If you’re just warming up to baijiu, or if you’re more experienced drinker but haven’t experienced the new wave of baijiu mixology – it can be a little difficult to know where to start with baijiu cocktails. There are a lot of recipes! How do you choose something to try out at your home bar?
So: The Lost Plate baijiu cocktail kit is a new entry that has you covered. This is a single package purchase that gets you an assortment of cocktail ingredients, a bottle of Ming River baijiu – and most importantly, some selected recipes to test out using those ingredients. Lost Plate sent us a kit to try out and it is really great. It’s an ideal way to check out the world of baijiu cocktails.
Our kit included:
- bitters (from Portland’s craft cocktail scene!)
- 3 kinds of syrup mixers: Ginger, Berry, and Cardamom
- Green Tea
- Star Anise
- Cinnamon Sticks
- a measuring jigger
- and a cocktail notebook so you can keep tabs on what you’ve tried
The recipes:
Our tasting panel has been testing out the recipes (see the baijiu cocktails index for more, but you can see some excellent examples recipes:
These have all been great so far. They present interesting flavors in very drinkable formats, and all have bee excellent matches with Ming River’s tropical profile. (The people at Lost Plate seem to know a thing or two about flavor – they run food tours in China, which look amazing.).
The big standout discovery for me was the Star Anise & Cinnamon simple syrup – this is a delicious match with many strong-aroma baijius, and is going to be a standard part of my personal bar from now on.
Our verdict:
try this already! This is a great way to get into baijiu cocktails and an excellent gift situation. Right now Lost Plate is offering a discount for the baijiureview.com community – you can get 3 bucks off by adding coupon code baijiureview to your order. They’re only available online, so you can buy them here: https://lostplate.com/product/baijiu-cocktail-recipe-box/
