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Some once-trendy cocktail ingredients — think sour apple schnapps and whipped cream vodka — are probably best left in the past. But bartenders across San Francisco have decided that others, like elderflower liqueur, are worthy of revisiting. Most commonly associated with the brand St. Germain, the sweet, floral liqueur has been mounting an impressive comeback.
Elderflower’s resurgence will probably smack of nostalgia if you’ve been in the beverage industry long enough. “I think it was probably 2007 to 2010, if you had a cocktail bar, you probably had a St. Germain drink on the menu,” says Phil Mauro, managing partner at Lower Nob Hill cocktail bar Rye.
Elderflower was not a well-known flavor, certainly not one found in classic cocktails, when St. Germain launched in the United States in 2007. The sweet, 20% ABV liqueur has notes of pear and lychee and is not so floral as to come across as soapy. The brand was considered by many to be the first high-quality liqueur of the craft cocktail renaissance, which coalesced in the Bay Area between 2006 and 2008. Bartenders began adding it to the daiquiri, gimlet, paloma, and even the old-fashioned.
“I remember it being around all the time,” says John Ottman, owner of Holy Water in Bernal Heights. “It was everywhere, it was in everything, and it was delicious.”
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‘Everything that was off-limits is back on the table’
The product even earned the nickname “bartender’s ketchup” for its utility and ubiquity. But like most trends, elderflower eventually blazed out. “I don’t know when the burnout on it was, or when it became kind of not cool to have St. Germain elderflower on your menu, but at some point, it did happen,” Ottman says. “But now it seems like everything that was off-limits is back on the table, from Midori to [Jagermeister] to flavored vodkas.”
Holy Water opened in 2013, but Ottman didn’t put an elderflower drink on the menu until this year. He added a modified version of the Recoil, a cocktail Dylan O’Brien (now owner of Emeryville’s Prizefighter Bar & Bottle Shop) created during elderflower’s golden era. “We used St. Germain and served it in Mason jars in our barnwood-wrapped, Edison-bulb-lit bar, because it was 2009,” O’Brien recalls of the drink at his SoMa bar Bloodhound, now closed.
Ottman’s “simple” riff contains bourbon, ginger, lime, elderflower syrup, and soda. “People can look at it and are like, ‘Oh, I know what this is going to taste like,’” he says. But instead of St. Germain, he uses D’arbo elderflower syrup. (And it is not served in a Mason jar, since it’s no longer 2009.) He also mixes D’arbo into a nonalcoholic elderflower cocktail called Duty Free.
D’arbo is one of many elderflower liqueurs, syrups, tonic waters, and gins that have become available since St. Germain arrived stateside. Local bartenders use a range of these, much as chefs prefer various brands of ketchup due to the subtle differences in flavor. Some form of elderflower cocktail is on the menu at The Alembic, Bar Sprezzatura, Blue Whale, Carlotta’s, Causwells, Colibri, Dirty Habit, Driftwood, Fog Harbor Fish House, Golden Eye Social, Heartwood, Lost & Found, Pacific Cocktail Haven, Persona, Pied Piper, Prospect, The Sea Star, Starlite, and Waterbar, among many other venues.
Once again, it seems to be everywhere and in everything.
Sofia Ramos wasn’t in the industry the first time elderflower came around; she joined Third Rail, where she is the general manager, just over three years ago. Though the bar has always stocked St. Germain, “from my memory, it hasn’t really been on our menu,” she says. “I guess I was the one who started adding it more.” Now she makes two drinks with St. Germain: a version of a paloma and a cocktail with gin, yuzu, and pineapple. She also can make nonalcoholic versions of those drinks using elderflower syrup.
As a happy hour special for a few years, Ramos has served the Hugo spritz, an internet-famous alternative to the Aperol spritz that calls for elderflower and a bouquet of mint as garnish. Versions of the elderflower spritz, which was (perhaps prematurely) dubbed the drink of summer 2023, can be found at Charmaine’s, Il Parco, Matterhorn, and Splash Sports Bar. Its sudden popularity has been one driver of the elderflower renaissance.
At the Ferry Building location of Hog Island Oyster Co., which serves between 1,500 and 1,800 customers on a peak summer day, the Coastal Spritzer splits the difference (spritz the difference?) between the elderflower and Aperol versions. It contains an imitation of Aperol called Fiero and a house elderflower shrub. The drink has been on the menu in some form since 2015, and it sells strongly enough that bartenders make it in batches and dispense it from a keg. “Elderflower listed on a menu will always be popular,” says Saul Ranella, Hog Island’s beverage director. “Even when it’s not trending, people still gravitate toward it.”
Rye, meanwhile, does not feature the elderflower liqueur on a menu drink. “But we have it on the back bar in case someone comes in,” Mauro says. “It’s coming up on 20 years, and it’s like, you stay in the game long enough, you’ll come back around.”