What Cheer Cocktail Recipe

The What Cheer is a low-ABV cocktail that features a complex combination of fruit flavors with minimal sweetness. The highball-esque drink is made with a pineapple cocktail syrup, sorghum syrup, White Port wine, fresh lime juice, and dry sparkling cider. The What Cheer gets served in a Collins glass over ice and has a flavor profile that balances fruity, savory, and tart notes. 

While this cocktail is not a riff on any classic drink recipes, it leans on common ingredient combinations: an acid, an alcoholic base (in this case, white Port), a sweetener, and a dry effervescent mixer. The use of the white Port is a reminder of another long drink, the White Port and Tonic, which has roots in Portugal and makes for a fantastic summer drink. This version, though, has more fruity and savory additions that add complexity. 

The recipe for the What Cheer comes from Paul Calvert, bartender and co-owner of Ticonderoga Club in Atlanta. Cavlert’s cordial was published in The Bartender’s Pantry: A Beverage Handbook for the Universal Bar, a book by another lauded bartender, Jim Meehan with Bart Sasso and Emma Janzen. The drink leans on Calvert’s recipe for a simple pineapple cordial, which has intense pineapple fruitiness and a caramelized sweetness. 

What makes the What Cheer work?

This drink is all about balancing bold flavors. The white Port serves as a perfect alcoholic base for this drink since it has notes of citrus, apple, and caramel that are echoed by the other ingredients in the cocktail. 

A combination of two sweeteners, the pineapple cordial and sorghum syrup, creates a lot of complex sweetness. Sorghum syrup is an earthy, complex sweetener made from the stalk of sorghum, a flowering grass grown mainly in the U.S. and Africa. The stalk’s juices are extracted and cooked down to yield an earthy and sweet syrup. 

Dry sparkling cider adds a hit of acidity, and the bubbles present in the cider amplify the flavors in the cocktail. Lime zest is grated directly into the cocktail, adding a touch of bitterness and vibrant lime aromas as you drink. 

How to roll or tumble a cocktail

This cocktail is mixed with a technique called rolling. To roll or tumble a cocktail, the drink is slowly poured from one tin of a Boston shaker into another. As the drink is poured back and forth between tins over ice (a Hawthorne strainer is used to hold the ice in its tin), the ingredients in the drink are gently mixed and well chilled. This method is great for making a drink without aerating or diluting it too much.

This recipe was developed by Paul Calvert; the text was written by Lucy Simon.