DrinkWire is Liquor.com's showcase for the best articles, recipe and reviews from the web's top writers and bloggers. In this post, Cocktails, 365 profiles a drink from the Savoy Cocktail Book.

As we continue our way through The Savoy Cocktail Book we come across one of the first mentions of a now-defunct liquor: Hercules.

This Serious Eats article gives a pretty good overview of what we’re pretty sure Hercules was – although there is still a bit of debate on how to exactly recreate it. As you can tell from the ad above, Hercules appears to have been a red wine based apéritif similar vermouth, infused with Yerba Maté. So, when blogger Erik Ellestad undertook his Savoy Stomp project several years ago, he came up with several different versions of “Hercules” that you can make ahead of time.

(As is noted in the Serious Eats article, these aren’t really attempts at recreating the original Hercules as nobody’s really sure exactly what it tastes like.)

For me, I went the simpler (read: lazier) way and simply took some Dolin Vermouth de Chambéry Rouge and infused it with a bit of yerba maté for the green tea flavor and caffeine kick. Lazy? Certainly. Tasty? Also most certainly.

The Angler Cocktail falls under a similar umbrella for several of the drinks we’ve already mixed – heady, bitter, and powerful. And also – brown.

>> Get the recipe on Cocktails, 365!