Blackberry Malt Cocktail

The Blackberry Malt Cocktail is an Irish Whiskey based cocktail that also ads Blackberries (hence the name) and a bit of Lime Juice. The drink is topped up with Soda Water to add some volume to the drink, diluting a little bit to even out the flavour.

Other than Lemon Juice, you don't often see fruit, especially berries, paired with Whiskey. These sorts of ingredients are usually reserved for the likes of Rum, Vodka, or sometimes Gin.

Enjoy this slightly unusual cocktail. It's a bit different but also very good.

Total Time 4

Servings 1 cocktail

Ingredients

50 mL Irish Whiskey
20 mL Simple Syrup*
20 mL Lime Juice
90-120 mL Soda Water
4 Blackberries
Lemon Peel to garnish

Instructions

Muddle the Blackberries in the bottom of a cocktail shaker.
Add the Whiskey and Lime Juice to the shaker and fill it with ice. Shake until nice and cold.
Double strain into a Collins glass filled with fresh ice.
Top up with the Soda Water.
Add garnish of Lemon Peel and a spare Blackberry.
Serve and enjoy.

Notes

*Here's a Simple Syrup recipe if you want to make it at home.

Depending on how strong you want your drink, feel free to add more or less Soda Water to suit your taste. It's possible to make this a nice long and relatively light drink if you add enough water. It can be quite nice even when diluted!

Also keep in mind that you don't want your Irish Whiskey to be overpowered by the Blackberries. Berries, in general, can be a little tart, sweet, and have intense flavour. While this is the desired taste, you also want to be tasting some of that Whiskey! To this end, make sure you're using a half decent Irish Whiskey. This will ensure tons of flavour.

A Couple More Things on the Blackberry Malt Cocktail

This cocktail is a lot of fun. Although berries aren’t uncommon in cocktails, you don’t see them nearly as much. Fruit flavours are always so dominating by citrus fruits like Lemon and Lime. You get plenty of Pineapple and Cranberry Juices as well, but berries don’t seem to come up quite as much. Yes, there are plenty of cocktail recipes with berries in them, but there are far fewer than them than other types of fruit mentioned. Blackberries can have a fairly vibrant flavour though, so it’s good that a bit of Soda Water is added to the drink. It waters things down a fair bit, prolonging the flavour and really spreading things out.

Is it possible to make more than one of these at the same time?

You can probably make two, maybe three, Blackberry Malt Cocktails at the same time, but no more. If you try to muddle too many Blackberries at once, you won’t get affective crushing going on. Adding to that, you can only fit so much into a cocktail shaker!

If you’re worried about taking to long to make a bunch of these, the best thing you can do is pre-juice the Limes. That saves lots of time.

Is making this cocktail in advance OK?

We’d advise making these to order. With a lot of shaken cocktails containing citrus, the texture of the cocktail changes when it’s shaken. And, of course, you can’t add the Soda Water until the drink is ready to serve.

As mentioned earlier, if you’re looking to save time, the best thing to prepare in advance is the Lime Juice. It takes time to juice things, so get that done when you can.

When is the best time for a Blackberry Malt Cocktail?

Since blackberries are relatively seasonal, we’re going to say the best time for this cocktail is Blackberry season! Of course you can try to make this cocktail with frozen Blackberries, but you’re not going to get as good a product as with fresh blackberries!

Blackberries are really a Summer fruit, which is great because the other elements of this recipe really bring it out as a Summer cocktail. Whiskey isn’t usually associated as a summer spirit (we usually like it in Autumn), but augmenting its flavour with some sweetness and some sourness from the Lime Juice, plus the ample Soda Water, make this an ideal Summer time refresher!

How strong is the Blackberry Malt Cocktail?

It’s actually a little bit below average in strength for cocktails. Couple this with somewhat generous proportions of Simple Syrup, Lime Juice, and even more generous proportions of Soda Water, you get a drink with relatively moderate amounts of alcohol (for a cocktail) that’s fairly well diluted into a long drink you can sip at and take your time on. Although there’s plenty of Simple Syrup in this recipe to keep things from getting too tart, you still get plenty of sharpness from the combination of Lime Juice and Blackberries, so hopefully this helps you keep things a little slow, sit back, and enjoy this drink for what it is. Delicious!

What’s the best music for a Blackberry Malt Cocktail?

We’re not sure where to go on this one. On the one hand we want to play up the Irish Whiskey, but that’s the only part of the recipe that’s extremely Irish. We could try to play the Blackberries off as Irish, but we all know that they’re not unique to Ireland, so we can’t rely too much on that. And of course nobody really associates Lime Juice with Ireland! Geographically, the ingredients in this cocktail are actually quite spread out!

There is a bit of a Summer aspect here, and, as mentioned, we think this is a great Summer cocktail, but we don’t think it’s Summery enough to push the Summer music.

We’re going to say enjoy the Blackberry Malt Cocktail with some laid back Country Music. This may sound weird, but it’s there if you hunt for it. Whiskey is a country drink. Sure, it’s Bourbon and Rye that are more into Country Music, but the connection is there. We may be wrong on this, but we also associate Blackberries with rural areas: who hasn’t gone out to the country to go Blackberry picking! With that, the countryside in the Summer time is just brilliant. It’s a bit of a stretch, yeah, but we got there in the end!

Looking for more cocktail recipes?

Take a look below for some suggestion on site sections that we think might interest you.

All Irish Whiskey cocktail recipes: while Irish Whiskey isn’t the most common cocktail ingredient, there are still plenty of recipes with it. Check them out!

All Whiskey cocktail recipes: if you want to experiment with other types of Whiskey, there are a fair few recipes for you to try. You’ll be spoiled for choice here.

Top 10 Whiskey cocktail recipes: if all that choice is a bit too much for you, take a look at our curated list of the ten Whiskey cocktails we like the best.