Making a Cocktail From the World’s Best Bar: the Peanut Butter Jelly!

Hi, Friends of Cocktails! Everyone loves to go to a good cocktail bar, but only one is the best in the world. That’s why I set myself a challenge of making a cocktail from the best bar in the world, and this time we’re going to Handshake Speakeasy, who won the 2024 award. It’s located in Mexico, which would be a long trip for me, which is why I’m thankful for their help in the making of today’s cocktail. 

I’ll use the tools available to me, but this challenge turned out to be even harder than I thought, so we’ll also check out a simple version of the cocktail so that you too can try it in no time. So let’s get started, it’s Cocktail Time!

Peanut Butter Jelly Cocktail - Home Version

● 15mL · 0.5oz Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey

● 30mL · 1oz Absolut Raspberry Vodka

● 7.5mL · 0.25oz Liber & Co Strawberry Syrup

● 7.5mL · 0.25oz Pinot Noir

● 7.5mL · 0.25oz Lemon Juice

● Few drops Balsamic Vinegar

● Pinch of Salt

Garnish: Peanut Butter & Strawberry Jam Sandwich

Begin with a chilled mixing glass, into which we’ll add Skrewball Whiskey for our creamy, peanut butter component. Follow that with raspberry vodka for our jelly, along with some Liber & Co. Pacific Strawberry Syrup made with sun-ripened strawberries from America’s West Coast.We’ll also add a little red wine, lemon juice, salt, a few drops of balsamic vinegar, and plenty of ice. 

Now stir to chill and dilute the cocktail before straining it into a chilled old-fashioned glass over ice, and garnish with a tiny peanut butter sandwich. I made mine with homemade strawberry jam, but feel free to get store-bought if you want to keep everything easy about this cocktail. So before we get into the complex part of the recipe, let’s test our first Peanur Butter & Jelly cocktail of the day. 

Skrewball brings the nutty flavor right away, and the raspberry vodka and syrup add the fruity “jam” note. It’s a fun, accessible version you can make without needing special equipment, but what about for those that want to go a step further and get as close as possible to what they’re making at the best cocktail bar in the world?

Thankfully Eric van Beek who leads Hanshake Speakeasy took us through the process of making this cocktail using specialized equipment, and you can watch the video on the Cocktail Time Patreon! It’s available to all members, even free ones, so don’t miss out. In the meantime, let’s see how to build our elevated cocktail. 

Their cocktail starts with vodka as a base, which they blend with peanut butter and distill it using a rotovap. I don’t have one, so instead we’ll use fatwashing to create a similar result. 

Peanut Butter–Washed Vodka

● 500mL · 16.66oz Vodka

● 55g Smooth Peanut Butter

Into a sous vide bag add in the ingredients, and double seal it to avoid any leaks. Just be careful so the liquid doesn’t get pulled into the machine… it’s happened to me more often than I’d like to admit. We’ll place the infusion in a sous vide bath set to 60°C, or 140°F, and cook it for 2 hours. After 2 hours, take the bag out and let it cool down a bit. Then place it into the freezer, where the peanut butter will separate from the vodka as it solidifies, making it easy to remove later.

Once it’s fully set, cut open the bag and pour the liquid through a coffee filter. I’m using a Chemex, and I’ll place this in the freezer as it filters. This way, the fat doesn’t melt while it’s being filtered. What you’ll end up with is clear vodka that has a rich peanut butter flavor, and that’s exactly what we need for the PBJ cocktail.

The next step they do at Handshake is to separate some of the distilled peanut butter vodka to create a raspberry infusion. We’ll do a raspberry liqueur instead, but the flavor will be concentrated enough that it will balance out in the end. 

Raspberry Liqueur

● 500g Raspberries

● 60g Sugar

● 0.4g Ascorbic Acid

● 1g Pectinex

● 34mL 96% Alcohol per 100mL of concentrated juice

We’ll add everything except the alcohol into the blender, and blend it until the mixture is completely smooth. Because it’s not raspberry season here, I’ll be using frozen raspberries that I already defrosted, but feel free to use fresh as well. Now it’s time to pour our raspberry juice into a container, and freeze it to use a technique we’ve featured in the past: cryo-concentration. 

So once the juice is fully frozen, weigh it and then place it in a strainer over a bowl. We want half of it to freeze, giving us raspberry juice with a higher concentration of flavor compounds, while leaving behind raspberry flavored ice. Once it’s melted by half, we should end up with a raspberry liquid that’s around 24 Brix–or 24g of sugar per 100g of juice. 

For every 100mL (3.33oz) of concentrated juice, we’ll add 34mL (~1.25oz) of 96% alcohol to reach the right ABV. As with all the liqueurs we make, you’ll find the calculator for this on kevinkos.com with a free 4-day trial. So mix this well, bottle it, and add a label. You can use it right away, but it’s best after about 3 days once the flavors have married.

Following their raspberry infusion, Handshake then makes a raspberry cordial. This one is less difficult to make, and it will bring in cooked raspberry notes, adding more depth to the overall flavor. 

Raspberry Cordial

● 300g Raspberries

● 150mL · 5oz Water

● Small piece Lemon Peel

● 99g Sugar (based on 260mL yield)

● 3.6g Citric Acid

● 3.6g Tartaric Acid

I’ll once again use frozen raspberries, which I’ll place into a pan along with water and lemon peel. We’ll bring this up to a gentle simmer, leaving it to cook for about 5 minutes and stirring a few times to make sure nothing sticks. When that’s done, pour the mixture into a cloth filter and let it strain, and toget a bit more juice and flavor, we’re using one of my favorite cocktail hacks: gently squeezing the filter and the contents with a potato ricer.

Once strained, measure the liquid you collected. Then it’s time for a little math, but again, the cocktail calculators on kevinkos.com are there for cordials as well. We ended up with 260mL (8.66oz) of liquid, so I’m adding 99g of sugar, 3.6g of citric acid, and 3.6g of tartaric acid. Stir until everything is dissolved, and that’s our raspberry cordial done. 

One of the most difficult parts about making this cocktail is that I’m going for a single serve. Handshake on the other hand, pun intended, combines everything with a touch of raspberry vinegar and Cocchi Rosa, before clarifying the cocktail with a centrifuge and a filter. We’ll of course skip that step, so after making some raspberry vinegar and one of the most challenging garnishes I’ve made yet, we’re ready to build the cocktail.

Raspberry Vinegar

● 1 part Apple Cider Vinegar

● 1 part Raspberry Cordial

This one is as easy as combining the ingredients, and adding them to a dasher bottle. You can also buy some premade raspberry vinegar, which you can also use in cooking for some great salad dressings. But now, let’s move onto the cherry on top, which originally looks like a PB&J sandwich, but in reality is aerated chocolate with peanut butter and jelly inside. 

It goes without saying I’m not a professional chocolatier, but I did my best to make something close. And thanks to the awesome Cocktail Time community, I was able to work on a recipe that gave me a similar result to what they have at Handshake. 

Aerated White Chocolate Garnish

● 200g White Chocolate

● 30g Cacao Butter

● Cocoa Powder

● 1 N₂O Cartridge

● Peanut Butter & Strawberry Jam

So I’m starting by chopping up the white chocolate, and placing it alongside the cacao butter in a double boiler. We’ll melt the mixture until smooth, or if you want to be precise, heat it up to 60°C or 140°F. Once that’s fully melted, pour the melted chocolate into a slightly warmed iSi siphon and charge it with one N₂O cartridge. Shake for about 30 seconds, then release the chocolate foam into a chilled glass container.

We now have a chocolate foam with N₂O bubbles, but to get them to expand to the right size we’ll now close the container with a lid, and place it into a vacuum chamber for about 10 seconds. When the pressure is released, the trapped air expands and creates a sponge-like texture in the chocolate, but you can get a similar effect using a food storage container with a vacuum pump lid.

Now move the containers to the freezer and let the chocolate set completely. Once you take it out, give it time to temper so it doesn’t crumble as you cut it. This time we’ll make small squares, like mini toasts, before adding the crust. To do that, dip the sides in cocoa powder to make it look like the crust was toasted, but don’t take too long with this because chocolate melts quickly.

Now comes the easiest part of today’s recipe: assembling the cocktail. This was a challenge on my end because Hanshake batches their PBJ, and then clarifies it with a centrifuge. So after some testing I got these proportions for a single serve:

Pro Peanut Butter Jelly Cocktail

● 30mL · 1oz Peanut Butter–Washed Vodka

● 22.5mL · 0.75oz Raspberry Liqueur

● 22.5mL · 0.75oz Raspberry Cordial

● 10mL · 0.33oz 9diDante Rosé Vermouth

● 3 drops 20% Saline Solution

● 1 dash Raspberry Vinegar

Garnish: Aerated White Chocolate PB&J

Start by adding everything into the large shaker tin, and fill the small tin with ice. We’ll be throwing this cocktail instead of stirring, so place a strainer over the small shaker and pour the liquid back and forth between the two tins. This chills and dilutes the drink while adding a touch of aeration, but it’s also gentler than shaking, so we keep the cocktail smooth and crystal clear.

Once the cocktail is nicely mixed and cold, strain it into a chilled tulip glass with a clear ice block.And for the final touch, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with our aerated chocolate “toasts”. So after all this hard work, let’s see how this cocktail tastes. 

It’s smooth, fruity, nutty, and playful all at once. Really a big step above the simple version we made before, but this just makes me want to go to Mexico City even more. Before I leave, I want to thank Eric again for sharing his knowledge and the amazing things they’re coming up with at the lab in Handshake Speakeasy.

 If you’re ever in Mexico City, the Handshake should definitely be on the top of the places to go.  If you can find it, of course… it’s a speakeasy after all. Well, that’s the exact reason why we created Cocktail Time, to show you how you can make world-class cocktails too, at home or at your bar, without lab equipment. Until next time, cheers!