Devon Jade - garden sour

Tucked away into a small pocket next to the tiniest broom closet door, carefully lined up bottles fill three shelves - a mix of familiar staples and niche small batch offerings along with homemade infusions and washes.  Here at Devon Jade’s (they/she) home bar, the standard procedure is to pick out a few things that look interesting and let the bartender come up with a balanced cocktail to blend them together.

I’ve been eyeing Nixta, a Mexican corn liqueur in a corn-cob shaped amber bottle. I think of atol de elote, corn silk tea, chicha morada… (not to mention the ubiquity of corn syrup in packaged drinks…) How could a corn-based drink do me wrong? I would rarely order a whiskey drink, but she’s already let me know that Nixta goes well with it. As a challenge, more to myself than to Devon Jade, I ask for a drink that includes both. They decide to make a version of whiskey sour, with Nixta serving as the sweetener. Adding fresh lemon juice and NA bitters to the whiskey and corn liqueur, she gives it a quick shake and a sniff “Oh. Smells like a bouquet. And then I'm gonna add just the tiniest little splash of hibiscus…” A drop of hibiscus syrup goes in, and then ice to finish it off. Just for fun, she breaks out the classic dramatic bartender shake, holding the shaker at shoulder height with two hands — joking, at first, and then intently focused. She’s listening for a change in the sound as the ice chips apart inside. She tells me that the ice’s purpose is multifold, not only to cool the drink quickly as the chips break off, but also to slightly dilute the drink as they melt. “That's something that not a ton of people know about cocktails: you want them to be diluted. They kind of suck when they're not diluted. You need that water in there.” 

“Right, there you are. So that's your hibiscus corn whiskey sour.”

I ask what this drink would be called. “I’d probably name it after you, ‘the Kells’.” I push for a different name and she offers “garden sour” as an alternative. But that’s clearly not her first call. For Devon Jade, the thing that makes mixing drinks worthwhile is personalization. She’s got a multi-page menu list on the wall of unique drinks made for specific people: friends who’ve stopped by, her partner, and more recently from Instagram comment requests.. “A lot of times those drinks come from … a deep understanding of who they are as a person. If they've been my friend for a long time, they know that the drink was really made with them in mind. That's the thing that I get to do at home [that] I don't get to do anywhere else.” 

Devon Jade works as a teacher for aspiring bartenders at a formal class and of course has experience behind the bar in several of Long Beach’s bars and nightclubs. But the perils of being an employee in a bar never cease — being denied breaks on time if ever, lack of protection from unwelcome customer behavior, and of course the loud noise and overwhelming stickiness of a busy worktop. Partially owing to these issues, being a full time bartender at a bar is not the end goal for them right now.

They’ve got a pretty clear vision of where they want to use their talents: sharing their drink-making knowledge in a way that engages personal connections. They prefer to bartend at special events and teach custom classes online and in person. They were recently hired to teach a cocktail workshop at a birthday party, in her words by “the coolest gays in LA.” Since the party was for someone named Bees, she chose to teach them a modification to the Ramos Gin Fizz that nodded to Bees by adding honey flavors. It’s already a famously difficult drink that she’s sure most bartenders would refuse to make if you tried to order it; it takes a very long time to shake and create a thick foam top. Despite the long process, it went over swimmingly at the party, and everyone had a great time learning about the drink’s history and how to replicate it.

While we talk, she’s mixing up a new drink for herself: this one has rum, NA amaro, fresh lemon juice, orange liqueur, peach syrup, and apple blossom bitters. We keep talking away as we finish our drinks, arriving at one of the truest downfalls of creativity: the more fun you have picking out ingredients and things to try, the more dishes pile up waiting for you at the end.