I make my living as an IT consultant here in Seattle.  One of my long time clients is Lisa Dupar Catering.  LDC has a restaurant called Pomegranate Bistro which is in Redmond Washington; more or less in the same space as their giant catering kitchen.  They recently opened a bar and have been enthusiastically working to bring bespoke cocktails to the east side.

One day while visiting the Dupar/Zimmer home, I noted that there were several batches of what I surmised was various batches of bitters and some sort of brown booze infusing on the counter.  Jonathan Zimmer (Co-Owner and GM at LDC) told me that the booze was Woodford Reserve Bourbon that was sitting on pears.  He then said that he had recently made a cocktail with the Pear Bourbon, St. Germain and the Hazelnut/Cherry bitters from Brad Thomas Parsons excellent bitters book.   He also said it was the best cocktail he’d ever had.  A few days later, talking to Lisa Dupar about our mutual bitters and booze experiments, I found out that Jonathan wasn’t just infusing pears;  no, they were oven roasted pears.   Ding ding ding… I think we have a winner!

Of course, on the way home, I stopped at the Crown Hill liquor store and picked up 3 bottles of said Woodford Reserve.  I also stopped at my local Cash and Carry and got a bag of Anjou pears.

A couple of weeks later:  Yum.

So, what to do with this tasty infusion other than sip it for desert?  A Manhattan seemed like a good place to start and resulted in a few really good recipes.  Here’s one that I’m especially fond of:

Jonathan’s Manhattan:

2 oz.                  Pear infused Woodford Reserve Bourbon”
1 oz.                  Carpano Antica Formula
shy .5oz.         Amaro Nonino
1 dash              Laphroig 10 Year Old Scotch
10 drops        Cherry Bitters