The recipe for the Industry Sour sounds like a dare. It sounds like a punishment for a misbehaving barback, or the kind of thing a father would force his teenage child to finish in an attempt to scare them off of alcohol for all time. And while it certainly could function as all of those things, what you need to know about the Industry Sour is that it wasn’t created to. It was created out of love.
The Industry Sour is essentially a mashup for three different things—Fernet Branca, Green Chartreuse, and a Daiquiri—all of which you are expected to love if you work in the service industry. And if that sounds pretentious to you, well, it sounds pretentious to me too, but again, this was not the spirit in which it was invented. “This was a cocktail I created on a Saturday night for an industry person,” wrote Ted Kilgore for Esquire, in September 2012, on occasion of his Industry Sour being chosen as the publication’s Cocktail of the Week. “I basically thought to myself, ‘what if I put all of my favorite things into a glass and just give it to him?’”
What are all his favorite things? First, there’s Green Chartreuse, a beguiling and almost hallucinogenically intense combination of 132 secret ingredients, which have been infused and distilled into high-proof alcohol by silent French monks since at least 1764, and probably quite a bit longer than that. Green Chartreuse tastes like a forest, meadow, and herb garden in one; it is the undisputed heavyweight champion of herbal liqueurs, and is so vivid and explosive you expect your pupils to dilate after every sip.
