Southside Sips: Staple Gin’s Rosemary Tini

Isn’t a martini glass just about the sexiest glassware out there? So pretty to look at; so sophisticated in your hand.

You know what’s not sexy? Laws. In this instance, liquor laws, to be exact. But sometimes changes in them work in your (and your martini glass’s) favor. Think about it: the federal government passed a law in 1919 prohibiting the making and consumption of alcohol, save for churchy stuff and medicinal purposes, and kept that law going for 14 how-dry-I-am years. Can you imagine??!!

But this past week Senate bill 2852-A, a much nicer liquor law, was passed — one that allows New York distilleries and hard cider producers to ship directly to consumers, as signed into law by New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul.

Maybe you didn’t even realize this was a roadblock between you and the nearly 200 craft distilleries currently pouring their hearts and souls into making delicious New York-based spirits. If you wanted, say, a bottle of Staple Gin from Roscoe, NY, you’d have had to drive there to get it. Which, if you’re a Rachael Ray fan, you may well have wanted to do because this gorgeous juniper-scented, palate-plush stunner of a spirit is a new collaboration between her and 17-year-old, Catskills-based Do Good Spirits.

“What excited me about this is Rachael is a an upstate New Yorker, like me. I put my heart and soul into every bottle as a New York craft distiller and when we started working together, I told her I want this to be from here and to be sustainable,” says Do Good Spirits founder and owner Brian Facquet. A former Navy man, Facquet has served for the last four years as president of the New York State Distillers Guild, and was actually a key player in writing the law that Hochul just signed, allowing for him and his brethren to ship their New York-made spirits to your door. Pretty cool, right?

As a New York farm distillery, a minimum of 75% of what’s in the bottle must be grown in New York State. Like his other spirits (the excellent Bootlegger line of vodka, gin and bourbon), the base is distilled from New York-grown corn, which is where he began with Staple. For this new gin, though, Facquet and Ray put their heads together to come up with something classic but with a new epicurean twist that spoke to Ray’s martini-loving sensibilities.

The distiller and cooking celebrity spend months going back and forth, riffing on favorite flavors and how they would translate into a cocktail-ready gin. During a phone conversation one evening, Ray happened to be sipping on a martini and paused to let out a happy sigh. She apologized for the conversation interruption, explaining that she’d just eaten the drink’s garnish: Her favorite, a Castelvetrano olive. A lightbulb went off in Facquet’s head.

Staple Gin offers the holy trinity of gin flavors (juniper, coriander, oris root), along with bitter orange and bergamot peel and fragrant French tarragon, but it also has Castelvetrano olives as part of the spirit’s maceration alongside its classic botanicals.

“The result isn’t the flavor of olives, but instead the mouthfeel, like a bead of olive oil on your palate,” says Facquet. “And, when diluted a bit, a slight salinity from the brine.”

There are a bevy of recipes developed by Ray herself on the website, but here she and Facquet have loaned us that most venerable to classic cocktail recipes, and one that shows off all their collaboration has to offer: the Martini. Grab your bottle here. Cheers to the Empire State!