Battle Sage — Hajime!

The illustrious Stumbling Dragon came up with our first subject of Cocktail Kumite: Sage. It is a delightful aromatic leaf, one I highly recommend in this recipe for roasted/braised chicken, and just like mint, it seemed like a natural fit for cocktails.
It was not.
As Mr. Blood and Sand mentioned, the aroma is a small part of sage's flavor profile, with the rest tasting like you took a variety of shrubs and decaying leaves and blended them into a distasteful vegetal mess. The trick of any sage cocktail was to harness the good bits we know and love while masking the trash.

One of the drinks I made is lost to history, a fate it deserved. All I can say is that making a good sage syrup was harder than I expected.

My second concoction was considerably better. Inspired by sage in fruit desserts, namely its use with pear and apple, and the forehead-splittingly obvious mint julep, I made an apple-pear-sage julep. While it won't be served at Pegu Club any time soon, it does have potential:

Apple-Pear-Sage Julep

• 2 parts bourbon
• 1 part pear brandy
• 1 part applejack (this could be favorably replaced by calvados, if you had the resources)
• 2 or 3 medium sized leaves sage, plus one.
• 1/4 teaspoon sugar (or more)
• dash Benedictine
• twist of lemon

Put the sugar, maybe the Benedictine, and the sage leaves into a tumbler and muddle like there is no tomorrow. It's the only way to get any quality sage flavor out, as best as we found. Combine everything else in a shaker, mix until cold, and add to the glass. Take the extra sage leaf and rub it around the lip of the glass to get the sage aroma out and squeeze the drink with the lemon twist.

I think this actually has some merit, but as with pretty much everything else that all three of us created, it would have been better without the sage. Actually, no, the aromatic sage on the glass is a nice gimmick, but the muddled sage probably was more useful for inspiration than actual flavor.

As an aside, try to make the Tenochtitlan. It is amazing.