Italian Buck

Two of Italy's finest amari -- Cynar and Amaro Montenegro -- join forces with fresh lime and spicy ginger beer in this long, refreshing take on the classic buck format. Bittersweet, lively, and endlessly sippable.

The Italian Buck was created by bartender Jamie Boudreau at Canon: Whiskey and Bitters Emporium, his acclaimed bar on Capitol Hill in Seattle, Washington, which opened in 2011 and rapidly earned recognition as one of the United States' premier cocktail destinations. Boudreau is known throughout the American craft cocktail industry as an educator and spirits authority as well as a working bartender, and Canon developed a specific reputation for rigorous technique and encyclopedic spirit selection. The Italian Buck applies the buck format — spirit, citrus, ginger beer, tall glass over ice — entirely to Italian amaro, using Cynar's artichoke-based earthiness and Amaro Montenegro's floral, citrus-forward complexity as complementary components rather than relying on a base distilled spirit. The buck's structure, which is essentially the template that produced the Moscow Mule in 1941 when vodka replaced whatever base spirit preceded it, is one of the most adaptable in bartending precisely because ginger beer's spice and fresh citrus's acid are so broadly compatible with different spirit categories. Amaro's herbal complexity interacts with ginger in ways that standard spirits cannot — the ginger amplifies rather than competes with the botanical notes, and the effervescence provides the lift that a dense, aromatic liqueur needs to function as a refreshing serve rather than a contemplative digestivo.