Welcome, RTD Cocktail Club Members, to our fifth installment! Each month we will be featuring a classic cocktail, sharing the story behind it, and bottling it along with three interesting variations for you to try and enjoy at home. This week, we take a look at the pairing of Gin and Lime in four classic cocktails.
History
Lime and gin have a not so romantic but highly influential political history that perfectly portrays how cocktails and the world have come to be in 2020. Lime isn’t the only good option for gin as a citrus fruit, however, in the early 19th century when the British army was falling from scurvy, lime happened to be the easiest vitamin-c-rich citrus fruit to preserve, that was it. The enforcements were given shots of lime as medicine and the officers that had rations of gin would add gin to make the lime juice easier to take. To preserve the lime juice, sugar was added, and there you have the gimlet. Turn this story into the prevention of malaria in India with the British occupation and you have gin, tonic, and lime. Original medicine with methods that were conquerable. Keep going and you see the acquisition of other territories in South America, Asia, and Africa to not only get the trees that grew these medicines (ie: lime and cinchona bark) but to clear land to grow these crops with slave labor to then export back to their militaries. So gin, lime, and sugar stuck.
So, to continue that trend with how things get popular is just who has the money and power to influence on such a large scale and we see the gimlet transform from a medicine to a classic cocktail and then grow from there. There are many many many delicious gin and lime drinks that will never come back out from obscurity and there are others that happened to fall into the hands of the influential.
Following are two cocktails that intentionally came after the pairing of gin and lime, how they came to be, and where they are today. Let’s start with the Last Word Cocktail. This is a Prohibition-era cocktail from the early 1920’s that was brought into the world at the Detroit Athletic Club. The drink died out in obscurity but was revived in 2005 at the Zig Zag cafe in Seattle and was cemented into popularity on modern menus through bars like the Pegu Club in New York City. This cocktail combines gin, lime, maraschino liqueur, and green chartreuse in equal parts. This shaping of a drink with sweet and herbal elements added to the base sour led to an entire modern genre of last word variations.
While Al Capone isn’t Audrey Sauders, he was also pretty influential. The Southside cocktail has a much less well documented and traceable history but the version that I prefer places Al Capone in the South Side of Chicago sipping on some bad gin. Rumor has it that this was his favorite beverage - it was sweeter and lighter than other gin drinks, which it needed to be because apparently the gin imported into the North Side was high quality but the gin that Capone was getting into the South Side was low-quality bathtub gin. Hence the mint, lime, and sugar perfectly liven and cover it up. The Southside cocktail as a gin based sour or fizz with the addition of mint is not nearly as popular as it’s cousin the Mojito, which in its backbone is the same thing but with rum. Cheers!
INGREDIENTS & EXTRAS
Green Chartreuse - In 1605, Carthusian monks were gifted a recipe for an ancient ‘elixir for a long life’. This herbal, drinkable medicine became popular and, in 1737, the monks started to distill it near their Grand Chartreuse Monastery. When they realized that it was being drunk as a beverage and not just as a medicine they adapted the recipe, and in 1840 we welcomed to the world Green Chartreuse. Green Chartreuse is a maceration of 130 herbs, spices, flowers, and other botanicals that sits at 55% alcohol or 110 proof. A couple fun things about Chartreuse: at any given time only two monks know the 130 herbs and how to use them to create the types of chartreuse (there is a yellow and an elixir, too!) that is, their formulation, as well as how to produce the distinct green and yellow color. Also, the color chartreuse is named after the green chartreuse liqueur, not vice versa.
Dry Curaçao - When the Spanish came to the island of Curaçao they tried planting their Seville, or bitter orange, trees. They did not take well to the climate and after they were abandoned they evolved into the Lahara orange. Not edible but highly aromatic, the peel of this fruit was used to make a rum based orange liqueur called Dry Curaçao during the Dutch occupation with the company Bols claiming to be the first, but with many companies having a say. This led to triple sec which is a french liqueur made with bitter and sweet orange peels (think Cointreau and Grand Marnier) and an important ingredient in classic margarita and sidecar recipes. We used Pierre Ferrand’s Dry Curaçao which uses the french technique of triple distillation as well as dry curacao tradition with the lahara orange peels.
Recipes
GIMLET
2 oz Bimini Coconut Gin
.75 oz RTD Lime Cordial
Lime twist for garnish
Combine ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake vigorously for 10-15 seconds and fine-strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with a lime twist
SOUTHSIDE
2 oz Bimini BR1 Gin
1 oz Fresh Lime Juice
.75 oz Simple Syrup
2-3 Mint Leaves
Mint leaf for garnish
**Follow directions for the Gimlet
Garnish with a slapped mint leaf.
LAST WORD
.75 oz Bimini Overproof Gin
.75 oz Green Chartreuse Liqueur
.75 oz Luxardo Maraschino Liqueur
.75 oz Fresh Lime Juice
Cherry for garnish
**Follow directions for the Gimlet
Garnish with a cherry.
DAISY
1.5 oz Classic Bimini Gin
.75 oz Fresh Lime Juice
.5 oz Pierre Ferrand Dry Curacao
.25 oz Simple Syrup
Lime wheel for garnish
**Follow directions for the Gimlet
Garnish with a lime wheel.
How to Make It
These are shaken cocktails so get your tin and strainer out (if you don’t have one we sell kits in the RTD Retail Shop or get your ball jar and lid out)
Measure out all ingredients and add to your shaking vessel
Add ice
Secure lid or top
Shake for 15-30 seconds
Strain into chilled coupe glass (I recommend a hawthorne strainer with a double tea strainer)
Garnish
Drink Up!
PRO TIPS:
Always shake these cocktails because they contain lime juice.
Use sparkling mineral water instead of soda water or seltzer water for a refreshing twist.
Use fresh lime juice and if you can’t try to find a brand that “ph” balances, like Natalie’s, and does not add extra sugar to stabilize.
Don’t over muddle your mint as it alters the flavor. Just a gentle pressing is sufficient for a soft green herb like mint.
TOOLS AND TOOL SUBSTITUTIONS:
Coupe glass
Cocktail shaker
Mason jar with top, smoothie shaker bottle
Cocktail Jigger
Coffee scoop, shot glass, measuring cups or spoons (1 tablespoon equals 1/2oz, 1/4 cup equals 2oz)
Cocktail strainer
slotted spoon, small mesh colander, offset lid from your mason jar
BUT WHAT’S A DAISY?
Is it a Punch, Collins, a Sour, or is it a Daisy… let me explain.
Cocktails have evolved from basic structures and if you look through cocktail history you can see the slight variations that were made to drinks to make them ‘their own’. Let’s start with punch, which is an original classic cocktail formulation. In this situation, we are talking about gin punch, which was a mixture of gin (or strong alcohol), sugar, water, fruits like lemons, limes, and oranges, and maybe a raspberry liqueur or something of the like. These were often served in larger formats which led to individual versions like the John (aka Tom) Collins with gin, lemon, sugar, and fizzy water. This in essence is just a ‘fizz’ which is a drink with strong spirit, lemon or lime, sugar, and “fizzed” as in adding carbonated water. Then we have sours (drinks with strong spirit, lemon, and sugar) often served up instead of on ice with soda. After Prohibition, the sour that survived was the whiskey sour, made with whiskey, egg white, lemon, and sugar, which is often looked at as the modern definition. While the Tom Collins lives on as the preferable gin variation, here we see what happened with the Daisy.
The Daisy followed suit, looking very similar to the sour or fizz build, with an acidic juice, sugar, and strong alcohol, but this time with the added element of bitter orange. Jerry Thomas wrote the recipe as a sour that also has an orange cordial with a splash of carbonated water. From here we have to take a quick trip to Mexico to see what ever happened to the daisy. Here it was immortalized as the margarita, which is just the spanish word for daisy, as it was a tequila based variation of a daisy cocktail with lime as the acid, as lemons were not prevalent in Mexico nor the cuisine, and with an orange liqueur. With the tequila daisy being the most popular variation, and the fact that it was being ordered in spanish, the name daisy died out and is only known as a margarita.
