Final Ward

Taste

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.

Origin

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.