The Obsessive Quest To Build The Perfect Cocktail Cherry

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In this excerpt from our print article “The Garnish King” in the Men’s Journal Fall 2026 Whiskey Special print edition, Gina Pace uncovers the story behind our favorite cocktail garnish maker. Read the full story here.

Since the cocktail’s modern revival in the 1990s, the drinks industry has become obsessed with spirits, ice, and bartending technique. But Daniel Singer, founder of Filthy, a premium cocktail garnish and mixer brand, has zeroed in on what most people have overlooked: a drink’s final embellishment. That instinct—to pour energy into the smallest, most delicate part of the drink—has defined his career. 

Before Filthy, Singer was an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. But when his wife became pregnant with their first child in 2003, reality hit. “I can’t support a family earning $200 a week treading the boards,” he thought to himself. A friend had recently invested in a struggling pickle company in the United States, and Singer—with no business training—moved his family across the Atlantic to try to fix the operation. He not only turned the pickle brand around, but he also helped grow a meat company soon after.

Around that time, Miami’s craft cocktail scene was taking off. Singer noticed everything in the drinks world was evolving except the garnishes on top. “As a dyslexic, you tend to see the space between all the noise while everybody’s focusing on the broad strokes,” he says. And in that space, he saw opportunity.

He pitched his brother Marc, a documentary filmmaker just back from Iraq and Afghanistan, on the idea of reinventing the category by starting their own garnish company in 2007. They decided to start with the olives, but Singer knew he’d need to tackle cherries next. 

And it proved to be hard. He set out to build a cherry with sweetness at the start and a tart, lingering finish—with just enough structure to meet a rye old-fashioned head-on. Unfortunately, everything he could find had been overly sweetened. He spent years with Italian syrup and sauce makers, learning the intricacies of turning cherries into garnishes. Singer found out that stainless steel pots cooked cherries too aggressively, leaving them thick‐skinned and saccharine, but copper pots gave him the control he needed to keep the fruit delicate. It was the only way to preserve the cherry’s natural bitterness while building the complexity he wanted for whiskey cocktails.

Related: 8 Bartender-Approved Cocktail Hacks to Upgrade Your Home Bar

Every Filthy cherry is hand‐picked—no nets, no shaking machines. “It kills the birds,” Singer says of the normal harvest methods. “If you have to consider everything, then you have to consider everything.”

In 2013, he introduced Filthy cocktail cherries, which are now found behind bars across the country and on store shelves, including at Costco and Walmart. He sells both black and red cherries, as well as black cherry syrup, which is perfect for making a Scotch-based Rob Roy.

“Daniel changed the garnish game with a reliable, well-made product that’s consistent
and we all trust and love,” says Shauna O’Neil, veteran Miami bartender and co-creator of
Cultor canned tequila cocktails, who’s known Singer for more than a decade. To her, the meticulousness behind Filthy mirrors the person behind it.

“His attention to detail is borderline obsessive.”