Final Ward
The Last Word, in a worse mood
- Method
- Shaken
- Style
- Modern Classic
- Glass
- Coupe
- Time
- 5 min
Ingredients
- 22.5mlRye Whiskey
No Rye Whiskey? Bourbon — rounder and sweeter — you lose rye's pepper, so the drink reads softer
- 22.5mlGreen Chartreuse
- 22.5mlMaraschino LiqueurLuxardo recommended
- 22.5mlLemon Juicefreshly squeezed
- —Cherriesfor garnish
- Garnish
- Cocktail cherry
Make it well
Shaken, properly.
Add the rye, Green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lemon juice to your .
Add ice and for 10-12 seconds. Equal parts drinks need the to knit together, so don't be gentle with it.
into a chilled coupe.
Drop in a cocktail cherry.
On the palate
On the nose the Chartreuse still leads, but the rye underneath changes what it smells like, more spice and less garden. On tasting it's the Last Word with a spine, the rye and the lemon pulling it drier and longer, while the maraschino does the same cherry-stone trick it always does. Green Chartreuse is 55% and rye is not a quiet spirit. Equal parts again, so measure properly, this isn't a drink that forgives a heavy hand.
Where it came from
The Final Ward is a Last Word with both halves swapped: rye for the gin, lemon for the lime, Chartreuse and maraschino left exactly where they were. It was created by Phil Ward at Death & Co in New York in the mid 2000s and yes, the name is his own. Ward built a lot of drinks this way, taking a known template and changing the base spirit to see what came out, and the Final Ward is the one that stuck. It now turns up on menus in bars that have never heard of Death & Co, which is about as good as it gets for a modern cocktail. The Last Word it's built on had itself only just come back from the dead, revived by Murray Stenson in Seattle a few years earlier. So this is a riff on a revival, which makes it about a century of cocktail history compressed into four equal measures.
Keep pouring
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The bartender’s note
One drink, one story, one bottle worth buying.
Thursday evening, so you have time to shop. No more than that.