It’s no exaggeration that I have thought about Lebron Chewbacca every summer since 2019, when we first looked through The Aviary Cocktail Book. It was less about the cocktail, or the flavored ice, or how fizzy and fun it looked. It was about the photo in the book, highlighting a plume of stunning mint flowers used to garnish the drink. I’m not sure who at The Aviary had the magic green thumb, but the mint flowers in that photograph were downright majestic. They look like towering alien pompoms with all their prickly parts preserved in exquisite detail. Every August, when mint plants all across the city go to flower, I think of this cocktail. When the time came, I knew I had to have mint flower garnishes that looked just as stunning as the ones in the book.

Lebron was another cocktail meant for summer nights on the patio. I love funky rums, and cachaça tends to scratch that itch for me. While I’m no cachaça connoisseur, Leblon Cachaça (where the cocktail gets its punny name) has some notes I really love: grassy, peppery, maybe a sort of green banana note, and even a bit of the darker, grape-y sweetness I get in cognac.

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Case in point: The perfect patio cocktail, made even better by the addition of some portable rope lights.

The book’s tasting notes of blackberry, pepper, and anise were all there. The Giffard Crème de Mûre and homemade blackberry syrup were well complemented by the grape-y sweetness I found in the Leblon. The CH Peppercorn Vodka really shone here. It helped ground the fruity flavors and keep the cocktail in balance. The fruity, peppery combination was further complemented by a generous portion of star anise ice marbles. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything that wouldn’t be complemented by star anise ice marbles. They were everyone’s favorite part of the cocktail. Normally, when I finish a cocktail with flavored ice, any remaining ice loses its appeal unless I can top off my drink. In this case, the four of us eagerly scooped every remaining ice marble from the glass using our spoon straws. The La Gitana Manzanilla Sherry brought notes of bruised apple along with a savory, yeasty flavor that paired exceptionally with the funky notes in the cachaça. And the Bittermens Orange Cream Citrate lent a fun tart, creamy note to the mix. It will be fun to play around with this now that it’s fulfilled its duties with The Gayviary.

This cocktail is quite similar to Joseph’s Cane, which I made two months ago. They are both red, fizzy cocktails with berry flavors featuring Leblon Cachaça as the star ingredient and loaded with flavored ice marbles. If you made me choose between the two (please don’t), I’d pick Joseph’s Cane over Lebron because I got more of the unadulterated funky flavor I love without the anise notes. Don’t get me wrong—I absolutely loved those anise ice marbles. I would buy a glass of them to eat on their own. But anise is a distinct flavor that kept things in a warm spice territory versus the slightly more savory notes in Joseph’s Cane. And in case you forgot, I would file a petition to legally marry that sugar cane garnish if I wasn’t already taken. (Sorry, Abe.)

So back to those mint flower garnishes: We had mint at home that flowered a couple weeks prior. Our mint flowers would get the job done, but they were both tinier and…more scorched?…than the mint flowers photographed in The Aviary Cocktail Book. From prior research, I know these aren’t anything I can find at a florist shop or farmers market. Mint is notoriously easy to grow and even a bit invasive, but ours didn’t take off in its new pot. The mint grew, but the flowers were minuscule. Determined to find some towering alien pompoms of my own, I tried my luck once again with the iNaturalist app to forage mint from somewhere I could pluck it without trespassing.

iNaturalist has helped me in the past by finding wild oxalis leaves and pods for Elvis Parsley, Beef Tartare, along with juniper used in Baked Apple and an abundance of spruce tips that went into both the standard and NA versions of Espelette You Finish. While I always feel a little sneaky on my urban foraging adventures, at least they’ve been in public spots. The first three tags in the app for wild mint led me to residential front yards and a fenced-in elementary school garden—not the kind of places I felt comfortable plucking from. It wasn’t until the night I planned to photograph Lebron Chewbacca with my remaining mini-mint that I passed a fourth spot along a creek while running errands across town. The sun was setting and it became hard to identify plants without my phone’s flashlight. Lucky for me, the mint was on the opposite side of the trail from the creek, as my idea of a good time was not misjudging the depth of the grass and stepping in ankle-deep water. However, it was getting late and I still had both Lebron Chewbacca and Horchata to photograph before bed. But true to form, I was fixated on bringing home some fluffy mint flowers, and in the end, I did.

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Was it worth it? Either way, it made for an interesting story.

It wasn’t just that I had to photograph both cocktails that night. In two weeks’ time, my friend Shara would be visiting from Georgia so she could sample a cocktail that used rum she graciously secured for me from a rundown liquor store on the outskirts of Atlanta. I also wanted to surprise her by making a second cocktail using one of her favorite flavors—watermelon. I needed a full week to make all the ice required for those cocktails and I didn’t want to add Lebron and Horchata to my shameful backlog of unphotographed Aviary cocktails. I refused to let that happen. And as a reward for my persistence, not only was I able to snap a lovely photo of my gorgeous mint flower garnish, but I got to consume the finished cocktail along with two additional glasses of ice marbles before bed.

Thanks for reading.

Whether you're a fellow home bartender, photographer, writer, collector, or simply enjoyed the story, I'd love to hear from you at hello@gayviary.com.