How to make the Katoomba Gold cocktail at Odd Culture

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH BOMBAY SAPPHIRE

For this drink, inspired by a yearly bushwalking's in the Blue Mountains for their team, Jordan looks to invert the Old Fashioned formula — as he explains, lightly edited and condensed, below.

BOOTHBY: Talk us through the inspiration for this drink.

JORDAN BLACKMAN: So what we have here is Odd Culture New Town, so far around the corner, our Hidden Jewels drink for Odd Culture Newtown. We do this yearly trip to the Blue Mountains or Katoomba. When I thought of places of natural beauty and striking landscapes the Blue Mountains came to mind pretty automatically. We just kind do a bit of a bushwalk thing around the mountains, which is good fun.

BOOTHBY: It sounds quite wholesome!

JORDAN BLACKMAN: Yeah, it is. It’s a really nice trip just to get out of the city, breathe in some fresh air and take in the natural beauty of the Blue Mountains. So I was inspired by that yearly trip there.

BOOTHBY: Can you walk us through how the drink comes together?

JORDAN BLACKMAN: So starting off with Bombay Sapphire, we do a little beeswax wash — similar to [London’s] White Lyan and their beeswax bourbon. So we sous vide some beeswax for about two-ish hours at 70 degrees, so that it melts through — essentially just a little fat wash, so it retains the the DNA of Bombay Sapphire and you can still actually taste that it’s a gin first and foremost. If anything, it gives more of a texture and mouthfeel. It does impart a tiny little bit of flavour, but rather than that super sweet cloying honey, you get more of that bright, aromatic, complex beeswax character. And a bit of that texture for the mouthfeel as well.

Next, have Amontillado Sherry, everyone’s favourite sherry at the moment. With amontillado, you get that brightness and freshness you know in that fino sherry world, but you get that nutty, oxidative complexity too. That is blended with a little bit of Muyu Vetiver, which is aromatic, grassy, woody and herbal with a little bit of sweetness there.

And we add a little bit of fermented honey. We still like to play with ferments at Odd Culture. Starting with raw honey, we add a little bit of water and some fruit, which reactivates all the bacteria and cultures in raw honey. And then we let that ferment out for a few weeks. So again, just adding layers of complexity and a little bit of acidity and chuck it all together, serve over ice with a little big chunk of beeswax.

BOOTHBY: When it comes to the inspiration for this thing, how do you take inspiration from a landscape and put it into a drink?

JORDAN BLACKMAN: What comes to mind, whether it’s raw product or ingredients, when I think of the Blue Mountains, I quite often think of honey and some of the better organic honey producers coming from that area. And just the fresh air — you feel like you can breathe again. So I wanted an air of freshness to the drink as well. And quite honestly, just the visual aspect of it, the colours, looking out into the landscape and seeing a beautiful blue sky and the trees and the mountains — and just kind of trying to picture that drink as if that was the canvas and placing it on top of that.

BOOTHBY: For people who haven’t been to Odd Culture, what’s the whole idea behind the place? How long’s it been going for now?

JORDAN BLACKMAN: Since 2021, October. So a few years now. As the name might imply, we like to play with fermentation. Whether that’s looking at beer and wild ales and sours, but also kind of exploring wine and natural wine, first and foremost, I suppose. And recently we’ve kind of reimagined the bistro upstairs. So before it was an extension of our culture, now we have Bistro Grenier, which is a French bistro, playfully reimagined with a mezzanine level there. It’s a wine bar, cocktail bar, and a pub in some ways — just a good space to hang out.

BOOTHBY: In terms of Bombay Sapphire, how do you go about thinking about Bombay Sapphire when you come to create drinks like this? What’s it good for?

JORDAN BLACKMAN: I mean it’s great for classics first and foremost. A lot of Australian gin, and Australian botanicals particularly, force your hand in some ways. Whereas I think Bombay is a really good strong base for classics and being able to manipulate it in the ways that you need it to, but it is still very like a classic gin that stands quite tall and strong in a drink.

BOOTHBY: Is this drink built on a classic at all? What was the building block there for it?

JORDAN BLACKMAN: Rather than gin drinks, they need to just be bright, fruity, shaken or tall or whatever — I was thinking of reimagining an Old Fashioned in some way shape or form. Spirit-driven, booze-forward, with that strong-bitter-sweet. Inverting an Old Fashioned in some way so it’s still a gin-forward drink, rather than bourbon, with honey being the sweetener rather than sugar.