I’ve known Dave Arnold for the better part of the last 15 years. Even before we were officially colleagues—I was the bar director for Momofuku while he was helming Booker and Dax, a high-concept cocktail bar nestled behind Momofuku Ssam Bar—we always shared an affinity for waxing nerdily about cocktails: where to find naturally carbonated spring water in upstate New York or how to properly store shaking ice. After all this time, it never gets old.
“OK.” Dave takes a barely perceptible pause before launching into the backstory of the Sagittarius B2, one of his cocktails at New York’s Bar Contra. “So there is a gas cloud in the center of the Milky Way galaxy [called Sagittarius B2] and in that gas cloud was discovered—via radio telescopic techniques—complex molecules with aroma. One of them is ethyl formate, one of the main aroma compounds in both raspberries and rum.” Without pausing for a breath, he continues: “Right away I was like, ‘Dang, Sagittarius B2, we’ve got a raspberries and rum drink coming up.’ And then it gets even better because it’s also got a form of cyanide. While that seems like a negative, for me, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a huge positive, because bitter almonds are cyanide-adjacent.’”
Although it can be a bit reductive, I tend to describe novel cocktails in terms of their genealogical lineage to earlier, more classic cocktails. In this framework, the Sagittarius B2—a mix of rum, raspberry and orgeat (a syrup made from almonds)—might best be understood as the cosmic love child of a strawberry Daiquiri and a Mai Tai.
For the base spirit, Dave initially wanted to use clairin, a sugarcane distillate native to Haiti, but its intrinsic grassiness was a bit too overpowering. Instead, he went with the more subdued Chairman’s Reserve rum from St. Lucia. Dialing in the other ingredients, in typical Dave Arnold fashion, was much less straightforward. “First I made it with regular orgeat and lime-acid raspberry,” he says, referring to clarified raspberry juice that’s been acid-adjusted with citric, malic and succinic acids to mirror the acidity of lime. “And I was like, nah, not raspberry enough.”
To make the raspberry flavor pop even more, he decided to augment the orgeat with, well, more raspberries, this time in the form of jam. The orgeat begins like any other, by soaking almonds overnight. But fine-tuning the recipe necessitated sourcing almonds from an unlikely source: Trader Joe’s. Apparently the Bazzini brand, which is commonly used in commercial kitchens, just didn’t provide the right flavor for this specific application. Then Dave strained the almonds and combined them with the aforementioned raspberry jam and hot water, before passing the mixture through a 150-micron cloth via a five-ton hydraulic press.
Finally, he augmented the syrup with salt, almond extract, gum arabic, xanthan gum (to keep the mixture in suspension) and Methocel F50, a food-grade thickening and binding agent (for proper foam generation).
Making traditional DIY orgeat is not for the faint of heart in the first place, and adding raspberries to the mix only magnified the challenge of straining the nut solids from the usable liquid. “It’s a huge pain in the ass,” Dave says. To understand that this statement is not remotely hyperbolic, consider this: On a recent Saturday evening, I encountered Dave casually posted up at the bar holding a handwritten matrix of Margarita recipes made with four different orange liqueurs, each with varying Brix levels, determined by a modified least squares regression algorithm. When a person who does this for fun says something is a huge pain in the ass, believe them.
After the ingredients have been dialed in, there’s the matter of actually making the Sagittarius B2 when a guest orders it. Theo Ouya, Bar Contra’s bar manager, found the orgeat too thick to measure out in a jigger, noting that it would slow down service to unacceptable levels. The team attempted to solve this by combining the lime-acid raspberry and the raspberry orgeat into a single cheater bottle, but the drink’s texture wasn’t coming out as optimally as when the two ingredients were mixed à la minute. The solution came in the form of a kitchen scale.
In my experience, a kitchen scale has rarely been the solution for efficiency. It’s typically slower than jiggering and measuring is irreversible—if you accidentally overshoot your mark on any ingredient, you have to toss the drink and start over. “It’s a horrible idea, most of the time,” agrees Dave. But this application proves the value: Jiggering involves two pours, one from the bottle to the jigger and another from the jigger to the shaker. Using a scale halves the number of pours, and in the case of pouring a thick, goopy substance, that can yield significant time savings.
If ever there were a drink that exemplifies the Dave Arnold approach to cocktails—balancing ambition and creativity against physical constraints, and calling on an elaborate tool kit to bring those constraints to heel—Sagittarius B2 is it. As Dave summarizes: “So yeah, it’s all the things.”
