Every Cocktail Wants to Taste Like the “Forest Floor” Now
When the modern amaro boom exploded early in the 2010s, “herbaceous” seemed like a novel flavor profile for a cocktail. In 2026, drinking something that tastes like pine and juniper feels borderline mundane; this year’s “flavor of the year” is even, apparently, pine. With so many amari and other spirits now channeling local roots, flowers and herbs, chances are the cocktails you’re ordering lately taste like licking a forest floor. And for me, there’s no going back.
My obsession with the flavor profile started at Antidote in Asheville, North Carolina. Intrigued by the menu description for the Mycologist—“a walk through the autumn forest after a summer storm”—I ordered the cocktail, and the mix of whiskey, alpine amaro and porcini mushrooms delivered on that promise. Then there was the Polina at The Dirty Truth in Northampton, Massachusetts, which called on cardamom- and caraway-infused rye along with yellow Chartreuse and was fragrant, floral and earthy. Then, at No Goodbyes in Washington D.C., I tried a peated fernet that bar manager Lukas B. Smith makes with single malt Scotch. The amaro’s classic mint and eucalyptus notes, anchored with some extra woodiness, also immediately brought “forest floor” to mind.
The thing with this flavor trend is that it, like an ecosystem, requires layers; it’s woody, earthy, green, floral, herbaceous and spicy all at once. But if you’re not going to distill or infuse your own spirits, consider an ingredient that can reliably capture all of that in an instant. With notes of myrrh, resin, cedar, chamomile and peppermint, the Akhenaten Amaro from Brooklyn’s Atheras Spirits is “forest floor” in a bottle.
“It has this lovely honey note but a decent amount of bitterness,” says Bruce Schultz, head bartender at Amor y Amargo, “with a lot of gentian as well as this woodsy-ness.”
After running the Egyptian Marathon in Luxor earlier this year, Schultz was inspired to create a cocktail around Akhenaten called the Pyramid Scheme. Akhenaten is part of Atheras Spirits’ recent launch of a six-liqueur lineup and it employs 40 different ingredients inspired by the ancient Egyptian mummification process. It has an incense quality that only amplifies its forest floor character—it indeed tastes like something ancient and ceremonial.