Stir with ice and strain into an old fashioned glass pre-rinsed with apricot liqueur.
Recently, I had been thinking about the Benedictine-Cynar combination that I last tried out in a coworker's recipe at Drink and I wanted to expand on that. I opted for a 3:1 split base of Rittenhouse Rye to mezcal that I learned from several Death & Co. recipes. As a final touch, I added in the apricot rinse "bell-ringer" that was the signature move of James Maloney, for I have been making a few drinks from his 1900 The Twentieth-Century Cocktail Guide for Mixing Fancy Drinks at work including the Martinez Bell-Ringer. The combination of Cynar and apricot has been a delight in several drinks, so that was on my mind. The Benedictine and apricot one was less on my mind despite it working well elsewhere. For a name, I dubbed this the Death on the Installment Plan after Louis-Ferdinand Celine's 1936 book. I had bought the book in the late 1990s but never read it for I got stuck reading his earlier Journey to the End of the Night and had to put it down to avoid the effects which that level of nihilism had on me as I was trying to wrap up my graduate studies.