Drinking it In

Spice certainly punches up your plate, but fragrant seeds, peppers, roots and buds are also finding their way into Richmond growlers and cocktails

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Garden Grove Brewing Co.’s Ginger Ale, $3 for a 16-ounce pour; $7 for a 32-ounce grunt; $12 for a 64-ounce growler

Only fresh ginger will do for Carytown’s own brewery, where co-owner and head brewer Michael Brandt painstakingly cleans and processes each batch of roots for hours before it boils and mingles with orange peels and local, organic lemongrass. “I’ve had Blenheim and a few other ginger ales, and I found them sort of one-dimensional, so I wanted to make something more interesting,” says Brandt. The secret to his soda? Hawaiian ginger closely resembles baby ginger, which is harvested before the root can grow its coarse brown exterior. “There’s much less bitterness [than in Chinese ginger], there’s a fresher flavor, and the Hawaiian ginger is much closer to that,” he says. The 30 pounds of ginger in each batch provide a hefty kick of spiciness — almost to ginger-beer levels of heat— but mellow out with cane sugar and wildflower honey, making for a dynamic, verdant and crisp sip with bite.

Peter Chang Scott’s Addition’s Sichuan Sazzy, $10

You can run the gamut of taste within the ancient Chinese five-spice blend, a mix of star anise, Sichuan pepper, cloves, cinnamon and fennel. This mélange has made its way into classic dishes including Peking duck, this cocktail’s inspiration.  “I’ve wanted to have flavors that make you nostalgic about different experiences, especially with Chinese or specifically Peter’s food,” says Peter Chang consulting beverage director Derek Salerno, who also helms the beverage program at Shagbark. To make these spices sing, Salerno creates a tincture — a potent alcohol infusion — from each of the blend’s five ingredients, then combines them to make his own bitters. Sichuan peppercorns lend heat and a light numbing effect to a drink cooled by duck fat-washed cognac, punctuated by rye whiskey and sweetened by jujube syrup. “The cool thing about five spice,” says Salerno, “is that everything works so well together.”

Lehja’s Princess of Kashmir, $9

“Once you have a chaat, you should say, ‘Wow, that’s delicious, I love it.’ If all those things don’t come to your mind, it’s not a chaat,” Sunny Baweja says of India’s thoughtfully spiced snacks. The Lehja co-owner and chef creates his own chaat spice blends in the kitchen of his restaurant in Short Pump Town Center, and even shakes one particular confetti of dried mango powder, Himalayan rock salt, pink salt, roasted cumin powder and dried pomegranate-seed powder into a cocktail. Paired with pomegranate- infused vodka, lime and apple — all flavors embraced in the bucolic region of Kashmir — this chaat blend strikes a balance with the drink’s sweet and fruity tones by peppering the cocktail with savory and salty notes.

Make it at home: Get the Princess of Kashmir recipe.