A Tropical Yuzu Sour with Japanese Roots

Today we make a new cocktail with a new syrup. This is the Akasaka Sour. This video is brought to us by the fine folks at Libranco who just released this yuzu syrup, and it's great. It might be one of my favorites so far, and yuzu is a great example of something that really needs to be in a commercial syrup, for me at least, because finding fresh yuzu is challenging. Yuzu is bright, it's fragrant, and reminds me a lot of mandarin. Now the reason I named this the Akasaka Sour is because that's the neighborhood where the Trader Vic's is located in Tokyo, and I wanted to take his standard sour recipe, revise it, and give us something a little bit new and different with this syrup. The base spirit today is going to be gin, because I think all the flavors here work extremely well with gin. I'm using a gin from Japan that has some yuzu peel in it, but if you don't have this gin, or similar gin, or some gin from Japan, don't let that stop you from enjoying this drink. Just use your favorite gin. And the rest of the sour is very similar to Trader Vic's. It's orange juice, it's lemon, and I'm using a little bit of bourgeois just because that's what the original does as well. Now I intentionally did not use mandarin here, or reach for that Napoleon mandarin liqueur, which is great, because I want that yuzu flavor to come from the Liber & Co. syrup, and not have, you know, competing flavors going on from different types of oranges or similar flavors. So let's go ahead and make the Akasaka Sour. I'm gonna start with half an ounce of lemon juice, one ounce of orange juice, half an ounce of Liber & Co.'s yuzu syrup, one teaspoon of orgeat, and two ounces of gin. I'm gonna garnish this with some mint and an orange wedge. So there you go, it's my take on a Trader Vic's Sour using yuzu, the Akasaka Sour. Now before those of you that know Japan well, let me know in the comments. I'm aware that technically speaking, Trader Vic's Tokyo is just barely outside of the Akasaka neighborhood district, but it sounded better, and the subway station that's nearby is Akasaka. So let's go ahead and try this. Cheers! The yuzu is so prominent, dominant, in a good way. If you're using that syrup for something else, you could get by with a quarter ounce. If you wanted to change this up, because you want to taste more orgeat, you could drop that and use more orgeat and use a quarter ounce. You could probably even use a teaspoon of this, but it has, you know, if you're not familiar with yuzu, the initial flavor I get from it the most is what I associate with mandarin, but has that same... there's like a little bit of florality to it, a little bit of sharpness, brightness, and like I said at the top of this video, that's a fruit that I just I'm not going to easily find. I'm sure that I can find it somewhere. I live in the Bay Area, I'm sure that I could find a market that has it, but having it in syrup format, which is what I would do with it anyways, makes it something that I can keep in the fridge, it's going to last a long time, and I can use it whenever I want. Whether you're making like daiquiri with this, that'd be delicious, or you're making a Mai Tai with this, which would be just a little bit different than this, get rid of the orange juice really, but if you want to use yuzu in your cocktails, syrups, really the way to go if you're in the United States at least, and you don't have access to yuzu, but you still get that brightness, you still get that that fragrancy, and you still get that real hit of yuzu flavor. That gin that I use also has a little bit of yuzu peel in it, so that sort of adds to that flavor, and it has enough of the juniper note that you get from the gin, but it's not super strong, so it'd also be great with light rum, but I just like that yuzu with gin, I think it complements, even if you're using a different gin, but the botanical notes from the gin really pair nicely with the brightness from the yuzu, and I think even if you're one of these orange juice haters, because someone hurt you when you were younger, if you hate orange juice in cocktails, I think you're still gonna like this, because the orange juice is subtle, and is it necessary? I don't know, but I wanted to do a Trader Vic's style sour, so to do that, you gotta have some orange juice. So there you go folks, the Akasaka Sour, it's my take on a Trader Vic's sour using yuzu. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like below, consider subscribing to this channel if you haven't already, and if you would like to support this channel more, go check out my Patreon page, and otherwise I will see you on the next one.