It’s the one my business partner, Benjamin Amberg, came up with for our menu at Pacific Standard last year – and boy is he a good one.
It all started when the owner of a new soft liquor business in Seattle contacted me and let me know he was coming to Portland and asked if I would like to get together and try your new product. Now, I usually get a lot of these requests, but I’m usually too busy to take time out of my bar schedule to sit down and sample new products. But that was before the first bar opened and after Clyde Common closed, so I was technically between jobs. So yeah, I’d love to get together and sample this one.
I have to say, and I’m sure most of you are the same way – it’s pretty rare when I try a new product and it blows my mind. I taste literally hundreds new products every year, and so that really special combination of a product that not only tastes amazing but also does something new and exciting is really, really hard to find.
Pathfinder is a non-alcoholic hemp-based spirit that drinks more like an amaro or dark spiced rum than your typical N/A spirits. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve found a lot of these N/A spirits that really get lost when you try to mix them into a cocktail. Many of them are more like delicately flavored water than real non-alcoholic spirit to me, and adding anything else to it just bury the flavor and I wonder why I spent $35 on something that didn’t contribute to the cocktail party anything.
But Pathfinder breaks that mold and we’ve been big fans of it ever since we first tried it. I had been working on another drink using our own non-alcoholic homemade spirit (recipe coming soon) at the time, so I asked Benjamin if he had something up his sleeve, and the Wandering Path was born. It’s one of our biggest sellers at the bar and we’re very proud of it.
You can look in your specialty stores for The Pathfinder, or you can pick up a bottle on their website. Again, this drink is foolproof, but if that’s not your thing, I can attest to the fact that this recipe also works great with alcoholic amari.
