Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Yeah, I know. Just let me say this, whatever side of the various debates around this holiday you are, whether you are joyously in love, miserably alone, happily alone, miserably in love, or on the horns of an incipient bust-up, there’s a good chance tomorrow night will go better for you with the help of a delicious, yet not too excessively potent, alcoholic beverage.

The Berried Treasure is yet another example of my dictum that the recipes that come to me along with free bottles of booze tend to be good to excellent. This is because marketers have a vested interest in making these promotional drinks taste as good as possible and so they tend to involve mixologists who really know what they’re doing. That definitely seems to apply to award winning New York  bartender Christian Sanders, who created this week’s drink to promote Hornitos Reposado Tequila.

Sanders creation is built around a tequila that’s surprisingly complex and tasty, especially at it’s very reasonable price point, and the highly underrated, but not under-priced, flavor of blackberries. Indeed, on a per drink basis, the antioxidant laden berries might well run you more than the booze. It’s also relatively labor intensive for a DOTW beverage, but love and a little work kind of go hand in hand.

The Berried Treasure

2 ounces Hornitos Reposado Tequila
8 blackberries
2 sprigs of rosemary
3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
3/4 ounce simple syrup (or 1 heaping tablespoon of superfine sugar)
2 dashes Angostura bitters

Put the tequila, lemon juice, bitters and simple syrup or sugar into a cocktail shaker along with six of your eight blackberries and one of your two sprigs of fresh rosemary. Muddle the blackberries and rosemary,so that you have a nice dark purple mixture. Add plenty of ice and shake very vigorously.

Now, here’s the tricky part for almost everyone who’s not a really experienced amateur or pro-bartender, and even for me. You’ll be double straining all of this into a old fashioned glass with ice cubes, but that’s slightly easier said than done.

The problem is that the pulp gets pretty thick — so thick, it very likely will prevent most of your drink from actually leaving your typical built-in cocktail shaker strainer. So, you’re going to need to use both a standard cocktail strainer like the pro bartenders use and a second mesh food strainer to strain out the pulp. This sounds harder than it actually is. Just hold the shaker with the cocktail stainer over your mesh strainer and allow the liquid to make its way through both strainers into the ice-filled glass. When that’s done, about a minute later, you’ll be ready to add the remaining two blackberries and rosemary sprig as garnishes.

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It might be lot of work compared to the many of the drinks I feature here, but the Berried Treasure is a delightful concoction. It’s almost perfectly balanced between sweet and tart and complements the tang of the slightly mellowed blue agave of the Hornitos Reposada. (I can’t stop you from trying it with other reposados, of course, but I haven’t had a chance to test it out with a Brand X for myself.)

There is one genuine X factor here and it applies to any fresh fruit-based drink, that is the taste of the fruit. I accidentally bought two different brands of on sale (but still pricey) blackberries. The first batch was definitely sweeter and the second more tart, and that definitely impacted the final product. Still, the Berried Treasure was never less than exceptionally good, and you can always add a hair more sugar or simple syrup if you like.