Salt-flavoured Vodka Provides A Good Shortcut To Making Great Cocktails

Here’s a spirit that gives new meaning to the phrase, “Pass the salt.”

Last year, the Sazerac Company, one of the largest family-owned distillers in the U.S., launched Saltworks Property Himalayan Pink Salt vodka and Saltworks Property Smoked Sea Salt vodka.

The logic behind the salty spirit is simple enough: Salt is a natural flavour enhancer. So, as Sazerac marketing director Kristy Crane says, “What it does to food it does to cocktails — amplifies the flavour. Salt vodka makes perfect sense.”

It also makes sense in that flavoured vodka continues to be popular, accounting for 21% of all vodka sales in the U.S., according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. But whereas the flavoured vodkas of a previous time tended to be of the sweet and silly variety, now spirits makers are moving to offering flavors with a more natural and “adult” profile. Perhaps a salt vodka fits into that trend.

Flavoured vodkas can provide a good shortcut to making a great cocktail — that is, they add the flavour without you doing a lot of mixing. And that is indeed the case with these vodkas — the Smoked Sea Salt makes an excellent Bloody Mary, for example. But if you taste them on their own, that’s a different story. They have a flavour that borders on the bizarre and the medicinal.

As the brand says, this is especially about the cocktails. But it also says to think beyond savoury mixed drinks since salt can work with sweet. Try the Smoked Sea Salt in a chocolate martini or the Himalayan Pink Salt in a Cosmo.