Introducing the Bognor Gothic cocktail

Bognor Gothic the font

A friend recently asked me to come up with a cocktail to go with a new font he had created.

You read that right. I don’t suppose many fonts come with a recommended cocktail, but you know what these creative types* are like. I suppose that, while many classic typefaces were developed to solve practical typesetting problems, others were intended to evoke emotions or associations in the viewer, so perhaps a prescribed drink might help achieve this effect.

To give you an idea of the mood, here is a room in my friend's
house done up in a Victorian Gothic/Arts & Crafts style

My friend lives in Bognor Regis, a town on the south coast of England. It became a fashionable resort in Victorian times and was later favoured by King George V for its healthy sea air, hence the “Regis” suffix. The font is called Bognor Gothic and seems to be a modern nod to the Victorian reinvention of the Gothic. This is what he has to say on the subject:

As Montmartre is to Paris and Soho is to London, so North Bersted is to Bognor Regis. Therefore it is no wonder that Bognor Gothic springs from this quaint “artists quarter” of the sprawling metropolis. It is deeply rooted in the Arts and Crafts movement, being a fine hand-crafted font brought about through a combination of both the belief in the integrity of the artisan and the eschewing of modern technology—albeit through the mechanism of not being arsed to Google other Gothic fonts. Bognor Gothic is a product of its environment, the desolate and blasted landscape of the Victorian seaside town, like the bleak moors but with more arcades and chip shops. Less “Wuthering Heights” and more “Withering Lows.”**

So something self-consciously rustic, artisanal and Victorian. “Our money is on something involving dark rum and absinthe,” he adds.

The Victorian angle put me in mind of some sort of punch or purl, a kind of ale infused with wormwood—particularly the variety that grows in coastal salt marshes—which used to be popular in Victorian times. The wormwood seems to have played the same role as a bittering agent as hops do today. Later the term purl was used for a mulled blend of ale, gin, sugar and spices. Simon Difford lists purl in his cocktail guide as simply gin and ale.

Monin's gingerbread syrup:
doesn't work here

Cocktails with beer are pretty trendy these days,*** presumably going hand in hand with the explosion of “craft” ales. So I start off with gin and beer, using Fuller’s London Pride simply because I have some in the house. Then I add some absinthe (La Fée Parisienne, the new formulation) in accordance with my friend’s suggestion, and as a nod to the original wormwood flavour in purl.

As for the spices, the simplest way to get them in is a spiced syrup. I happen to have some of Monin’s gingerbread syrup, so I experiment with that, but I have to abandon it in the end as it has too dominating a flavour. I don’t know how they make it, but it doesn’t just taste of gingerbread spices—ginger and cinnamon—but somehow of gingerbread. So instead I make an experimental quantity of simple syrup (100ml sugar and 50ml water heated in a pan till it dissolves) with about a teaspoon of Schwartz mixed spice (ground cinnamon, coriander seed, caraway seed, nutmeg, ginger and cloves) plus a few extra whole cloves.

I found that if you start with a double measure (50ml) of gin then you probably don’t want much more than 300ml beer before you start to lose the flavour of the gin. Absinthe always makes its presence felt, and I found that half a teaspoon was ample. A couple of teaspoons of the syrup got those mulling spices involved, and I chose to add a teaspoon of lemon juice for a tartness to balance the sweetness of the sugar. I tried it at room temperature though you could mull it—preferably by plunging a red-hot poker into it in the traditional way.

The Bognor Gothic No.1

The Bognor Gothic No.1
6 shots ale
2 shots gin
2 tsp mixed spice syrup
1 tsp lemon juice
½ tsp absinthe
Combine ingredients in a glass and stir gently.

It’s an interesting drink, with all the flavours discernible at the same time. Whether or not you’ll actually like it depends in the first instance on whether you like absinthe, which is a pretty divisive taste. Or beer, for that matter: between the beer and the absinthe there is a noticeable bitterness to this cocktail, as well as the sweet and sour “cocktaily” elements too.

London Pride has quite a caramel character to it, which made me wonder if the same cocktail might indeed work with dark rum instead of gin. I tried it with some Bacardi Carta Negra, but for some reason I didn’t think it worked so well. It may be that beer and rum aren’t comfortable bedfellows after all, so I decided to backtrack and start again with rum and absinthe as my friend had originally suggested. I didn’t find anything intrinsically quarrelsome here, so I then tried to bring in some spice again, this time using The King’s Ginger liqueur, then lime juice to balance its sweetness (and for a nautical nod).

The Bognor Gothic No.2

The Bognor Gothic No.2
2½ shots dark rum
¾ shot The King’s Ginger
½ shot lime juice
½ tsp absinthe
Shake with ice and serve in some sort of chalice, pewter tankard or hand-turned wooden bowl. Or a cocktail glass.

You may have to play around with the proportions depending on what rum you use. There is actually an existing cocktail called a Green Swizzle (mentioned in the P.G. Woodhouse story The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy) which is probably similar—I say “probably” as there doesn’t seem to be much agreement and Woodhouse doesn't name the ingredients—but with almond-flavoured falernum instead of the ginger liqueur (some modern versions use crème de menthe to get the colour and no absinthe) and presumably with white rum to allow it to be green. And you are also not far from the classic Dark ‘n’ Stormy, mixing dark rum, lime juice and ginger beer.

Once again the absinthe will divide people: Mrs H. hates the stuff, so I tried making one without it but for some reason it didn’t really add up to much, even after I added a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters (which went nicely with the ginger). I suspected it exposed the relatively mild flavour of Bacardi Carta Negra as a “dark” rum, and that one with more of a raspy pot-still character might work better. So I try the experiment again using Myer’s dark Jamaican rum and, although it is different, I again think that the absinthe-free version doesn’t quite come together but the full-on version does.

I couldn’t really say whether this cocktail will help you appreciate the font better, but it leaves me wondering what drinks should accompany other fonts. Times? Something establishment like a whisky and soda, I think. Courier, the classic monospaced typewriter font? Whatever a war correspondent drinks—a cup of cold coffee or anything from a hipflask with a dent from a bullet in it. Slab serif fonts remind me of politically correct textbooks from the late Seventies or early Eighties, so perhaps a Harvey Wallbanger (though the people who wrote those books probably drank chlorophyll smoothies or Fairtrade real ale with twigs floating in it). Gill Sans is one of my favourite fonts and it always reminds me of wartime information posters. What did they drink in the Blitz..?

Any other suggestions gratefully received!

Times

Courier

Slab serif font American Typewriter. Check out Rockwell too

Gill Sans

* Pardon the pun…

** On the subject of Victorian novels, Bognor—or rather the purpose-built resort of Hothampton developed there by speculator Sir Richard Hotham—is believed to be portrayed in Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon.

*** At a bar in St John's Square called The Bear (now closed down) I had an unlikely-sounding but very successful cocktail of gin, IPA beer and sauvignon blanc wine.

Cocktails for Bonfire Night

Right from when I noticed, earlier in the year, that Guy Fawkes night (5th November) fell on a Saturday I had the idea of doing a themed Candlelight Club party, somehow creating cocktails with smoky, fiery flavours.

A few ingredients immediately leapt to mind. First was Chase’s Oak-Smoked Vodka, which is produced in limited editions (now on its second batch) by allowing oak smoke to infuse into the spirit for about a week in a specially designed smoke chamber. It’s an extraordinary taste—and not to everyone’s liking, as my partner observed when he wrinkled his nose and said it smelled like bacon. (I didn’t tell him that bacon vodka is a well-established concept.) But it’s also quite a subtle flavour. I tried various vodka cocktails, such as one called a Hot Tub which combines vodka with pineapple juice and prosecco, but the results weren’t very nice. It works fine in a Bloody Mary, but that’s quite a feisty cocktail for a delicate vodka (and many people are convinced it’s really a breakfast drink). So I decided it perhaps needed showcasing in a simpler recipe and ended up with a Collins/Fizz arrangement and hit on the idea of adding a bit of fruit body from sloe gin, a seasonal and rather English beverage.

Heart of Oak
2 shots Chase oak-smoked vodka
1 shot sloe gin (I used Hayman’s)
½ shot lemon juice
½ shot sugar syrup
soda water
Shake first four ingredients and strain into an ice-filled highball. Top with soda water.

The smoke is not at all puckering or cloying: it’s a subtle background dry waft, almost meaty, indeed like smoked duck or bacon. The sloes are again calm, dry and rather ethereal compared to, say, the blackberries in cassis (see below), with a hint of spice. With the pencil-lead juniper from the base gin this ends up a little like smoked game with a sloe and juniper jus. The lack of cloyingness to the fruit makes this a lean, refreshing number; just the thing to follow a country ramble in the late autumn afternoon—with a suggestion of dinner to come!

In the spring I was introduced to a ballsy product called Fireball, made from Canadian whisky blended with a cinnamon liqueur. Despite its name it’s not really hot, but has a vague pepperiness to its cinnamon spice. But for the name alone I thought it was worth including. One of the brand’s signature serves is a cocktail called Dub Dub’s Apple Pie, cleverly combing the cinnamon of the whisky with apple, a classic pairing. But Fireball is a pretty in-your-face flavour, with a medicinal quality that reminds me of surgical spirit (or rootbeer, depending on your drinking history), so I replaced half of the Fireball with calvados to calm it down a bit while emphasising the apple:

Hot Apple Pie
1 shot Fireball cinnamon whisky
1 shot calvados
1½ shots apple juice
1 shot lemon juice
10ml egg white
1 dash Angostura bitters
Shake all ingredients vigorously and strain into a Martini or coupé glass.

Even in this reduced quantity, the sweetness of the Fireball offsets the lemon juice pretty well, though some might want to add a bit of syrup. It is a lot like baked apple with cinnamon!

There is a well-established simple cocktail called a Smoky Martini which adds a small amount of whisky (most likely a smoky Islay malt or a blend with a high smoked malt content) to a normal Martini (often omitting the vermouth). In a party environment I tend to steer clear of cocktails that are basically all spirit, so I combined this idea with the Abbey/Bronx direction of lengthening it with a small amount of orange juice, plus a sweet-sour mix of sugar syrup and lime juice to give it body.

Smokini
1½ shots gin
½ shot Islay malt whisky
1 shot orange juice
½ shot sugar syrup
¾ shot lime juice
Shake all ingredients and strain into a Martini or coupé glass.

The flavour of this cocktail will obviously depend on your choice of whisky. With Bowmore it is fairly subtle but with Laphroaig it’s more up-front in its smoky, peaty, iodine character. But even using Laphroaig it makes a drink that Mrs H.—who basically doesn’t like whisky—declared to be very tasty.

Everyone seems to be using tea in cockails at the moment, so inevitably the idea of smoked lapsang souchong tea came up. There is a cocktail called a Smoky Old Bastard (on the grounds that it is a bastardisation of an Old Fashioned) that combines Bourbon, lapsang and maple syrup. I had some maple syrup knocking around so I gave it a try. I found it a trifle thin so I experimented with fruiting it up a bit using apricot (which I always think goes rather nicely with bourbon) and plum bitters.

Bonfire of the Vani-Teas
2 shots bourbon
2 shots cold lapsang souchong tea
1 shot crème d’abricot
½ shot lemon juice
¼ shot maple syrup (or regular syrup)
2 dashes plum bitters
Shake all ingredients and strain into a rocks-filled glass

The apricot liqueur adds sweetness so you don’t need much syrup—in fact you probably don’t much notice the fact that it is maple syrup, so I’m sure simple syrup would do just as well. The tannins in the tea dry it out, so it’s quite a refreshing drink, not hefty.

Finally, I wanted to include ginger, and ended up adapting a recipe from the 1940s called El Diablo. This is tequila-based, but I wanted something that better evoked the pagan horrors lurking in the English hedgerow, so I used gin instead, along with the ginger beer, lime and crème de cassis of the original, plus some of Monin’s extraordinary gingerbread syrup, mainly because it seemed seasonal.

The Horned One
2 shots gin
¾ shot crème de cassis
1 shot lime juice
1 tsp (5ml) gingerbread syrup
Ginger beer
Shake first four ingredients and strain into an ice-filled highball. Top with ginger beer.

The gingerbread syrup can be very overwhelming and, even with just a teaspoon, it and the blackcurrant are the dominant flavours—and they go together very well. (I see that Gabriel Boudier makes a blackcurrant and gingerbread liqueur, so I am clearly not the only person who thinks this.) To be honest you aren’t much aware of the gin and it would probably work well with white rum too.

I had just acquired some of Master of Malt’s chipotle (smoked chilli) bitters and was intrigued to try adding some, to turn up the heat of the ginger (some ginger beer has chilli in it), while again adding some smokiness, but Mrs H. persuaded me that it might be nice to have at least one cocktail that was neither hot nor smoky, so I let it lie. For now. Mwah, hah, hah hah…