From coffee to cocktails, South Bay mixologist makes sense of scents

Mixologist Erica Presto has made a career of shaking things up. She worked at downtown San Jose bars like Paper Plane and Alter Ego, and also at Oak & Rye in Los Gatos, before coming to Silos in Morgan Hill, a cocktail and small bites concept started by Oak & Rye Chef Ross Hanson and Jacob Farleigh, a chef with kitchen experience at Manresa and Dio Deka.

At Silos, it’s all about elevated flavors. The cocktail menu is topped by concoctions like the Saturn, made with gin, almond, lemon and passionfruit, and the Leatherbound Book, blending bourbon, herbal aperitif, cinnamon and tobacco bitters.

“Our success is in making cocktails depends on the ability to decipher what you are smelling and tasting,” says Presto, a south San Jose native.

Presto has a good grounding in the kitchen, which serves her well in the mixology space. She loves gathering her friends and coworkers at her place in Redwood Estates to cook up some scratch-made pho or Korean barbecue.

She grew up in a Filipino household with parents who are both chefs. Her mother was raised on fancy city food, while her father came from a small fishing village where they ate only what they caught.

“You’d never find those dishes on a restaurant menu,” says Presto.

While their culinary tastes are divergent, one thing they can agree on is tequila, their drink of choice.

“My Mom and Dad have always been the entertainers,” says Presto. “We are big drinkers, and my family loves to party. They’re all about the drinks and the karaoke. Shove a mic in their hand, and look out!”

Presto says they’re starting to drink more wine now, which kind of surprised her. They also love Cognac VSOP.

Presto actually started working her olfactory lobes in the world of coffee.

“I worked for almost 10 years at Chromatic, a big-batch open roaster,” she says. “Every single day, you taste 20 different types. You are evaluating stuff that you’ve never had before. You have a tasting wheel, which helps you decipher what you’re experiencing.”

Eventually, she discovered the lure of mixology. “I started out doing a few bars, and then one job ends up being four jobs, like when your buddy needs your help downtown.”

She found the work exhilarating but not very lucrative, so she began working with 3D printers for making dental implants. For someone with an acute sense of smell, this probably wasn’t the best move.

“3D resin leaves a bad taste in your mouth,” she says.

Observing more old friends moving from coffeehouses into bars, she started attending of pop-up workshops held at various downtown San Jose venues. She notes that there’s one at Haberdasher every Wednesday. “Someone donates food so nobody gets too drunk,” Presto says.

The workshops are sponsored by booze companies that take you through the products and describe how to properly position and market each one, whether it be bourbon, gin or mezcal.

“People should check this out, as it brings you from the world of casual daytime drinks into more adventurous realm of cocktails,” says Presto. “I also like to throw myself into competitions and weird spaces. It feels like a kid and it’s Halloween, and you’re not the only one in a costume.”

Presto observes that with everything costing more all the time, everyone is struggling. “The craft cocktail industry is a direct reflection of our economy and political climate,” she says. “Chartreuse became a bartender’s handshake, but it’s so become so expensive. We are all inherently broke now, so we are trying to make more things out of cheapo stuff. Beer cocktails are a good indicator of a good summer and also of an economic recession.”

She’ll sometimes serve a pony glass of Miller alongside a glass with Aperol, lemon juice, an ice cube and a splash of Strega. An Italian herbal liqueur created in 1860 in Benovida, Italy, Strega is what Presto calls a poor man’s Chartreuse. It’s literally half the price. Known as the “witch liqueur” (strega is Italian for witch), it has a sweet, viscous profile derived from 70 herbs and spices, including saffron and juniper.

“It’s honey-sweetened and reminds me of riding a motorcycle through the forest and fields,” says Presto, who uses it in a cocktail called the Bee’s Knees.

As a former bartender, I ask her the telltale question: vodka or gin? “We try to make drinks with gin on our menu,” says Presto. “Vodka is lazy. Flavored vodka is making a resurgence, though; it reflects people’s budgets.”

Presto’s secret to making impressive cocktails starts with the garnish. The rim is like the ring in which the performance occurs, and making that ring stand out is part of the challenge.

Lately, she’s been developing a rim called Green Tajin that involves three different kinds of chiles and dehydrated limes. She’ll get a whole bag of kefir limes from the Little Saigon market for $2, remove the rinds (shockingly bitter) and then juice the pulp. She then adds the juice to the rinds and dehydrates it low and slow for 48 hours with a mix of sugar and salt. The chiles are roasted and then ground by hand. “It takes us two days to make, and the yield is super low, but it’s quite tasty,” Presto says.

As for her personal cocktail preference, she will have a really dry gin martini with one olive. “Do not force me to rush my martini,” says Presto. “It’s not like a slam-it-back-sweet before- or after-dinner drink. Just give me a super dirty martini and a side of chips and I am good for the night.”