Can Dirty Sue Put the Dirty in Your Martini?

“I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won’t let himself get snotty about it.” – Raymond Chandler

The traditional gin martini (as opposed to something colored an unnatural hue, syrupy sweet and served in a cocktail glass) is many things to many people. It can be the drink of a sophisticate, an alcoholic; a man, a woman. While there are many variations to the trinity of gin, vermouth and garnish, perhaps the most common is the dirty martini.

A dirty martini adds olive brine to the mix, softening the drink and bringing a savory note to the cocktail. While a proper olive garnish certainly adds a note of umami to a martini, a splash or two of the brine crosses the line from accent to ingredient. Many people enjoy a degree of dirtiness in their martini; for example, General Patton’s preferred drink (which now bears his name) was an extremely dirty martini with two olives and two onions.

Whatever the proportions, those who enjoy a dirty martini at their home bar will inevitably run into a simple but vexing problem: unless you are a huge fan of eating pickled olives by the handful, you’ll run out of olive brine long before you run out of olives.

Enter: Dirty Martini Olive Juice

Fortunately, capitalism and alcohol have been deeply intertwined since the inception of both. As a result, the market has brought us bottles of dirty martini olive juice sans olives, enabling the dirty martini drinker to mix themselves another without feeling like they’re wasting a perfectly good jar of olives. Among the entrants in this market is Dirty Sue, a product of American Mixers, Inc.

Offering an opinion on a martini mixer is a complicated endeavor for any number of reasons, chief among them being that attempting to sample a number of different martinis in one sitting is likely to skew the results towards the end. In the interests of giving Dirty Sue a fair stir (don’t shake that martini!) I took a quasi-scientific approach to my review.

Martini Testing Methodology

I chose to sample three different varieties of dirty martini olive juice, both individually and in a martini:

• Dirty Sue dirty martini mix
• BevMo brand martini mix
• Brine from BevMo martini olives in vermouth

Each martini was made to the same specification:

• Two shots of gin
• One-half shot of olive brine
• A swirl of vermouth in the glass, then dumped in the shaker
• No garnish
• Stirred with ice and strained

I used Trader Joe’s Rear Admiral Joseph’s Original London Dry Gin as the spirit for these martinis. It’s a mild gin, with enough juniper to let you know what you’re drinking, but without overpowering the rest of the beverage. Similarly, I omitted the garnish so that the dirtiness was solely the responsibility of the brine.

Each martini was split with my bride-to-be, who graciously volunteered to assist me with this project. By consuming half martinis – and relatively small ones at that – I hoped to lessen the impact of intoxication on my ability to judge the cocktail.

Commonalities

Before tasting the brines I noticed that the Dirty Sue and BevMo brand brines looked remarkably similar. Upon further examination, I noticed that physically, they are almost exactly the same:

1. The bottles are exactly the same size, shape, and color
2. The caps are identical
3. The seals around the caps are identical
4. The nutrition information is identical
5. The ingredients are nearly identical: Dirty Sue lists “Olive Brine (water, salt, olives), lactic acid, traces of benzoate as a preservative”, while BevMo lists “water, salt, lactic acid and traces of benzoate as a preservative”

Tasting the Brines

I tasted a few sips of each dirty martini olive juice, one after the other, cleansing my palette between sips with club soda.

Dirty Sue tasting notes:

• Moderate olive nose with a note of brine
• Mildly savory, mostly salty
• Definite olive flavor
• Slight acid flavor

BevMo Dirty martini Olive Juice tasting notes:

• Slightly softer/milder than the Dirty Sue (probably because it had been opened and in my chill chest)
• Otherwise identical to Dirty Sue

BevMo martini Olives brine tasting notes:

• Strong olive nose with notes of acid and pimento
• Very salty, but with a nice acid zing
• Robust olive flavor

Based on the evidence, I am pretty sure that the Dirty Sue and BevMo mixes are from the same manufacturer. If the claims on the Dirty Sue website are true (they state they’re the innovator in this space), I believe American Mixers are themselves bottling, labeling and selling the product to BevMo.

Tasting the Cocktails

Upon mixing into the martinis, the distinctions between the bottled brines and actual brine-from-the-jar became moot. The sheer amount of salt ensured things would get savory, but aside from an almost-imperceptible tang in the from-the-jar martini, they all tasted… like a good dirty martini.

Conclusion

If you enjoy a good dirty martini, get yourself a bottle of Dirty Sue dirty martini olive juice and a matching, small bottle of vermouth. Don’t open them till you need them, and keep them in the fridge. Instead of wasting olives and guessing on potency, you’ll be making consistent, delicious dirty martinis every time. That is of course if you’re not one of those vermouth-less heathens…

Josh consumed a Dirty Sue martini during the creation of this missive. Product provided by the company, Dirty Sue.

Tagged as: alcohol, beverages, dirty martini olive juice