Eagle Creek

I built my first draft of this cocktail in 2017 to showcase an infusion I had made using a noble fir cone found while on my first backpacking trip with my future wife along the exceptionally beautiful Eagle Creek trail in the Columbia River Gorge. Later that year my family (along with most folks in our region) mourned as the Eagle Creek fire decimated 50000 acres of lush, exceedingly scenic, and personally meaningful forest and rained down the ashes upon us for weeks. The original name I had picked out for this drink, "Forest Fire," felt abhorrent, and I stopped making the it altogether. Early in 2021, the Eagle Creek trail was finally reopened to hikers, if only briefly, and this semi-consciously prompted me to take another look at this cocktail, tweak it a bit (substituting Zirbenz for the now gone infusion) and renamed it as a dedication to the former beauty and ongoing rebirth of that special place.