Despite what you’ll read more or less everywhere, the Jasmine cocktail has nothing to do with the Cosmopolitan.
The two drinks are directly compared so often you’d think they were siblings. Most of the articles you’ll read about the Jasmine will tell you that it’s the Cosmo’s “tart and bitter cousin” or that you can “think of it as a next generation Cosmopolitan ” or that “it’s the Cosmo for grown-ups,” when honestly, it’s none of those things. Yes, both call for a red ingredient that makes the resulting cocktail kind of pink, but expecting cranberry juice and getting Campari is like expecting Barney the Friendly Dinosaur and instead getting an actual dinosaur. It’s more than just a difference of degree.
Paul Harrington never set out to invent a modern classic cocktail. He was just a bright young man tending bar outside of San Francisco in the early 1990s, but a couple introductions to the work of legendary New York bartender Dale DeGroff—one with a chef who was familiar with the classics DeGroff was resurrecting, and one chance encounter with the man himself—inspired Harrington to dig into dusty old cocktail books, diving into the all-but-lost cocktail secrets from the previous century.