One small dinger for mankind

A Small Dinger

I have a troubled relationship with grenadine.

It’s an age-old cocktail ingredient, a syrup or cordial traditionally made from pomegranate (it’s name coming from grenade, French for pomegranate), sometimes slightly alcoholic. But modern grenadine is berry-based, mostly blackcurrant. Syrup merchants Monin acknowledge this shift by producing both a “grenadine” and a “pomegranate syrup”. I don’t know why this change happened—perhaps because traditional grenadine is both sweet and tart, and modern palates maybe hanker after something less edgy.

In any case, I find all commercial grenadines have a bubblegum confectionary flavour that, even in small quantities, ruins most cocktails. (Monin’s pomegranate syrup is better, but still a bit synthetic.) So nowadays I make my own, very simply, by mixing equal parts POM Wonderful pomegranate juice (it comes in a dopey-looking segmented bottle but it is 100% pomegranate, apparently) with granulated sugar, heated in a pan until it all dissolves then allowed to cool. (Normal cocktail syrup I make with a ratio of two parts sugar by volume to one part water, but when I tried that with pomegranate juice I discovered that it set into a jelly at room temperature. Something like pectin in the juice? Who knows. But at 1:1 it stays liquid and, kept in the fridge, it seems to avoid going mouldy for a surprisingly long time.)

Anyway, I mention all this because I’d like to introduce you to a cocktail that, for my money, makes grenadine taste good. It’s called a Small Dinger* and I noticed it printed on the frontispiece of the 1935 reprint of Bar Florida Cocktails, in the 2008 facsimile edition produced by Ross Bolton. Its appeal lay in its simplicity and, at the same time, its oddness, mixing rum and gin, augmented only with the straightforward sweet-and-sour combo of grenadine and lemon juice.**

Small Dinger
1 shot gin
1 shot rum
½ shot grenadine
½ lemon juice
Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

But the really odd thing about the Small Dinger is that it really works. For me this is what cocktails are all about—you can pick out the contributions of all the ingredients, but the whole is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. On the nose you notice the fruitiness of the grenadine, then on the tongue you get a clear warmth from the rum, with the sugar spirit flavour coming through, plus the high juniper notes and dry spice complexity of the gin. And the sweet/tart of the grenadine fruit marries well: this is actually quite a high proportion of grenadine (many recipes call for just a dash) but it does not seem cloying as it both has a clear space for itself in the mix and is balanced by the sourness of the lemon juice. (You may need to juggle the exact proportions depending on the sweetness of the grenadine.)

The original recipe for the Small Dinger. Click to enlarge

I first tried this cocktail with Botran Reserva rum—I am, as you know, a fan of the whole Botran range. I’ve also tried it with Havana Club 7-year-old. But, as you can see, the original recipe specifies Bacardi rum (back in those days Bacardi was still made in Cuba, rather than Puerto Rico, Spain and other places, as it is now), a white rum, I assume; so I also tried it with Botran Reserva Blanca and Brugal Blanco. Frankly it works with all of them, though my personal preference would be the darker Botran Reserva, where the complex mid-range notes of dried fruit, vanilla an chocolate slot nicely in with the fresh fruit flavours and the high spice notes of the gin (I’ve been using Tanqueray as a typical, classic style for this experiment).

All I can really say is: try it. It needs no special ingredients (well, I would advise making your own grenadine, though it may work with commercial stuff) but represents that sort of mixological earth magic that we all have easy access to.

* You will find some suggestions online that the name is lewd, but so far as I can tell a dinger is just a contraction of 19th-century humdinger—a thing that is an excellent example of its kind.

** It’s not a common cocktail but some recipes you’ll find actually specify lime juice. It’s a bit of a controversy because some of these early Cuban books talk about limón verde, meaning lime, but which was sloppily translated just as “lemon”. Yet this recipe, as you can see, specifies simply jugo limon, so I assume we’re on fairly safe ground using lemon juice. It works nicely with lime too.

The looking-glass half full…

David with a row of Pop Goes the Walrus cocktails

As I have commented before, I don’t normally do bar reviews, but I was invited along a couple of weeks ago to the launch of a new watering hole managed by a chum, David Hamilton-Boyd. I actually know David more for food than drink, as he has in the past run the food operation at Candlelight Club events—a fact that seemed to become more significant as the evening went on.

The place is called the Looking Glass Cocktail Club and, as the name suggests, there is an Alice in Wonderland theme going on. The Hackney Road venue has a small front bar decorated in standard Hoxton style with patches of exposed brickwork and pendant clusters of those exposed-filament lightbulbs you see everywhere. At the back, to the right of the bar is a huge gilt-framed mirror—which one would probably assume was just that, were it not for the fact that, at least on the launch night, there was a girl opening and closing it. Yes, it is a door into the much larger back bar. Through the looking glass indeed.

Entertainment

The styling of the back bar was similar, with a sparse collection of low furniture in clumps around the sides. I gather that some artwork will be going up on the walls. I spoke to the owner, who, interestingly, wanted his bar to become a venue for leftfield performance art—and indeed we were treated to some surreal keening from a young lady in skeletal corsetry. Oddly, though, there is no stage and the owner has no intention to install one.

But what of the drinks? As David zipped energetically about behind the bar clad in a purple Mad Hatter-esque topper and tie, I sampled four of the libations on offer. Some of them have Lewis Carroll names like Check Mate, Pop Goes the Walrus and the Looking Glass Fizz, while three of them have tea-related names and are indeed served in teacups—here evoking the Mad Hatter’s tea party, rather than the more common Prohibition speakeasy connotations. First up was the Shades of Green, blending the highly characterful, single-distilled Vestal vodka with a homemade dill syrup and absinthe mist, served with a cornichon pickle. The vegetal notes dominate, aromatic dill blending with the absinthe botanicals and the tart sappiness of the pickle, plus some saltiness from somewhere. David won a Vestal competition with this one.

Next I try the Pop Goes the Walrus, a psychedelic tour de force based around “buttered popcorn bourbon”. I’d previously heard that David made this, and I had tried to imagine what popcorn really tastes of other than the things one tends to put on it, like butter, caramel, salt, etc. Here the flavoured bourbon is blended with caramel syrup and milk, and served with a few bits of popcorn floating in it. Straightaway you get a bitter, toasted waft on the nose that does indeed remind you of popcorn, along with a butteriness too. On the palate there is a strange green, savoury note. Overall the cocktail is a like a buttery Baileys but with a drying cereal element—it does remind you of what popcorn tastes like. (It’s also unsurprisingly rich, so I doubt you would assay more than one in an evening.)

Then David hands me a Modern Gentleman. He is unable to explain why he gave it that name, but at £12 it’s the priciest drink on the menu—being based around El Dorado 21-year-old rum. It’s essentially a sort of rum Old Fashioned, sweetened with salted caramel and served with both an orange wedge and a spray of Mozart chocolate bitters over the top. This construction intrigued me, as the aroma of the bitters lingered for the whole life of the drink, blending with the sweet orange scent, always present on the nose but not really on the tongue. I guess the idea was to highlight the chocolate, orange and caramel notes in the rum, and I picked up elements of vanilla and banana too. And then there’s the salt again, here suggesting maritime brine, which seemed apt for a drink like rum, with its seafaring connotations.

Could this be the dill or tarragon syrup?

But this is what struck me most about the cocktails I tasted: their savouriness, whether it is the salt, the herby vegetable flavours or the dry cereal angle. I don’t have an especially sweet tooth, so I’m always being reminded to make sure the Candlelight Club cocktails are not too dry. But classic cocktail construction tends to revolve around a balance between the poles of spirit, sweet, sour, and maybe bitter herbal notes from vermouth, Campari, absinthe or aromatic bitters. The savoury elements in David’s cocktails reminded me more of food than anything. It could be a reflection of his other life as a chef, but to be honest it is a trend that has been going on for a while.

Perhaps the desire to break away from traditional cocktail flavours to explore new ones has been inspired by the way that deconstructionist “molecular gastronomy” has inspired “molecular mixology”, as evinced by places like Purl and its sister the Worship Street Whistling Shop, or the pop-up Burlington Social Club last year, where guests could enjoy cocktails made with “protein” served from eggshells. I applaud all such experimentation, though I find that in some cases it can be all mouth and no trousers—if you hadn’t read the elaborate description of what went into the drink and the exotic techniques involved, you would probably dismiss the result as something that just doesn’t taste of very much. And in some cases I also find the “theatre” just a bit too annoying, like the time I was served a cocktail that came entombed in a Bible and which somehow had to be consumed while inhaling from a vessel of frankincense smoke. Sometimes you just want a drink.

Mercifully David’s drinks don’t stray into that territory. But looking down the list I was struck by how foodie they seemed. The Looking Glass fizz consists of “stewed brambly apples” with blackberries and gingerbread and, almost as an afterthought, some Prosecco. The Check Mate contains star anise, vanilla and cinnamon tequila with pineapple juice and lemon curd (!). The High Tea goes even further and contains “oat-steeped vodka”, strawberry jam, milk and a rum & raisin cream.

A previously enjoyed Pop Goes the Walrus (in
the foreground), Modern Gentleman (left) and
Shades of Green (right)

My last cocktail at the Looking Glass Cocktail Club was the Storm in a Tea Cup, a mixture of bergamot liqueur, smoked vanilla vodka, lavender-infused Earl Grey tea and lemon juice. It had a satisfying balance of citrus, sweetness and tannin. (Tea may be fashionable in cocktails at the moment, but its used in mixed drinks goes right back to the first punches, which often contained it.) I found this actually the most moreish of the drinks I tried, and also liked the fact that it is served (in a teacup, naturally) with a sugar cube on the side in a spoon, a sugar cube impregnated with grapefruit bitters. The cube is not that eager to dissolve, so you can dunk it into your cocktail for as long as you wish, to achieve the sweetness that suits your palate. I liked this simple element of customization, but overall I just thought it combined intriguing complexity with a user-friendly approachability.

And if you just want a pleasant night out, it makes a more agreeable tipple than, say, wasp-infused tequila with a sump-oil foam and a methane mist, all served at one’s table in the cupped hands of a South American street urchin…

Botran Reserva Blanca

Francis from Distillnation came round the other day to drop off some absinthe and he presented me also with a handsome bottle of Botran’s new Blanca Reserva. It doesn’t officially launch in the UK till later this year, but when it does it will retail for about £22.

Botran are a Guatemalan family firm who have been making rum since 1939. Originally sugar cane planters, they still make all their rum with virgin cane juice from their own family estate in Retalhuleu, in the south of the country, using their own strain of yeast taken from pineapple, before ageing it slowly in the cool mountain town of Quetzaltenango. They use a mixture of bourbon (sometimes re-charred), sherry and port barrels and practise a “solera” system, more usually found in sherry production, where rums of different ages are constantly blended. To get an idea of just how elaborate this is, have a look at the flow chart below. Their current range consists of the Reserva, containing rums aged 5–14 years, and the Solera 1893, a drier, more profound blend of rums aged 5–18 years.

Click on the image to see a larger version

Their new white rum is not quite what it seems: for it too has been barrel aged using the solera technique; the current bottling contains rums aged 3–5 years and is made in the same way as the Reserva, except that there is no port barrel ageing. It is then charcoal filtered to remove the colour. Whereas most white rums are intended as mixers, Botran say theirs can be enjoyed both in cocktails and simply on the rocks.

Straightaway I can tell you that this Blanca makes a cracking Daiquiri,* with the rum coming through as tight and fruity, with a petrolly spirit thrust that pokes through the lime and sugar, yet bonds smoothly and perfectly with those flavours too. I try a Mary Pickford,** and again the rum lends an elegant power to this frothy, fruity number.

Neat, the Reserva Blanca has a juicy nose with elements of marzipan and cherry Bakewell. The palate is very soft and smooth for a white rum, and maintains the marzipan flavours. I have bottles of Bacardi and Havana Club 3-year-old to hand so I try them alongside: the Bacardi has a dry, sour nose by comparison, whereas the Botran is mellow and inviting with hints of chocolate. Likewise the Bacardi is thin and sharp on the palate, with a hint of blue cheese and seemingly a bit watery (though it is 37.5% ABV compared to the Botran’s 40%).

A Daiquiri made with Botran Reserva Blanca

The Havana Club has, unsurprisingly, a strong wood element on the nose and a tequila-like sourness. The palate likewise has a sawmill wood character plus a crude banana fruit. It somehow reminds me of the inside of a rubber balloon, and is quite tough to drink on its own. All of which goes to show how sophisticated the Botran is for a white rum, and how it is indeed a white rum you can enjoy neat.

OK, so the Botran Reserva Blanca will retail for almost double what you can find the Bacardi and Havana Club rums for in supermarket offers, but inevitably that careful ageing and filtering is going to come at a price. But how does the Blanca compare with the standard Botran Reserva? The Reserva has more obvious wood, plus dried fruit like figs, orange and raisins. I have a bottle of Havana Club 7-year-old knocking around so I do a comparison: this is dry, appley like Calvados and has a more stern, single-minded balance. By comparison the Botran Reserva is wreathed in sweet sugar and almond softness and smooth, smoky wood.

A Mary Pickford made with the Botran Blanca

Side by side, the Blanca has a much quieter nose than the Reserva, delicate, clean with a hint of a vodka-like medicinal note. The Reserva on the other hand immediately hits you with strong sherry notes, plus all that dried fruit. On the palate the Blanca channels more of the underlying sugar spirit character, a fuel for cocktails, but so much smoother than a typical white rum. The Reserva, by comparison, has a distinct oak wood character, which carries an acidity on the tongue that makes it in some ways less smooth than the Blanca.

This comparison helps me understand where the Blanca fits into the range. Whereas the Reserva (and more so the Solera 1893) is about in-your-face character and complexity, the Blanca is more about smoothness. I can see why they might encourage consumers to drink it neat, perhaps not as a profound character study, but as a clean, classy shot like premium vodka.

With this thought in mind I tried the Blanca from the freezer. It works OK, coming across at first with vodka-like medicinal notes, before the fruitiness hits and the sugar. I wouldn’t especially recommend it (but then I’ve never met a decent vodka that I thought was improved by being served frozen), yet it works well enough. For me the Botran Reserva Blanca works best in simple, classic rum cocktails.

* 2½ shots rum, ¾ shot lime juice, ¾ shot sugar syrup

** 2 shots rum, 2 shots pineapple juice, 1 tsp grenadine, dash of maraschino

Bootlegger white grain spirit

The utilitarian bottle and deliberately ragged label

It was at the London Boutique Bar Show last year that I first encountered Bootlegger. All their branding screams “Prohibition”—the utilitarian bottles and rough labels, the logo depicting a home still, and the “packing crate” style wooden presentation boxes. What with my involvement with the Candlelight Club I was inevitably curious.

Bootlegger is a spirit designed to evoke the unaged “moonshine” whiskey produced illicitly during Prohibition. There has actually been something of a trend towards bottling such “white dog” whiskies. Georgia Moon (actually made in Kentucky by Heaven Hill) comes in a large jam jar and proudly boasts it is no more than 30 days old. Buffalo Trace, Heaven Hill and Maker’s Mark have all bottled white versions of the spirits that usually go on to make their aged products, and in October Jack Daniel’s announced the launch of an unaged rye-heavy “white” whiskey. While there are many artisanal, crafted white dogs being made in the US, apparently very creditably, there is nevertheless a reason why most whiskey is aged in wood, at great expense, for a number of years. I’ve not actually tasted Georgia Moon—because the smell of the eye-watering fumes coming off it when the jam jar lid was unscrewed put me off. And the unaged bottlings of mainstream whiskeys are often presented more as experimental, “educational” products, to illustrate the journey that the “proper” products make towards their final matured form.

Note the rather pleasing indentations in the sides of the
bottle, giving your shaking fingers a good grip

So I didn’t have very high hopes when I tasted Bootlegger at the bar show—and I was pleasantly surprised. There is a whiff of vanilla and caramel on the nose (which reminds me a bit of Bailey’s) plus a warmth of dry grain spirit underneath. There is plenty of pepper on the palate but it is actually pretty smooth, again with vanilla, caramel and a chocolate finish, maybe with a hint of dry oatmeal. They are so confident of the palatability of their product that the preferred serve is actually sipped neat.

Given all the Prohibition associations, I was surprised to discover that Bootlegger is actually made in the UK for Halewood International. And it’s made entirely from wheat, not an obvious American whiskey grain. (There are wheated blends—Buffalo Trace have bottled a wheated white dog which normally goes on to make Pappy Van Winkle and W.L. Weller—but even here the wheat is part of a mix of grains.) “I did quite a bit of research,” says Halewood's Peter Eaton, whose brainchild Bootlegger was, “and they made moonshine out of pretty much anything that was to hand. We tried loads of different grains—and to be honest some of them, when I tasted the finished spirit, nearly burned my tongue off—but what we landed up with was a precise combination of English and French winter wheats, which produced the smoothest liquid.”

Bootlegger is entirely unaged, but has an “oak tincture” added, which gives that woody vanilla element, along with a slight yellow colour, to mimic the effect of the barrels that would have been used to transport moonshine—what Peter calls the “transportation flavour”. (House Spirit White Dog, another brand, is barrel aged for precisely three hours to achieve the same effect.) So in practice Bootlegger is arguably more like a moonshine-flavoured vodka. The wheat spirit undergoes a “multiple distillation process which results in a liquid of exceptional purity”—very much the way premium vodkas sell themselves. So you end up with something with the illicit associations of moonshine, and an appealing vanilla woody whiskeyness, yet with none of the searing roughness that can so easily characterise unaged whiskey, the mellowness coming in this case from the wheat grain and the multiple distillation rather than barrel ageing.

The label is all about Prohibition

Despite the emphasis on serving Bootlegger neat (their slogan is “Made for sippin’ while the moon shines”) it also makes a useful cocktail base, being relatively neutral with that light vanilla character. We based our Christmas Candlelight Club event around Bootlegger and served their signature cocktail, the Al Capone:

Al Capone
1½ shots Bootlegger
½ shot Grand Marnier
½ shot sugar syrup
½ shot lemon juice
2 dashes of bitters
Champagne to top
Raspberry to garnish
     Shake Bootlegger, Grand Marnier, bitters, lemon juice and sugar syrup in a cocktail shaker with ice and strain into a cocktail glass or coupette. Top with Champagne and garnish with a raspberry.

An Al Capone cocktail

Not dissimilar to Dale de Groff’s Ritz cocktail, this is a dangerously agreeable tipple, with orange and lemon backed by spirit warmth and the Champagne drying it slightly and adding a sparkling shimmer. It’s hard to imagine Al Capone drinking one, but if you ask the Internet what Al’s favourite tipple was, the only answer that comes back is Templeton Rye, made in the Iowa town of Templeton; evidently the townsfolk managed to keep producing throughout Prohibition, helped by Capone’s fondness for the stuff. And on the Templeton Rye website today is a cocktail called the Capone, essentially the same as this one but without the lemon and sugar. It’s not a Prohibition era drink, though—there is a YouTube video in which brand manager Michael Killmer says that he invented it himself.

Because it was a Christmas Ball, we threw in a cocktail of our own, invented for the Candlelight Club by Will Sprunt. Originally using gin as its base, it also works very well with Bootlegger, the vanilla element partnering well with cherry. The rosemary sounds unlikely, but what is fascinating about this drink is how well cherry and rosemary go together.

Cherry Christmas
2 shots Bootlegger
¾ shot cherry brandy
½ shot sugar syrup
¼ shot rosemary tincture
Dash of cherry bitters
Top with cranberry juice
     Shake everything but the cranberry with ice and strain into an ice-filled highball. Top with the juice and stir briefly. The rosemary tincture is created by adding fresh rosemary to vodka (maybe four sprigs per bottle, bruised a bit if possible) and leaving it to soak for about 24 hours.

If you’re curious to try Bootlegger, we’ll also be serving it to sip or a cocktail at our next Candlelight Club party, on 25th and 26th January…

Fentimans & Bloom Pre-mixed Gin & Tonic

Fans of the site will know that I have a penchant fro premixes and it has been a puzzlement to me that no-one had made a very decent pre-mixed gin and tonic so imagine my intrigue when I saw that Fentimans had teamed up with Bloom Gin to make a high-end gin and tonic.

This is bottled in Fentimans standard 250ml bottle and comes with a high-end price tag of £3.99 a bottle (I got mine for a discount to £3.50).

It is bottled at 6.5%ABV which as Bloom is bottled at 40% means the drink is one part gin to six parts tonic.

THE TASTE

CHILLED: OK but too bitter at the end and only a little zestiness. The gin is there but it is rather lost. Part of this is due to the alcoholic weakness of the gin.

WITH ICE: much better with ice but still decidedly mediocre. Not even a patch on a fresh made Bloom Gin and tonic; which can be superb!
Fentimans-wise I'd rather have a chilled bottle of their (non-alcoholic) ginger beer on it's own.

This combination does neither the gin the tonic or the attractive bottle justice.

In Conclusion
To my mind this disappointing product is a waste of time. The gin is not nearly strong enough and it represents poor value for money.

Kopparberg Naked Apple sparkling cider

Continuing our recent spate of cider articles, perfect to refresh yourself in this warm weather. Today we will look at another Kopparberg, namely Naked Apple.* This was released in late april 2012 and designed to be a scantily clad** version of their cider, basically it is just apple rather than being adulterated with another flavour.*** It is bottled at 4.5% ABV.

On with the tasting...

THE TASTE

Nose: Sour apple (like a Bramley)
Taste: Fresh, crisp and slightly tart. Medium-high fizz, some hints of vanilla and winter spice; a very respectable fizzy cider (I usually prefer mine still). For any fans of sparkling cider this is definitely worth trying.

Over ice: Clean and crisp dry apple, the fizz is reduced, rather good. I prefer this cider chilled rather than “on the rocks” but if you want that extra cooling factor then the cider holds up well.

* I’m not quite sure why such titillation is applied to apple (Chase’s Naked Vodka is also Apple based.)
** They use the term strip*ed-d*wn but I thought that was too scandalous for the IAE—a place of science.
*** Kopparberg have made a plain apple cider before but I remember it being rather different from the Naked Apple (although it is a few years since I last tried it—the old one was fizzier and less crisp.)

Beefeater 24 global cocktail competition

The 14 hopefuls set up their stations as guests sample the cocktails and make their choices

I was invited to help judge the Beefeater 24 Global Competition last Wednesday evening at the Shoreditch Studios in London. Beefeater had flown in hopeful bartenders from all over the world, vying for the prize of a trip to Japan, and earlier in the day they had encountered challenges measuring all aspects of modern bartending, including food matching. The organisers are looking for more than just the finished drink, judging overall ability to be a host and, unsurprisingly, an understanding of Beefeater 24 and its history and place in the cocktail pantheon. But our role was simply to taste 14 cocktails and choose our favourite.

It’s always interesting to go into a bar, study the menu, try a few drinks and get a clear sense of how this particularly mixologist’s thoughts and palate work. But it’s not often you’ll find yourself confronted with 14 different sensibilities in the same room. Having said that, it was noticeable how much similarity there was in the ingredients. Tim Stones, a B24 ambassador, explained that the contestants were told they had to include tea (Japanese sencha tea and Chinese green tea are ingredients in Beefeater 24). But grapefruit was also common (grapefruit peel is in the botanical mix of the gin too, along with more conventional orange and lemon peel) as was honey and elderflower. Tim mentioned that in the past you would get clear national styles emerging when judging competitions like this, but nowadays bartending is a much more global community and the styles are more homogenised and the standard higher. (Though he did mention that in an early heat one chap presented a simple gin and tonic as his entry—Tim couldn’t decide if he had misunderstood the idea of the competition or if he just had enormous front…)

These were the cocktails on offer:

Mr Burroughs’ Reviver
Nathan O’Neil, United Kingdom
The Mr Burroughs in question turns out to be Beefeater founder James Burroughs and not, as I had hoped, elegant beatnik hallucinatory wordsmith William Burroughs. The cocktail is a variant of the Corpse Reviver No.2, featuring absinthe (but, mercifully, no heroin, peyote, yage, bug powder, the True Black Meat of the Giant Centipede, or any of the other intoxicants that feature in Mr Burroughs’ oeuvre). The absinthe is infused with lapsang souchong tea, and there is also a green tea and sencha tea syrup, aquavit, orgeat and lemon juice. The nose is dominated by lemon, but the palate is more complex, with notes of honey, warming anise and something floral. I liked these elements but I think overall it doesn’t have the righteous balance of a normal Corpse Reviver.

The Trading Company Martini—not much
like a Martini, really

Trading Company Martini
Marko Radičev, Serbia
Named after the East India Trading Company, this drink takes its inspiration from ingredients that were shipped to this country by that goliath of a corporation (James Burroughs’ father was a tea merchant himself, which is where today’s master distiller Desmond Payne got the idea for B24). It has a nose of weak lemon and a palate that is surprisingly light and thin with a citrus peel/tea bitterness. Probably too bitter for many, and not really much like a Martini.

Ginjamboa
Diogo Quinaz, Portugal
The name comes from the main ingredients, gin, fresh ginger and grapefruit (jamboa in Portuguese). The nose is of honey and ginger plus a medicinal note and the palate is very bold but very balanced—sweetness from honey, tartness from citrus, tannin dryness from tea and a fiery finish from ginger. This was one of my favourites, robust and to-the-point but also multi-faceted, with all the ingredients playing their part. Which is what a good cocktail is all about.

The So British
Aurélie Pezet, France
Aurélie uses a special blend of Earl Grey (which she considers quintessentially English) flavoured with lime and grapefruit peel and some sort of purple flower for which she could not think of the English name. There is also elderflower and grapefruit juice in the mix. The drink has a surprising pungence from the elderflower and waxy honey, combined with a refreshing citrus tang. The notes of Earl Grey and elderflower do somehow seen redolent of an English summer, so I can forgive the cheesy name.

Diogo Quinaz with his Ginjamboa

Desert Punch
Alexander Frezza, Italy
Alexander takes his inspiration from the Moroccan tea ceremony, and in particular the punch-style idea of a drink as an evolving group experience rather than a single serving. Moroccan tea is poured from a height into small glasses and the drinker is expected to have several of these. The fresh mint in the pot gradually infuses a bitterness into the tea as is steeps, and the saying goes (if I remember it correctly) that the first glass is as fresh as life, the second as sweet as love and the third as bitter as death. Not sure that third glass is really selling itself to me. This simple cocktail—just gin, tea, citrus and mint—is light and does have a refreshing mint flavour with a bitter finish, though I’m not sure it could hold my interest long enough to make it to that deathly third glass.

Mr Oolong’s Fixer Upper
Hasse Bank Johansen, Nordic
Hasse runs a bar in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, on the Jutland peninsula, where he is pretty much inventing the market. He takes great delight in introducing mixology to people who may never had tasted a cocktail before. He studied bartending in Japan for a while, where his teacher was actually called Mr Oolong and served them all oolong tea each morning to wake them up from the previous night’s indulgence, so this drink was named in his honour. As Hasse says, it is a Martini-style cocktail, with the gin strongly to the fore, plus a homemade oolong cordial, citric acid and some grapefruit bitters. I admired the restraint, giving the podium to the gin rather than trying to show off, while the other ingredients did a good job of adding just the right amounts of sweetness, sourness and tannic dryness. It’s the sort of drink I would actually order in a bar.

Elletaria
Raphaël Trémérie, Belgium
The name is the Latin for cardamom, and the cocktail also has a green tea syrup, apple and lime. Raphaël had a picnic hamper on display with little phials of the ingredients and his suggestion was that it was something anyone could make, though I doubt most people would want to take this chemistry set with them on a picnic. The drink has a vivid green colour which Raphaël said came from the tea, though it looked rather artificial to me (like Monin’s Green Apple Syrup, which may have been involved). The green tea is pronounced and I liked the appley aromatics, though it’s a bit sweet for me with a confectionary note that would probably put me off from drinking very much of it.

Belgium's entry, Raphaël Trémérie's chemistry-set picnic concept of the Elletaria cocktail

La Bella Donna
Sarah Parniak, Canada
Sarah is proud of her Italian roots, hence the name of this drink, though I’m not entirely clear on what’s particularly Italian about the recipe: sencha tea, liquorice, honey, Lillet Rose, orange blossom water, grapefruit oil and a homemade lemon cordial. It has a light, delicate, evasive flavour, with beeswax headiness of the honey and liquorice coming through and, oddly, a hint of rose (and apparently I’m not the only person to get that), even though there is no rose in it. Perhaps it is the blossom combining with something else. I think Sarah said she created the recipe with flavours that reminded her of time spent with her Italian grandmother, and this light, fresh, aromatic drink, does have teasing ghosts of scent that seem reminiscent of a half-remembered past.

As the judges deliberate, in the background Jamil, with his Japanese teapot,
rustles up a coconut-flavoured Coco Verde

Coco Verde
Jamil El Azem, Austria
Jamil described this as a “gin-based fancy Japanese cocktail”, serving it from an elegant Japanese tea pot, and its ingredients include green tea and sake, but also a syrup made from dried coconut. This is very important to him and he kept emphasising how unusual it was to have coconut in a cocktail these days and how he wanted to rehabilitate it as an ingredient. (I think he had consumed quite a few of his own cocktails by the time I spoke to him…) The coconut is actually quite subtle in the finished drink, with tangy lime juice to the fore and the tea clearly present, plus a mysterious earthy element that might come from the sake, with its distinctive dry, savoury flavour. Jamil seemed rather affronted when I suggested an earthy note, but, as I say, he was three sheets to the wind by this stage. Actually quite a poised drink in some ways but perhaps more “interesting” than moreish.

The 24/7 Cocktail
Gregory Ian Sanderson, Australia
When I asked Greg what his cocktail was all about he began a spiel about how the name comes from the fact that as a barman he likes to entertain 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and my heart began to sink. But he’s a likeable chap who had an unusual twist to his offering. The basic recipe is fairly simple, combining the gin with grapefruit juice, elderflower liqueur and his own tea blend that includes sencha and lapsang souchong (he admits the tea on its own is too strong and bitter to be very nice but is designed to work in the cocktail). But just before he serves it he invites you to roll a die on to a wooden backgammon board on which he has laid out little bowls of six of the dried botanicals from the gin. Next to each bowl is an atomiser containing an extract of that botanical. Depending on which number comes up when you roll, Greg sprays that essence into the air over your drink before handing it to you. It’s an interesting idea to build in an element of randomness like this, and also just the idea that each iteration of a cocktail is designed to vary. For me, liquorice root came up, and the nose of grapefruit and elderflower was joined by a woody note. As if that wasn’t enough, Greg serves his cocktail from a teapot, and encourages you to taste a grapefruit-dipped morsel of duck rillette with your cocktail (which goes remarkably well). On its own, though, the cocktail was nice enough, with an interesting bitter-sweet finish, but perhaps a tad disappointing after all the build-up.

Greg dispenses his B24/7, complete with Dice Man spritz and duck rillette

B.P. Ruby @ 24
Eduard Ondracek, Czech Republic
This raspberry-dominated drink has evolved since its inception, its creator told me. An early version that got him through the heats had mint and crushed ice in it, but then the seasons changed so he removed those elements. The version I tasted had an Earl Grey syrup and, oddly, Maldon sea salt in the gin. On the nose, to me, it seemed to smell of tomato, making me expect a Bloody Mary: whether it is the salt doing this (can you smell salt?), I don’t know. On the palate it is mostly fresh raspberry with a rich texture from egg white. The salt is pronounced and it isn’t revolting, but I’m not sure it’s helping much. I think it would make it hard to drink very much of this cocktail.

B24 Martinez
Alex Chatte, Hong Kong
I think in this cocktail the tea was infused directly into the gin, and the other ingredients include Italian and French dry vermouths, grapefruit bitters and a late-harvest Sauvignon Blanc reduction with honeycomb. (Although representing Hong Kong, Alex comes originally from France, so it’s not surprising that wine should feature in his recipe.) Unusually, Alex invites to you try the drink with a nibble of 74%-cocoa-solid chocolate with Szechuan pepper. On the nose the cocktail is dry and aromatic with notes of honey and lavender, while the palate is sweeter and has that now familiar wax note from honey. With sour and tea-tannin bitter elements, the cocktail avoids being cloying, and in fact is relatively light to match with a heavyweight like chocolate, but it does work in an unexpected way. But if you’re going to spend an evening pummelling your liver with cocktails, it doesn’t seem fair to be encouraged to scoff chocs at the same time!

The Watchman’s Wife
Katrin Reitz, Germany
The watchman in the name is the Beefeater himself, guarding the Tower of London, and the reference to his wife is a nod to what Katrin sees as the floral, more feminine elements in this drink. Apples and pears are muddled with a cardamom syrup, oolong tea, rosewater and lime, but this cocktail is most noticeable for being the only one here that uses tonic water (in this case Thomas Henry, a German brand that is very good but hard to come by in the UK). Given that G&T is doubtless the default way of consuming gin for most people in this country (and probably the world), it is surprising that there aren’t more cocktails based on this combo. Katrin’s drink was masterfully balanced, with apple, pear, tea and rose all slotting into place, but you could also just enjoy it as a G&T, and for that reason I ultimately decided it was my pick of the bunch.

Pandora’s Box
Panagiotis Kanavetas, Greece
In addition to curaçao, lemon juice, agave syrup, peach bitters and citrus tea, this cocktail, unusually, featured milk—which I assume is a reference to the milk that is often added to tea. Its creator told me that the tea is usually served as a tea bag, infusing in the cocktail glass, which must further enhance the reference. I’m sure the name came from a desire to highlight his nation’s mythological tradition, though by the time he served it to me Panagiotis had actually changed it: he said he had realised that most of the things that came out of Pandora’s Box were actually unpleasant, so maybe it wasn’t such a great name… The end result is quite simple, with a big citrus jolt, followed by a sort of lactic mouthfeel, then the drying tannins. But to be honest I think I’d sooner just have a cup of tea.

Canada's Sarah Parniak talks a customer through her La Bella Donna cocktail

In the end I gave my top three as 1) the Watchman’s Wife for combining balanced complexity with straightforward drinkability, 2) the Ginjamboa for much the same reason, being multifaceted but bold enough that you didn’t have to concentrate too hard to get interest out of it, and 3) the So British, again a punchy drink with a subtle aura of English-summer grace notes. I’m pleased to say that the Watchman’s Wife won the public vote, so clearly we were all thinking along similar lines.* And it supports the notion that a good cocktail has to be more than just tricksy, playful or complex—it has to satisfy, the sort of drink you want when you just fancy a drink, a drink you don’t have to think about too hard to enjoy.

* The overall winner of the competition, judged by the organisers, was the UK's Nathan O’Neill.