A grasshopper is crème de menthe, crème de cacao and cream. Every part of it gets rebuilt here. Hops and green tea together carry the herbaceousness the mint used to. Lactic acid carries the creaminess. Champagne acid and 3.5 volumes of carbonation make it drink like champagne. The cacao stays where it is.
The drink
Hops and green tea are doing one job between them. Sencha brings a green, grassy, slightly vegetal weight, and Lemondrop brings the sharper aromatic top. Neither reads as mint on its own. Together they land in the same herbal register the crème de menthe occupied, without the sugar or the candy note.
Lemondrop is the hop for it. Hopsteiner released it in 2012 as a Cascade cross, and its published descriptors are lemon, mint, green tea and a little melon. It points at the tea rather than away from it.
The creaminess is lactic acid, not dairy. Lactic is what milk tastes of once the sugar is gone, so weighting the acid blend toward it gives a round, creamy read with nothing in the bottle that can split under pressure. Tartaric is the other half. Tartaric and lactic together are what the wine trade calls champagne acid, and with 3.5 volumes of gas the drink reads as sparkling wine rather than a soda.
Everything is cold. The hops go into gin under vacuum at 40°C, the tea is brewed in the fridge overnight, and the mix is chilled to 2°C before it takes gas. Nothing in this drink ever sees heat.
Finished-drink targets
ABV: ~9.5%
Sugar: ~70 g/L, 7 °Bx
Acid: 5 g/L, lactic and tartaric at 7:3
Carbonation: 3.5 volumes
Clarity: clear, pale green. Coffee-filter both preps
Serve: 170 ml, coupe from the freezer, no ice
Prep 1: the hop gin
Dried pellets, not fresh cones. Fresh hops are only usable for a day after picking and the season is three weeks long, which is no basis for a menu item. T90 pellets hold their oils for a year in the freezer and every hop farm sells them.
The temperature is the whole technique. Alpha acids only turn into brewing bitterness with sustained heat, so a cold infusion takes the aromatic oils and leaves the bitterness behind. Above 50°C those oils start leaving and the green note turns to hay. Same sous vide logic as the fig leaf gin, run longer and cooler.
Spec, per 750 ml gin
750 ml London dry gin, 45%
8 g Lemondrop pellets, T90
1. Weigh the pellets. Seal gin and hops in a jar or
vacuum bag with no headspace.
2. 40°C for 4 hours.
3. Ice bath straight out of the water, down to fridge
temperature.
4. Strain through a chinois, then a coffee filter.
Pellet fines are what makes a carbonated bottle gush.
Yield ~675 g. Four weeks refrigerated. The aroma peaks
in week one.
Prep 2: the sencha
Green tea above 60°C goes tannic and the colour turns olive. Cold brewing takes longer and gives back a sweeter, brighter extract that holds its colour for the life of the bottle.
Spec, per 1,000 g water
1,000 g filtered water, cold
10 g sencha
1. Combine and refrigerate overnight, 12 hours, no
agitation.
2. Strain through a chinois, then a coffee filter.
Yield ~960 g. Use it the day it is made.
The build
Test the balance one glass at a time before committing a batch to gas.
Spec, per serve
30 ml hop gin
10 ml white crème de cacao
120 ml sencha
8.5 g white sugar
0.6 g lactic acid
0.25 g tartaric acid
0.17 g fine salt
1. Dissolve the sugar, acids and salt into the sencha
cold.
2. Add the cacao, then the hop gin.
3. Chill to 2°C and carbonate, or taste it flat.
170 ml finished.
A flat sample reads sweeter and rounder than the bottled drink. Carbonic acid registers as acidity on the palate and pushes perceived sweetness down, so judge the sugar with gas in it or judge it knowing the gap.
The bottling mix
Spec, per liter
170 g hop gin
710 g sencha
65 g white crème de cacao
50 g white sugar
3.5 g lactic acid
1.5 g tartaric acid
1 g fine salt
1 drop green food colouring
1. Dissolve the sugar, acids and salt into the sencha
cold.
2. Add the cacao, then the hop gin.
3. Add the colouring to the full batch, never to the
glass. Stir and check the shade against something
white.
4. Chill the mix to 2°C.
5. Force carbonate at 40 psi to 3.5 volumes. Purge the
headspace and crown cap into 750 ml bottles.
6. Date the caps for rotation.
5.8 serves per liter. A 750 ml bottle pours 4.
Months at 2 to 4°C, sealed.
Take the Brix reading before the spirits go in. The sencha, sugar, acid and salt stage should land at 7.4 °Bx. Ethanol refracts more strongly than water, so a refractometer on the finished mix reads several points high and tells you nothing useful.
Sealed, it keeps for months in the fridge. Hop aroma is killed by oxygen rather than by time, so a purged headspace under a crown cap at 9.5% with 5 g/L of acid holds it. That is the whole reason to purge properly instead of capping over air. Bottle a month at a time.
That stage before the spirits, carbonated on its own, is a zero-proof listing straight off the same prep. It is worth having on the list for the same reasons as the rest of the no and low section.
Service
The pour
1. Coupe out of the freezer, 180 ml.
2. 170 ml poured down the side of the glass.
3. No ice. No garnish.
Ten seconds, no shaker, no strainer. This is the same argument as cocktails on draft and the same format as bottling for hotels, at a scale that fits one fridge shelf.
The operator math
Per liter, using a $28 London dry, sencha at $0.30 a gram and a $18 bottle of white crème de cacao:
- Hop gin, 170 g: ~$7.31, including $1.00 of pellets across the 750 ml infusion
- Sencha, 710 g: ~$2.22
- White crème de cacao, 65 g: ~$1.56
- Sugar, acids, salt: ~$0.35
- CO2: ~$0.05
That is $11.49 a liter, or $2.00 a serve at 5.8 serves. On a $17 menu price that is an 11.6% pour cost. At $18 it is 11.0%.
The labour is two passive preps and one bottling session. Four hours in the bath and twelve hours in the fridge are hours nobody stands over. What service gets is a bottle and a glass, which is the number that matters on a Friday at nine.
Where it goes wrong
- Bottles gush on opening: particulate in the mix. Coffee-filter both preps, no exceptions.
- Tea reads olive and tannic: the water was warm or the brew ran past 12 hours.
- Hay instead of green: the bath ran above 50°C.
- Colour reads artificial: one drop per liter, added to the batch.
- Flat in the glass: the coupe was not cold enough, or it was poured at the bowl instead of down the side.
- Aroma fades inside a few weeks: the headspace was not purged before capping.
Specs like this, with the batch sheets and prep SOPs behind them, are what a menu refresh engagement produces. If your list has no sparkling option that is not wine, fifteen minutes will tell you what it needs.