Greetings from the Appalachian Mountains. We hope your weekend has been a good one. We’ve spent a lot of time lately on cocktails that are at least 50 years old. This week’s cocktail goes modern and gives us a break from our adventures in rum and tropical places, though not from warmer climes — and it has certainly been warm in Appalachia the past two weeks. If you love heat combined with humidity, we have you covered.

My run-in with this cocktail owes to a close friend of mine, Bryan. He loves Tequila and has pushed me to explore a few more formulations using it as a base spirit — you’ll recall that we previously haven’t done a ton of Tequila cocktails — see Coconut Margarita and The Matador from earlier this year. For Bryan’s birthday, I resolved to find a cocktail with his preferred spirit. My parameters were that the Tequila needed to be palpable, but the drink should be approachable for his guests.

Those conditions led me to the Dead Man’s Handle. This is a modern cocktail, first developed in 2019 by bartender Tiffany Kirk at Houston’s (now seemingly closed) Miss Carousel bar. The drink was even featured in Imbibe, which is where I encountered it. The internet suggests the name relates to the brake used to stop runaway trains, but we’d need Tiffany to weigh in on that. 

My version below will have a nice salinity and grassy Tequila flavor as its base, but will have a punchy nose and tip-of-the-tongue fruitiness from the Aperol. And if you’ve never had the combination of Aperol and orgeat, it’s really great. Some formulations specify less Tequila than I have below. But the recipe will call for a free pour, so we want to keep the Tequila front and center. And for Bryan’s party, I was batching this for around 15 folks, so we need a bit more punch. As always, the balance can be adjusted to your tastes. 

First, slice a lime and coat a sliver of the rim of your glass. The simple process can be found in our discussions of Coconut Margarita, the Sidecar, The Golden Bulb, or Scottish Sandie. Chill your glass thoroughly. This is a shaken cocktail. Add the ingredients sans garnish to one half of your shaker tin. Load the other half with ice — you’ll generally want a balance of medium ice shards for this one. You’ll see why. Then bring your tins together for a standard shake. Retrieve your glass and add fresh ice to about ⅓ of your glass. You’ll then free pour the drink into the (already Tajin-rimmed) glass. You’ll drink this one over ice. Enjoy! 

This is a very specific cocktail. So there aren’t a ton of options. In terms of tequila, you could use Reposado or Anejo, but the nuances of each will be lost in this drink. Plus, Blanco’s brightness pairs really well with Aperol and fresh lime. Note the extra salt in this one. Tequila, more than any other spirit, loves salt, and it’ll help all these flavors pop in this drink.

The Orgeat offers one option. Typically, Orgeat implies an almond milk syrup. But you can, in fact, make an Orgeat from any nut. The tree nuts native to Mexico include pecans, Mexican Pinyon (pine nuts), and walnuts. Any of these could be made into their version of orgeat. Pecans are the most commercially important of these, and Pecan Orgeat would be a great choice here. You can find recipes for different orgeats online, but I’ll eventually post mine here. I think the Pine nuts and walnuts would come off too savory for the “punchy” character of this cocktail. But by all means, try it and let us know in the comments.

Finally, as with all versions of “sours,” the balance of the drink can be adjusted to be sweeter with the Aperol/Orgeat or tarter with the lime, in ratio. The dilution helps here, too. So try it and see where your allegiances lie with the Dead Man’s Handle. See you next week at the Appalachian Speakeasy when we return to rum, if briefly.

This blog is, as ever, an opinionated take on drinks.