The Cocktails Must Flow

The 25^th January is the birthday of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet and lyricist who is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide.

Despite, most likely, being named for a cigar salesman called Bobby Burns, this cocktail is a popular cocktail for the Scots when raising a glass to famous Scottish poet Robert Burns on his birthday.

There are a few cocktails called Bobby Burns which are all fairly similar; we’ve opted to use one closely related to the one published in the 1930 book The Savoy cocktail BOok by Henry Craddock.

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Our third and final cocktail is the Sapphire Alpine cocktail. This is best made with Bombay Sapphire London Dry Gin as the botanticals of this gin make for a good contrast with the sweet orange and peach flavoured liqueurs.

This cocktail will easily scale up to punch sized as the ratio is a simple 1:1:1 of the three ingredients.

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Our second cocktail this evening is the Fuzzy Navel, which was created in 1984 by the National Distillers in the USA as part of a marketing campaign for the launch of De Kuyper Original Peachtree; it is a variation of the Screwdriver.

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We asked one of our regulars for a preferred ingredient last week and got “peach liqueur” as the request; all three cocktails this week include a peach liqueur/schnapps as one of the ingredients. Despite the same ingredient, each cocktail is very different from the last.

We thought we’d start with all guns blazing and use the Spitfire, a wonderful take on a brandy sour which uses peach and dry white wine to good effect, as out first cocktail of the evening.

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Our third and final cocktail is a long refreshing blend of strong flavours; it is Ginger Nut.

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Our second cocktail this #FridayNightCocktails is the Perfect Storm. This is Grand Marnier’s deep and fruity answer to the Dark ‘n’ Stormy.

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Our first cocktail is the Friar Tuck which is a simple creamy chocolate and hazelnut dessert cocktail.

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Our third and final classic (and vintage) cocktail tonight is the Gargoyle which was created at, and named after, The Gargoyle Club in London, England, by head bartender, George White, in approximately 1930.

While the Gargoyle predates, by several decades, it is regarded by some as a grown-up version of the Porn Star Martini[/link].

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Our second classic (and vintage) cocktail this evening is the Scoff-Law; it was created by a bartender called Jock at Harry’s New York Bar in 1924, following a competition by the Boston Herald to find an epithet for those who would try to flout the rules of Prohibition; the winning epithet was “scoff-law”.

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We’re doing three classic (and vintage) cocktails this evening. Our first is the Manhattan dating from the 1870s which, I was slightly surprised to realise, we haven’t posted before.

We’ve done a lot of Manhattan variants such as the Bourbon Manhattan, Tenessee Rye Manhattan, the Affinity, Rory O’More, Chrchill Manhattan and the Dandy, but not the original.

A Manhattan is a cocktail made with whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters. While rye is the traditional whiskey of choice, other commonly used whiskies include Canadian whisky, bourbon, blended whiskey, and Tennessee whiskey. The cocktail is usually stirred then strained into a cocktail glass (although it can be served in a lowball over ice) and garnished traditionally with a maraschino cherry.

Popular history suggests that the drink originated at the Manhattan Club in New York City in the mid-1870s, where it was invented by Iain Marshall for a banquet hosted by Jennie Jerome (Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston) in honor of presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden. The success of the banquet made the drink fashionable, later prompting several people to request the drink by referring to the name of the club where it originated—”the Manhattan cocktail”. However, Lady Randolph was in France at the time and pregnant, so the story is likely a fiction.

>However, there are prior references to various similar cocktail recipes called “Manhattan” and served in the Manhattan area. By one account it was invented in the 1860s by a bartender named Black at a bar on Broadway near Houston Street.

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