The Potion Makers of Dallas

Hundreds of Dallas bars can serve you a good drink. Many of them make their own ingredients, too, creating custom flavored syrups, sour mixes, and infused spirits. But a handful of local bartenders are going further, making their own in-house versions of popular aperitifs and liqueurs such as Aperol, Campari, and Chartreuse. Their backbars occasionally look like science labs, with sophisticated equipment, preserved ingredients, and mysterious potions in jars.

Why go to the trouble? Liqueurs like Chartreuse are becoming hard to get, so a house-made alternative can ensure affordable availability. Bartenders can also take greater control of the final flavor profile. Put simply, it’s also a fun feature for a bar to have. “It’s nicer to have our own house product,” says Sachet bar manager Bobby Lilly. “It makes it unique to us. It’s something we can be proud of.”

We took a behind-the-scenes tour of the bars at Apothecary, Bar Colette, The Branca Room, Fond, Jettison, Petra and the Beast, and Sachet, tipping open experimental batches, watching new booze get made, and sampling the results.

Chartreuse: “Let Me Be a Monk”

Green and yellow Chartreuse are herbal liqueurs made by Carthusian monks in France. The monks are in no hurry to distill more. Their primary focus is on religious devotion, and they make only enough liqueur to pay the bills. In a 2023 letter to business partners, the monks announced that all distributors are “under allocation,” meaning their order quantities are capped. The New York Times reports the monks limit production to 1.6 million bottles a year. 

But as America’s cocktail bars became thirstier for Chartreuse and its herbaceous, bittersweet profile—the secret recipe reportedly contains more than 100 ingredients—they have run straight into a shortage. “The timeline is unpredictable,” says Rubén Rolón, bar director at Bar Colette in Uptown. “I received one bottle of each earlier this year. It is completely out of our control.”

Rolón is one of two Dallas-area bartenders who now make their own Chartreuse. The other is Branca Room’s James Slater, who succinctly describes his own motivation: “Those fuckers didn’t want to do more Chartreuse? OK, let me be a monk.”

Slater and Rolón worked separately to deduce the monks’ recipes. Slater read books on the production process; Rolón sat with a bottle and read tasting notes by other mixologists. Both made initial test batches that tasted too savory. Rolón says his early test had too much rosemary and “tasted like steak,” while Slater’s colleague, Brian O’Malley, recalls that the first Branca Room trial “had a very strong umami flavor, the closest alcoholic beverage I’ve tasted to a protein.”

It didn’t take long, though, for both to develop Chartreuse recipes that come close to the real thing. Slater’s new recipe goes big on lemon balm. “Now we’ve gotten to the point where we do blind tastes with bartenders who work in this area, and they can’t tell the difference,” O’Malley says of The Branca Room’s yellow Chartreuse. His one concession: the homemade version might be less sweet than the real thing.

Green Chartreuse is considered harder to copy because of its vivid color. (The color chartreuse gets its name from the drink.) There aren’t many bright green ingredients that don’t come with their own ultra strong flavors, but Rolón has a trick up his sleeve: pandan leaves. His recipe also involves multiple citrus zests, whole mace, star anise, angelica root, licorice root, chamomile, bay leaves, thyme, rosemary, cinnamon, green cardamom, a little bit of mint liqueur, and a small splash of ultra high-proof rum.

Despite the rum, Rolón’s Chartreuse is lower proof than the monks’ version. “We use an eau de vie as a base instead of grain alcohol,” he says. (Eau de vie is a clear, unaged brandy.) He isn’t shooting for a perfect match, but he has achieved something close, a sip with complexity and depth, the slightest hint of sweetness, and enough flavor to stand on its own.

Campari: A Tale of Flowers and Beetles

Chartreuse isn’t the only liqueur being mixed behind the bar at The Branca Room. Slater also makes his own Campari with 27 ingredients, including grapefruit, lemon, kumquat, and hibiscus distillate, a water in which Slater boils hibiscus flowers to extract their purple hue. 

Another coloring agent: cochineals, the red beetles from Mexico that were the basis of Campari’s red dye until 2006. Although the company switched to artificial coloring, the tradition of cochineal dye lives on in rival brands—and at The Branca Room. O’Malley watched Slater at work. “He was over there with a mortar and pestle, shelling beetles by hand.” The dried-out bugs, a sort of dusky earth tone before they’re crushed and processed into dye, come in clear plastic tubs with round lids, the kind you might buy couscous in.

The Branca Room’s house Campari and Chartreuse sit in enormous barrel-like plastic jugs, waiting to be dispensed. At the top of the jug of the next Campari batch are citrus peels and rosemary sprigs, working their magic in the deep red murk. Two weeks later, Slater texts me: the Campari is ready.

Aperol: Build a Better Spritz

At Sachet, Aperol spritzes have been a bar staple for years, but co-owner Allison Yoder challenged her bar manager, Bobby Lilly, to make the drink a little more personal. Now he makes the restaurant’s own Aperol-like aperitif for spritzes. 

But it’s not an exact copy of the original. Frankly, it’s better. The Sachet version is less straightforwardly sweet and more complex, with a lovely aroma. “I decided that I was going to add botanicals and a little bit of strawberries for color,” Lilly says. “I added a little bit of lavender, cardamom, hibiscus, rhubarb tea, citric acid. I put citric acid in there so it’s tart enough. I also put gentian in there for a bitter component.”

He pulls out another tub, containing his first test batch. It has a soapy smell, likely from too much lavender, and less of the new version’s pleasing bitterness. The final recipe, by contrast, is a well-rounded delight. It’s boozier than Aperol, so Lilly has to add a little more cava to the completed spritz to keep it refreshing and light.

He’s so excited about Sachet’s new house aperitif that he’s talking about selling small gift bottles to go, maybe as part of a holiday basket. “I’m really surprised how great it turned out, and extremely excited,” he says. “Completely shocked.”

Milk Punch: the Flavor Whisperer

The name “milk punch” may not sound appetizing, but it is probably your favorite bartender’s favorite drink. “I like doing milk punch a lot,” Rolón says. “It’s my favorite type of cocktail to make. It takes a lot of time, but it’s amazing to keep in the fridge. You can make them at home. It’s so fun.”

“I have to have a milk punch on the menu at all times,” says Shane Scully, bar manager at Petra and the Beast. “It’s a way to really push flavor forward and see the evolution of flavor, because what you start with and what you end with are two completely different things. It’s a vessel to rejoice flavors. I love milk punches more than anything.”

“It’s very hard to beat the texture and the flavor,” says Tanner Agar, co-owner of cocktail bar Apothecary and restaurant Rye, both of which make and serve milk punches. “I think the best part is when the milk is part of the cocktail, and you’re using it to make something better. Tiki drinks are often acid and sugar, so that creaminess and fluffiness take them in another direction.” 

In New York, there are whole bars dedicated to milk punch, most notably Jelas near Union Square. So what is it? 

Milk punch can include booze-and-dairy mixes such as eggnog. But today’s bartenders are making clarified (meaning literally clear) punches. This version, too, has historical roots, including a recipe by America’s trendiest founder, Benjamin Franklin.

It works like this: in one container, you combine your booze of choice with the flavors you want to infuse. On a stovetop, get milk to steaming—don’t scald it—then add the milk to a second container. Gently pour the infused booze into the milk bowl. Let this mixture sit, and eventually it will separate into two parts: the curds, which you’ll discard, and the clarified boozy blend, to which the whey proteins attach.

“The milk solids that make cheese trap a lot of bitterness, tannins, and pigmentation,” Rolón says. “What you end up with [after discarding the solids] is rich, refined, silky smooth.” 

“Milk punch is my favorite type of cocktail to make. It takes a lot of time, but it’s amazing to keep in the fridge. You can make them at home. It’s so fun.” 

Rubén Rolón at Bar Colette

“The only thing that’s transferring over is that whey protein and whatever is bound to the whey protein,” Scully adds. “It’s this way where you’re kind of whispering another flavor into this cocktail.”

Although the milk is gone and the punch is clear, whey proteins make the resulting texture feel indulgent. The tipple can be stored for months in the fridge, too, since there’s nothing to oxidate, and alcohol is a preservative. Ben Franklin kept his bottled in the cellar for years. Rolón says, “Rhubarb [season] is gone fast, right? If I have rhubarb in a milk punch, now I have it for a long time.” 

Because of that smooth texture, and because bitter tannins have been removed, the result is dangerously easy to drink. As Scully says, “They’re deceptively velvety drinks that people say, ‘Oh, this barely tastes like it has any booze in it.’ ”

“When you’re drinking milk punch clarified piña coladas, they’re so much smaller,” Agar warns. “But the potency is the same in the 3-ounce version as the [original] 10-ounce version. It’s pretty easy to have five of these and realize you need an Uber home.”

At Bar Colette, milk punches are on the menu and also often appear as a small, free welcome sip when customers sit down. For an Alice in Wonderland-themed cocktail list, Apothecary used the technique to create the Tea Party, infusing tea’s bergamot flavor into gin without its bitterness. Scully always keeps a milk punch on Petra’s list, there’s a mai tai milk punch on offer at Saint Valentine, and the recipe for Monarch’s Diamond Noir has been published on the website Punch.

Now it’s time to put one in your home fridge. Try Rolón’s recipe for Autumn Milk Punch.

Spanish Vermút: Steeping Downtown 

A trip across Spain and Portugal got Fond chef-owners Jennie Kelley and Brandon Moore thinking about creating a house aperitif. At bar after bar, they were served house-made vermút—not the boldly sweet vermouth used as a cocktail ingredient in the United States but a refreshing, Coke-colored fortified wine poured over ice and garnished with lemon peel and an olive. In Madrid, they walked from bar to bar on a quest to find their favorite vermút.

Back home, they made a batch for a Friendsgiving party, then added it to the menu at Fond. Starting with organic bottles of vinho verde, Fond adds a host of botanicals—thyme, rosemary, star anise, cinnamon, clove, cardamom seeds, citrus peels—and lets them steep for about 24 hours. A brandy caramel is added for the brown color, and then the whole mixture sits for a couple weeks to let the flavors settle in happily together.

“Some of those things really need to mellow out,” Moore says. “The first time we made it, the first week and a half-ish, it was a cinnamon bomb. It was still good, but it was very cinnamon-forward. But the day we got [to the dinner], we tasted it, and it had mellowed out so much. Everything had time to settle itself.”

Fond’s vermút is gently sweet, but with each sip, the warm spices blossom a little more. In high summer, over ice, the vermút can feel like a refreshing escape. When the weather changes, Kelley and Moore serve their vermút warm as a mulled wine.

Bitters, Fortified Wines, Amari, and More

There’s much more going on behind Dallas’ bars. For a competition this spring, former Jettison bartender George Kaiho made an amaro with herbs used in Japanese kanpō medicine. Freak storms at the end of May spoiled another of his projects, destroying the red shiso crop he planned to use to make an aperitif. 

At The Branca Room, Slater creates bitters with vanilla beans and tobacco leaves—leftovers from a friend in the cigar-making business. O’Malley says of the result, “I would wear this like cologne.”

Shane Scully makes bitters at Petra and the Beast, too. “As long as you have an overproof spirit, some type of bittering agent, and some sweet component, you can build a bitter,” he says. “You can do a long process, up to a month, of letting flavors infuse with bitters. Or you can cut that time down to two or three hours by using an iSi whipped cream canister. Just not with cheese.” About that: he tried making goat cheese bitters, but the cheese caused the whipped cream canister to explode. When we spoke, a ghostly white cheesy smear was still visible on a mirror behind the bar.

Scully usually has about two dozen infusions, vinegars, shrubs, and other projects in progress. Some ingredients get made for specific cocktails but then don’t get used, so they’re waiting to be repurposed elsewhere. He benefits from the fact that Petra serves frequent tasting menu dinners, for which he can create one-night-only drinks. He tells me about a few of them—recently he made a fortified dandelion wine with Texas wildflower honey and Malört—but none will be served again. 

“Dude, I love that drink so much,” Scully says after describing one such creation. “I had so many people at that dinner being like, ‘When is this hitting the menu?’ I’m like, ‘You have no idea how much prep work goes into this drink.’ ”  

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This story originally appeared in the November issue of D Magazine with the headline “The Potion Makers.” Write to brian.reinhart@dmagazine.com.