The Mosquito

I am a big fan of cocktails made with equal proportions of ingredients, such as the Golden Dawn and my signature Last Word, so I was really excited when I learned that Sam Ross had created a series of cocktails with equal proportions. His most famous is probably the Paper Plane, but he also created a group of four, all containing sweetened ginger juice, that became known as the “bug cocktails”. The first is the Mosquito.

• 3/4 ounce mezcal
• 3/4 ounce lemon juice
• 3/4 ounce sweetened ginger juice
• 3/4 ounce Campari

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice and shake until chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with candied ginger.

I’d been meaning to make this cocktail since back in February, but I struggled with how to get the ginger juice. I ended up buying a masticating juicer to take raw ginger and juice it. It works pretty well, and with the juice in hand I set out to make the “sweetened ginger juice” called for in this drink.

The instructions said to take four parts ginger juice and add three parts granulated sugar by weight, so I got out my scale and put in 40 grams of ginger juice and 30 grams of sugar and stirred it until the sugar was dissolved. I then mixed up the cocktail as described.

All I could taste was the ginger. It was so hot it burned.

I’ve been making cocktails for awhile now, and this was the first one I couldn’t finish. There was simply no nuance to it. I could have pretty much mixed in three random other ingredients and it would taste the same.

I figure I probably did something wrong, so the next night I decided to try again. I looked up a couple more variations on the recipe and one called for 1:1 juice/sugar. It also called for it to be heated to help the sugar dissolve, so I did that but it didn’t improve the taste at all. So I kept pouring in more sugar until I had something that still had the bite of ginger but without the burn. This was probably something more like 1:3 or 1:4 juice to sugar. And even then I only used 1/2 an ounce, adding more lemon juice to make up the difference.

This created a cocktail that hinted at the balance that was promised. You could taste some of the smoke from the mezcal, a little of the bitterness of the Campari and a hint of the sour lemon.

I still couldn’t finish it.

I had intended to make all of the other variations, but since they all contain that blasted ginger juice I plan to skip. Either I’m making the cocktail wrong in some way, or it just isn’t to my liking.

Notes: This is the first cocktail I’ve made with mezcal, and since my rural local liquor store doesn’t have a huge selection I took a stab and went with Montelobos Espadin. It’s good. I’m not a huge fan of smoke and while this definitely delivered it wasn’t overwhelming.