The best drink to toast May the Fourth rhymes with Chewbacca
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Fan boys and geek girls everywhere are toasting May the Fourth…be with you. And while this Star Wars day is being celebrated with Baby Yoda cocktails, but what you should be drinking is an Italian brandy.
While there’s an entire universe of Baby Yoda meme cocktails – Baby Yoda margaritas, Baby Yoda Midori concoctions and Baby Yoda matcha tea drinks – and there’s probably another entire universe dedicated to alcoholic version of blue milk made with blue curacao, I’ve long thought that the most perfect spirt to toast May the Fourth isn’t green or trendy, and it isn’t milky or blue.
Instead, I think you should toast May the Fourth with Tuaca. Let me explain.
I was first introduced to Tuaca when I was studying bartending while working on my first cocktail book. My instructor, Suzanne Bruce, gave me my first taste of this sweet Italian brandy, flavored with vanilla and citrus, and she recommended serving it straight or mixed with honeycrisp apple juice around the Thanksgiving holiday.
My first thought was: how have I gone through so many years of legal imbibing without ever encountering this delicious drink. My second thought was: hey, this rhymes with Chewbacca.
Tuaca, tuaca.com, itself is made from a brandy in a town east of Rome called Anagni. Its website says that the recipe to make this beverage is more than 500 years old, and that “legend has it” that it was first created to commemorate Lorenzo de Medici.
While I can’t verify those claims – and a lot of boozy legends are sometimes just good stories to tell – Tuaca’s website also says that in the 1930s, brothers-in-law Gaetano Tuoni and Giorgio Canepa recreated the recipe, calling it Tuaca, which is a combination of both of their last names. Tuaca began being exported to the United States in the 1950s, and it’s found just about anywhere you can find brandy and/or liqueurs. So while the story behind the name makes sense to me, I wish I could say it inspired or was somehow related to Chewbacca, but I think the rhyming thing must just be a coincidence.
Personally, I’ve only been able to purchase it at the bigger liquor stores, which have more extensive and eclectic selections, rather than in grocery stores or smaller, Mom and Pop liquor stores. The bottle of Tuaca I have in my liquor cabinet says that it’s made in Canada, from imported Italian brandy.
As a brandy, I’ve found it makes a heck of a brandy Alexander, a good sidecar, and if you’re in Wisconsin, it makes quite a decent brandy old fashioned. The Tuaca website recommends using it in hot toddies, in Tuscan mules, and in tuacaritas. It also includes recipes for using it in sangrias, alcoholic lemonades, shots, coffee drinks and various concoctions with watermelon, gin and even Worcestershire sauce.
I’ve personally found that it goes great with ice cream (as a shot on top or mixed into dessert beverages), works well if you throw a tablespoon or two into a batch of chocolate chip cookies or a pan of brownies, and you could do a Tuaca cake instead of a rum cake quite easily.
I also think that you could throw it into a blue milk recipe or even do a Baby Yoda cocktail with it. And maybe Chewie would enjoy a sip, too. After all, he does think with his stomach.