New at the Bar: Four More Scarlet Bottles From Iseya

We have carried Scarlet for a while. The Aperitivo goes into our Negroni, and the Radice, Verde, Fernet, Menta and Orange have been on the shelf for a while now.

A few more have arrived from Iseya Distillery. Two of them we only got a handful of bottles of, so this is less a menu announcement than a heads-up.

Cask Marriage, Batch 8 and Batch 9

This is the Aperitivo, aged.

Two years in oak that previously held whisky from Chichibu, Kanosuke and Asaka, then blended across four barrels. If those names look familiar it is because all three have turned up on this blog before. We pour their whisky, and now we are pouring an amaro that has been sitting in their barrels.

It is released as numbered batches rather than to a fixed recipe, so Batch 8 and Batch 9 are not the same liquid. Both are here, and both are extremely limited.

Fiori Amaro

Over thirty-four botanicals, and the list is almost entirely flowers: peach blossom, jasmine, marigold, chamomile, mallow flower, mint flower, wormwood flower, rock rose, Greek mountain tea.

Iseya made it to mark their hundredth production batch and the distillery's fourth anniversary. Motonaga has called it one of his best. It is a limited edition and there will not be more of it.

Caffe Amaro

Cold-brewed coffee, built into an amaro with twenty-three-odd botanicals: hojicha, vanilla, cinnamon, licorice, fennel, ginger, moringa.

The coffee is the part worth knowing about: lightly roasted Ethiopian from Bensa and Sidama, plus Panamanian Geisha, which is about as rare as coffee gets. The top auction lots of Geisha have gone for over thirty thousand dollars a kilo.

A digestif, and an easy one to like.

Peach Amaro

Also in, and worth its own visit. Three varieties of Yamanashi peach with the juice used in place of water, and at 19% the lightest thing Scarlet makes. Seasonal rather than one-off, though seasonal still means it goes away.

How We Are Serving Them

Neat.

The Aperitivo is the only Scarlet on our cocktail menu at the moment, in the Negroni. Everything above we are pouring on its own, which with bottles this limited feels like the right call, though the bartenders have used the range in drinks before and will again.

Come Try Them

They are at the bar at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. The Cask Marriage batches and the Fiori are the ones to ask about first, because when those run out we cannot order more.

See what's coming up at Juraku.