I always get excited when I add a new bottle to my bar, but never so much as when I get a new bottle of amaro. Once you get into amari, you are certain to develop an uncomfortable urge to own as many as possible. The newest addition to my modest collection is Amaro Lucano, and it’s one of my favorites so far.
Amari, as you will recall, are bittersweet herbal liqueurs traditionally consumed as digestifs. Most come from Italy and have a long history and tradition behind them. In the case of Lucano, a biscuit maker named Pasquale Vena created the liqueur in the back of his biscuit factory in Pisticci (in the region of Lucania) in 1894. His grandson now leads the company, and claims to be the only one privy to the secret recipe. Amaro Lucano is a lovely amaro, deep and rich with flavors of cola and caramel and intense bitterness on the finish. While it’s delicious on its own, there are so many ways you could incorporate it into a cocktail. My usual move would be to make something spirit-forward, but I wanted to change it up a bit this time! Now that the weather is nice, we’ve been spending cocktail hour outdoors, and I’m loving fizzy, bitter drinks. Lucano is perfect for this. I paired it with a strawberry-infused vermouth, which I think works wonderfully with the flavors in the amaro.
When I’m coming up with my own cocktail recipes, I usually take a guess at what ingredients will go well together and how much of each to try. Having never mixed with Amaro Lucano before, I assumed this one would need a lot of tweaking. I had a list of other ingredients to add or substitute if these didn’t work together the way I thought. But it was one of those rare, magical instances when it was absolutely perfect the first time. It was exactly what I was hoping for: bitter but balanced, fruity but not too sweet, refreshing but still complex.
