever tried at The Alembic sounded perfectly horrible. Kaffir lime-infused Hangar One vodka, port wine, and ginger beer? Blech. It reminded me of the concoctions my friends and I used to whip up in elementary school and then dare each other to drink. But I ordered it anyway, seduced as much by its tongue-in-cheek name (the Power Suit) as by the unlikely recipe.

Before the night was over, I had slurped down two more. More importantly, I’d determined to meet the drink’s creator. What kind of man would make a drink like the Power Suit—and then have the balls to serve it to someone else? “I get a flavor or smell in mind and think, How do I achieve this?” Daniel Hyatt, the Alembic’s bar manager, explained to me one sunny Friday afternoon. “Scent and taste memories are really powerful. It’s more than making a cocktail; it’s reliving a moment.”

I’d love to know what moment inspired the Vice Grip, a mix of coffee rum liqueur, Brachetto d’Aqui (a sparkling, sweet red wine), and porter foam. I settle instead for a general theory of Hyatt’s: “I like everything to be alcoholic. I like the flavors you can get. There’s only one cocktail on the entire list of original drinks that uses juice.” Hardcore, for sure, but the approach works.

The menu at The Alembic is divided into multiple parts. There’s The Canon, with classic drinks of yore like the Sazerac and the bourbon old-fashioned. New School is where Hyatt and his crew strut their stuff; you might try the Pomme Pomme, with apple eau de vie, Madeira, Velvet Falernum (a Caribbean liqueur flavored with almonds, cloves, and lime) and cin namon oil. There are cocktails for the morning, and others created for sunset. Then there’s the whiskey list, with 38 kinds of bourbon alone.

Just like Hyatt’s fashion sense—on the day we met, he was sporting a yellow fedora, stovepipe jeans, and fingernails painted black—his methods are one part old-school, two parts new. He uses a smoker to flavor syrups and a dehydrator to make razor thin melon crisps, but several days a week, he shops the farmers’ market for good old organic fruits, vegetables, and herbs to pickle, candy, and muddle in glass bottoms.

Between restocking the bar, writing the menu, and going on the occasional tequila tasting in Mexico, Hyatt devotes about 15 hours a week to simply playing around in the kitchen. He’s as likely to be infusing honey with lavender flowers that grow out back as he is to be creating pineapple “ravioli” from pineapple juice, cayenne pepper, calcium chloride, and sodium alginate, a little Ferran Adria trick he learned from Boris Portnoy, the Campton Place pastry chef with whom he worked at the now defunct Winterland. (Boris recently revamped The Alembic’s dessert menu.) “He taught me to do this stuff,” Hyatt says.

The old-fashioned, considered by many to be the original cocktail, consists of six simple ingredients at the Alembic: bourbon whiskey, bitters, sugar, a twist of lemon peel, three ice cubes -- no more, no less—and the tumbler that takes its name from the drink.

From brews to booze

The Alembic is the brainchild of Dave McLean, the Slow-Food-following, Grateful-Dead-loving owner of Magnolia Pub & Brewery just up the street. McLean studied brewing science at UC Davis and started making beer at home; the interest in beer led to whiskey. Ten years after opening up the neighborhood brewpub, McLean wondered what he might do next. “The question was, How would a high-end spirits-driven bar fare in the Haight?” he explains.

All you have to do is read the chalkboard menu hanging behind the bar to understand how seriously McLean has taken to the spirit world. In addition to a large bourbon selection, the bar stocks American rye, American, Canadian, and Irish whiskey, and a list of single-malt and blended Scotches esoteric enough to intrigue any buff. “The broad offering of artisan products is what we’re about. We’ll go out and find the things people spent a lot of love producing. It’s not choice for the sake of choice.”

He can reel off facts and figures about corn mash as easily as he can regale you with the history of distillation, and naming The Alembic after one of the Grateful Dead’s guitar manufacturers was more than a simple nod to a favorite band. The word “alembic” comes from the Arabic al-ambiq, meaning “still.” (The world alcohol is also Arabic in origin, from either al-kuhl or al-gawl, and Muslim chemists were the first to isolate ethanol, otherwise known as drinking alcohol.) The term alembic was later adopted by 19th-century alchemists who specialized in elixirs of dubious healing powers, and it is from this association that the word came to mean something with transformative powers.

Given the name, it seems nearly inevitable that what McLean envisioned as a whiskey bar has evolved into a cocktail kitchen. At first glance, The Alembic seems like any watering hole—unassuming facade, darkened interior, a bar topped with green olives, lime wedges, and leafy celery stalks. But if you look closely, you’ll notice history (the numbers carved into the wooden bartop are a vestige from the days when it served as Kezar Stadium’s bleacher seats) as well as humor (squat jars stuffed with Alka-Seltzer packets wink at the potential pitfalls of overindulgence). You’ll also notice out-of-the-ordinary garnishes, from giant caperberries to candied grapefruit peel and dark red cherries marinated in gin and black pepper. Start opening drawers and you’ll uncover bottles of housemade limoncello or experiments like bourbon infused with long pepper, a tiny peppercorn that resembles a pinecone.

McLean describes his team’s work in terms of artistry more than anything else. “They understand the principles of flavors. It’s not just memorizing recipes,” he emphasizes. “They know ingredients well enough to create something. It’s true, intimate knowledge and mastery of the craft.”

The bare essentials

At The Alembic, this craft starts with everything being made fresh from scratch. The cardamom syrup, fresh celery juice, and grapefruit-chili soda listed on the menu, for example, are all made in house.

That is the reason McLean staffed the bar with people like Hyatt and daytime bartender Josey Packard, both of whom are easily as passionate and knowledgeable about spirits as any scholar—or drunk. One afternoon, I watched Packard explain the motivations of early American moonshiners to a woman sipping a glass of Old Potrero, a faithful re-creation of 18th-century rye whiskey from local Anchor Steam brewmaster Fritz Maytag. “The main distinguishing factor of 18th-century Americans is they didn’t have the patience to wait four to six years to age their whiskey,” she explained. “They wanted to get smashed.”

Bitters is a particular obsession at The Alembic these days. It’s made by distilling herbs, flowers, roots, or bark in a clear alcohol like vodka or grain. Most bartenders use one of the two mass-market bitters, Angostura or Peychaud’s—the version traditionally used in the Sazerac cocktail—but Hyatt and Packard like to make their own, in flavors as wide-ranging as milk thistle or chocolate mint. The root-beer bitters, for instance, is made with gentian root, sassafras, and Jamaican sarsaparilla. No matter how enticing the name sounds, be warned: it is shockingly, bracingly bitter. “There was a time 100 years ago when you had 20 different bitters behind the bar,” McLean points out. “The more we create, the more fun we can have.”

Like any inventor, Hyatt is circumspect about his experiments, and says that mistakes often become thrilling discoveries. Take the first bitters he made, from apricot pits. “It tasted like swimming pool water, but it got me thinking about a cherry stone version.”

Sourcing ingredients most people have never heard of requires him to be a bit of an urban plant hunter. In addition to the farmers’ market, he’s a big fan of Le Sanctuaire and the bulk aisle at Rainbow Grocery. He hits up Boulette’s Larder in the Ferry Building for hard-to-find items like yuzu juice and white cardamom, and frequents Scarlet Sage Herb Company on Valencia Street for medicinal herbs. A small garden out back supplies the bar with lavender, limes, fennel, and other fresh herbs.

“I have a crazy messy spice rack,” he confesses, getting up to rummage around in a drawer behind the bar. What he pulls out of it—plastic baggies of chicory root and sarsaparilla, and dropper jars half full of celery-seed extract and damiana root—seems better suited to an apothecary. “There’s a lot of improvisation that goes on behind the bar with these ingredients.”

But all the strange sounding tinctures and potions are merely building blocks for what is, essentially, a playful selection of hand-crafted cocktails, which change frequently enough to keep up with the seasons and the bartenders’ interests. “What I wanted was an interesting and focused cocktail menu,” Hyatt explains. “We have eight originals and eight classics. When you only do a few, you do really interesting things. Each one says something very different.”

Catherine Nash is a freelance writer who lives in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Olive Magazine, the Oakland Tribune, Best Food Writing, Northside San Francisco, The Onion, and KQED’s Bay Area Bites. She also writes the blog Food Musings (Food Musings).

This content was published in the Feb/March 2008 Edible San Francisco Magazine. © 2008 Edible San Francisco. No part of this article may be reproduced without the written consent of the author or publisher.

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