It’s not the only one—the ‘Ti Punch and the Corn ‘n Oil also come to mind—but where the Chet Baker differs from those is that it’s not the slightest bit beachy. The Chet Baker’s not on the pool menu. It’s not in flip-flops. It’s in a linen suit and a Panama hat, the kind of drink that feels like listening to its eponymous trumpeter under a languid ceiling fan in a blue-lit room. It’s not that it’s there to cool you down, it’s that it is, in and of itself, cool.
The Chet Baker is a creation of Sam Ross, then of Milk & Honey in New York City. Milk & Honey, like its successor Attaboy, worked off a verbal menu—you’d tell them a spirit you enjoy and/or a sensation you’re after, and the bartenders would concoct a drink for you on the spot. Not only was creativity therefore baked into the concept, but this was early in the cocktail renaissance, there was much ground yet to be discovered. Ross and the other bartenders who passed through Milk & Honey, under the tutelage of the inimitable Sasha Petraske, created a staggering amount of the cocktails we think of as the “neo-classics:” The Penicillin , the Gold Rush , the Red Hook , it goes on and on. The Chet Baker is one of these, invented by Ross in 2005, presumably to help flesh out the underpopulated category of a “stirred summer drink.”
Most summer cocktails are bright and refreshing, with ample citrus and sweetness to match. Whether the cocktail reads sweet or tart will depend on the balance of those two ingredients, not on the quantity of sugar itself; a properly made Daiquiri or Mojito will finish with the tart zing of lime, but the 0.75 oz. simple syrup required for balance still contains a tablespoon of sugar. Sometimes, though, you don’t want all that juice. Sometimes it’s warm outside but you nonetheless want something drier and more spirit forward, preferring the gentle clinking of a big cube to the rattle or buzz of a shaker or blender.
This is the truth at the heart of the Chet Baker—that you don’t need to add coconut or pineapple or anything else to rum to make it good for summer, because rum is inherently good for summer. Aged rum in particular takes on the sweeter characteristics of the barrel, offering a broad vanilla and cinnamon kiss that’s just better for hot weather than the grainy oaky punch of bourbon or rye.
The Chet Baker starts with the depth of a couple ounces of aged rum, complemented with just a kiss of honey (see the Airmail cocktail for a more lurid love affair between honey and rum). It is finished out of left field with barely more than a teaspoon of sweet vermouth, offering just enough plush fruit and herbaceousness to keep it complex and interesting while keeping the overall sweetness very low. It has the same amount of rum as something like a Daiquiri but with only about 1/3rd of the sugar. This allows the rum to more vividly play its summer song and stands as a reminder that summer drinks aren’t just about escaping the heat, but about finding moments of pure, effortless cool.
Rum: Straight away, we need to disqualify a couple types of rum: The big funk of Jamaican rum and the grassy complexity of rhum agricole are both delightful, but don’t belong in this drink. We want an aged rum that, plainly, isn’t too weird.
That said, I thought this cocktail was best with the booming depth of a “demerara rum,” like Hamilton’s 86 Demerara or something from the El Dorado line. This cocktail’s most frequent problem (aside from the styles of rum, above, that simply don’t work) is a superficiality—it needs depth from somewhere. Demerara rum responds to that challenge nicely, and if you have your pick of the litter, go with that. You can also grab an older rum, like Ron Zacapa or Appleton Estates 15, that would answer that call well. And if you don’t have any of these, you can still make it, but the advice on sweet vermouth, below, becomes a bit more important.
Sweet Vermouth: Another way depth can show up is with a big robust sweet vermouth, namely Carpano Antica, which was the best in every heat in which it competed. If you have it, use it here. If not, but you do have one of the above recommended rums, I’d still make the drink, but you need one or the other at minimum.
Honey Syrup: Honey is a great cocktail ingredient, but it tends to turn to stone the second it hits ice, and not mix with anything. A honey syrup is a good way around that problem: Mix honey 2:1 (by volume) or 3:1 (by weight) with warm water and stir to dissolve. This makes a syrup that’s about as sweet as lemon juice is sour (so you can just match them up in something like a Bee’s Knees for perfect balance), and obviates that non-mixing problem entirely.
Bitters: The classic choice here is Angostura Bitters, which are great and you should probably just use them. I’ll only add that this template is unusually forgiving to other types of bitters, so if you wanted to mess with it—orange bitters, chocolate mole bitters, etc.—the results will at minimum be interesting.
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