Once, when my brother was in college, he brought home an aquamarine bottle that he had received as a gift. He doesn’t drink. My parents kept it in the china cabinet in my childhood dining room as though it was a fancy wine they were saving for a special occasion. (It was the only bottle in there; they also don’t really drink.)
That bottle was Hpnotiq. For years, it sat in the cabinet until eventually my family moved out of the country. I remember looking at that silver, swirly, mermaid-coded logo, intrigued. (Aquamarine the movie had also recently come out.) To this day, I’ve never actually tried the stuff. By the time I was in college, we’d moved onto greener (well, at least less blue) pastures, the likes of vodka Red Bulls and White Claws. To write this, I searched my local liquor stores, and I’m sad to report that they did not have Hpnotiq. If not for my weird dining-room associations with the liqueur, I might have never heard of it. That is, maybe, until now?
Last year I learned that there was an Incredible Hulk—a drink from the aughts that combines the liqueur with Cognac—on the menu at No Smoking Bar in LA. That’s random, I thought. I haven’t seen the word Hpnotiq in ages. But then I saw the drink again, at Press Club in D.C. In New York, you can get an Incredible Hulk at Lullaby, in a dainty Nick & Nora, or at Jean’s, where it was recently, inexplicably, poured into an Erewhon-branded jar. You can also get one at the recently opened Kitty’s Cosmopolitan Lounge in Chicago. But why?
“We took the space of an old nightclub,” says Kitty’s partner and beverage director Kevin Beary. “To pay homage to our previous tenant, we felt it appropriate to revive this early 2000s club banger.”
Beary’s version has come a long way from the original. The Cognac and the iconic liqueur are in there, as is a clarified passionfruit puree, bianco vermouth and cane syrup. The whole thing is batched and force-carbonated for 48 hours at a precise 32 degrees. On a menu where old-school classics meet modern techniques, Beary says, “this club staple was given the full treatment.”
Incredible Hulks join the growing group of cocktails that have been “rescued” from their reputations. Will they, and Hpnotiq in general, catch on again? You tell me.
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