PITTSBORO — Libation lovers don’t often contemplate their favorite cocktails’ ancillary components. Even the most censorious palates might limit scrutiny to the caliber of a drink’s primary liquor.
But as David and Kris Pass learned on one fateful distillery tour in 2018, it’s the supporting cast of oft-overlooked ingredients that can make or break a fine mixed drink.
“We’d been drinking gin and tonic for a number of years and our taste in gins kept getting more expensive,” David said. “We did a tour out there at Durham Distillery, and they had a bottle of tonic syrup on the shelf and I bought it and thought, ‘That’s much better than the clear tonic you get at the grocery store.’” The experience was something of a revelation. High-quality tonic (mixed with selzer water, tonic syrup resembles tonic water) immediately elevated the quality of his drink, and it didn’t come with the financial burden of world-class alcohol. But David felt there was still room for improvement.
“He was like, ‘You know, this is good,’” Kris said, “‘but I think I can do better.’”
And so David set to work concocting his own tonic recipe.
“I played around with some stuff and we made a batch of tonic and I got it to where I thought it was pretty good,” he said. “And then it was like, ‘Here Kris, try this,’ and she literally tried it and said, ‘That’s good. That’s dangerously good.’”
Thus Dangerously Good Tonic was born. Since 2019, the Passes have operated a modest tonic-making operation at The Plant, widely known as the Chatham Beverage District. So far it hasn’t been a full-time gig. David, a longtime IT professional at UNC-Chapel Hill, is nearing retirement, and Kris — who oversees the teaching assistants at Woods Charter School — is “not quite ready to give up working with the kids.” But tonic production has become the couple’s passion, and they’re eying expansion in the near future.
“What we’re doing currently is we rent commercial kitchen space from Copeland Springs Kitchen,” David said of The Plant’s only restaurant.
But in the last few months, with the pandemic receding, the couple has started exploring options for dedicated space. At a board of commissioners meeting last month, the town officials approved a request for increased sewer allocation at the Plant to accommodate new or growing businesses, including Dangerously Good Tonic.
“I think what it would allow us to do is have more flexibility with when we make tonic,” David said. “Right now we’re sort of beholden to Copeland Springs’ schedule. It would just give us a space dedicated to our making tonic and having everything there in place.”
Despite limited space to work and the challenges of having launched their business right before the pandemic began, the Passes have seen outsized success. Durham Distillery (where the couple first caught on to high-quality tonic) now stocks DGT’s product, as does Fair Game Distillery — The Plant’s flagship business — and Fainting Goat Distillery in Greensboro. Several local bars use their tonic as well, the couple said.
“And now that things are getting back to normal,” David said, “we’re reaching out to more distilleries and bars and restaurants.”
Good tonic — the humble catalyst in many a mixologist’s staple recipe — is more complex than its drinkers might know, the Passes say. Their recipe includes lemons, limes, grapefruits, oranges, cardamom, lemon grass and “a ton of other spices,” Kris said. And for the tonic novices, the couple offers a telling tip: if your tonic is clear, it’s made from synthetic materials.
“It’s cool because when you get a synthetically made quinine, which is the kind of defining part of what makes tonic tonic,” Kris said, “that’s what makes it clear like the stuff at the grocery store ... But natural quinine makes your tonic, orange. So it’s this beautiful color of orange.”
To keep their tonic completely natural, the Passes extract quinine from cinchona bark, which can come from South America, the Caribbean and parts of Africa. They mix all the ingredients together in a sachet bag, which they boil before letting it chill in the refrigerator for a couple of days. After filtering and bottling, the result is a tonic syrup, more concentrated and versatile than the carbonated tonic water typical in most stores.
“So what you can do, for example, is if you have like a soda siphon gun, or just some seltzer water,” David said, “you put your gin in, put your tonic syrup in and then top it off with some bubbly water of some sort ... It’s just such a better experience for your gin and tonic or whatever than the cheap tonic water at the grocery store.”
To try their syrup, the Passes recommend a “flying dangerously vodka tonic” at Fair Game, or one of the drink recipes they have on their website, dangerouslygoodtonic.com (see the box, “Dangerously good recipes”). But their suggestions come with a warning: after trying the good stuff, you’ll be ever after ruined to grocery store varieties.
“Once you go dangerous,” Kris said, “it’s hard to go back.”
Reporter D. Lars Dolder can be reached at dldolder@chathamnr.com and on Twitter @dldolder.