The Spirits

CLASSIC SPIRITS: The Brown Derby

Richard Godwin — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:01:16 GMT

Friends, I am a little under the weather and also in a house with no internet. But I didn’t want to leave you thirsty. Here is the very first Spirits entry from the distant days of lockdown— and a drink that I always forget is rather good, a kind of surprising Whiskey Sour. Although these days I’d be tempted to add just a scant 5ml lemon juice. And maybe egg white?

If it is fresh Godwin you’re after, well, here are two recent Guardian wine columns for you. Here, I tried to think about vegetable matching. And the other week, I looked into why wine is so expensive in restaurants — and offered a strategy for the impecunious oenophile.

I am off to Porto next week to would you believe judge a cocktail competition and cruise up the Douro drinking excellent wines. Any tips welcome. And I think it’s fair to say that next week’s shopping list should be: white port (not expensive!) and tonic.

Richard

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~ BROWN DERBY ~

45ml bourbon
30ml pink grapefruit juice
10ml maple syrup (or honey, loosened with a little hot water)

Place all the ingredients in a shaker. (NB: If you’re using honey, you’ll want to loosen it with about 5-10ml hot water from the kettle first - a good way of rescuing honey that’s crystallised in the jar). Fill about halfway with ice and shake until your fingers go numb. Fine-strain (i.e. through a tea-strainer or similar) into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a strip of grapefruit zest that you removed with a vegetable peeler. You can cut it into a parallelogram, as above, if you’re feeling swank. And why not?

Some music. Oh yeah and if you have a nickel for the phone booth, the dial code for tonight’s destination is 90027.

The Brown Derby restaurant opened at 3247 Wilshere Blvd, Los Angeles, in 1926.

It was called the Brown Derby because it was in the shape of a Derby hat and it was brown. It is an example of mimetic architecture, i.e. architecture that is designed to mimic something else. Like this massive duck on Long Island. Or this jumbo toilet in South Korea. The sort of building that makes children go: “Look!” And (so the idea went) passing motorists go: “Hey! Let’s stop there and get a Cobb salad!” (The Cobb salad was invented at the Brown Derby).

The gimmick worked. The Brown Derby soon established itself in Hollywood iconography, a place to see and be seen. If you have Disney+, and have made peace with the finitude of existence, you can look up the sequence in ‘Mickey and the Beanstalk’ (1947) in which Willie the Giant jumps down from his beanstalk fortifications, chases the eponymous rodent around L.A., spies the Brown Derby and puts it on his head.

Three more branches followed. The most famous was the one on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where the walls were filled with caricatures of the clientele. Marlene Dietrich once caused a scene by turning up in slacks. Clark Gable proposed to Carole Lombard (pictured below). Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (the inspiration for Paige Sinclair in Bojack Horseman, aka my secret TV crush) held court in the booths. There was another branch in Beverly Hills, too, and a fourth one followed in Los Feliz, owned by Cecil B. DeMille. That one had a Drive-In “Car Cafe” that looked like this:

As for the Brown Derby cocktail? I had hoped to find you a suitably Hollywtf picture of, e.g., Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Theodor Adorno and Toto from the Wizard of Oz, all sipping them in situ. Sadly, no such picture exists. It turns out that the Brown Derby drink was actually invented at a rival establishment, the Vendôme Cafe, which occupied the unimprovable address 6666 Sunset Blvd. Which seems a bit like Burger King serving a burger called the McDonalds? Still, the Brown Derby did serve a famous Grapefruit Cake - so perhaps that has something to do with the recipe, which is sort of a honey sour made with grapefruit.

Anyway: the cocktail is delicious, surprisingly so, considering it’s not that well known. It’s simple to make - three ingredients, only one of them alcohol - but surprisingly complex to drink. A lot of that has to do with the bitterness of the grapefruit, which deepens all the other flavours. And a lot has to do with not-using-sugar as the sweetening element. The Vendôme recipe called for honey syrup. I’m not sure who subbed in maple syrup, but it’s a great choice and has a particular affinity w/ bourbon.

Another good thing about the Brown Derby cocktail? It’s damn near unmessuppable. You can up the bourbon content significantly and it still tastes obligingly sweet. It also works well as a non-alcoholic drink template. Either sub the bourbon for cold black tea and shake it up; or else make a long honey-grapefruit soda, topping up w/ fizzy water.

🍸

Sadly, the Brown Derby chain is no more (unless you count the replica Brown Derbies at Disneyland). The original dome is interred in a shopping mall on Wilshere Blvd. The Los Feliz one is a bank. The Hollywood facade was demolished in 1994. There’s a Trader Joe’s supermarket there now. I bought grapefruits there a few times when I was living in L.A. But the once iconic Hollywood and Vine intersection is now sort of busy, tacky, generic, full of tourists going: “Is this it?” L.A. is like that: lax / arcane / corruptible planning laws mean you get a lot of meh architecture. But occasionally you get a hat.

And were Willie rampaging around contemporary L.A., he would still have a few props to choose from. There’s a Frank Gehry-designed building on Venice Blvd. where the entrance-way is a pair of binoculars - perfect for giant-scale snooping. That building is now the Google HQ.

OFFER!

Online alcohol shop The Drop Store is giving readers of The Spirits a discount. Head HERE, have a mooch and if you add thespirits10 (i.e. lowercase!) in the promo code you will get 10% off at checkout. There’s a good deal on Eagle Rare bourbon at the moment.

PLAYLIST

Baby remember, I'm not drinking wine
But that Cherry Coke you serve is fine
And our love's sweet enough on the vine
Bartender, bartender

Yeah, we’re in Hollywood this week. (Or at least, the wider L.A. County area…) Link here if the embed doesn’t work.

(CW: Kanye.)

ASK RICHARD

Journalist and ocean child Elle Hunt writes:

“Hey Richard, what do you make of the budget spirits stocked by Lidl? We have a few in our flat – Finton's gin, Bitterol etc – and as a lazy, indiscriminate person I don't find them too bad!"

Glad you asked! It’s surprising (but maybe not that surprising given the amount of marketing ca$h thrown at this) how many people think of cocktails as an expensive, high-falutin’ pursuit. Truth is? Most spirits are OK in 2020. It’s not like it’s London 1780 or L.A. 1925 or Siberia 1995 when drinking the wrong stuff could kill you. Lidl and (especially) Aldi actually have decent reputations for spirits and often outclass their more upmarket rivals in blind tastings. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that their copycat gins, ersatz-Aperols, etc, were distilled in the precise same stills as some of your more boutique-y stuff.

Anyhow, the whole point of cocktails is to make cheap stuff taste better. Use what you have. If it tastes good to you, it is good.

Got a Q? Send it over and I might just give you an A.

SOUR CHALLENGE

I was impressed - humbled even - at the diligence and creativity with which the Sour challenge was taken up last week: Brandy Sours, Bourbon Sours, eau de myrtille sours w/ lavender syrup, are you serious? But particularly pleasing was this creation made by Kevin Goodall: cachaça, lemon, marmalade, egg white, garnished w/ a strip of orange from the marmalade (which apparently sank 😔 ). Sort of a Brazilian Breakfast Martini? I too have had a bottle of cachaça lurking at the back of a cupboard for some time and will be trying this forthwith (😄).

WHAT I’M READING

Susanna Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi, a bit Secret History, a bit Borges. (Your local bookshop).
No idea who Mike Francesca is, no real opinions on Kazuo Ishiguro, but this (from 2017!) made me hoot like an injured owl (Slate).
John Gray on the crime writer Lawrence Osborne (New Statesman).
Kirsty Major on Scouse stew and the unhappy fate of British regional cooking (Vittles - scroll past the italics to get to the actual piece).
The chilling complicity of Mike Pence (NYT).

Couple of my pieces from this week:

I went to the Newt, the huge Somerset garden museum that weirdly reminded me of Jurassic Park for the Notting Hill set (Observer).
On the new fish sustainability guidelines (The Times).

SHOPPING LIST

French vermouth, gin, lemons, green olives. 🍸

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The Cabinet: Eau-de-Vie

Richard Godwin — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:04:52 GMT

~ EAU-DE-VIE ~
Unaged fruit brandy in various forms / 40-55% ABV / c£25-£!!! for 500-700ml
Friends with: champagne. Gin, vodka, pisco, light rum. Vermouth, quinquina, white port. Fruit. And from here it very much depends on the particularities of the eau-de-vie itself.

Note: the below is a substantially expanded version of a column I recently wrote for Guardian Feast. This one features all the recipes!

“I’ve had people burst into tears tasting these — it takes them straight back to a moment in their past.” I have come to visit Barney Wilczak, a soulful young spirits producer, at his Capreolus distillery near Cirencester in the Cotswolds. We are surrounded by stainless steel vats of eau-de-vie – the clear, fragrant brandy that he distills from apples, gooseberries, cherries, pears, plums, raspberries, grapes, quince and various other fruits grown within a 35-mile radius of his sunny English hilltop, one of the finest fruit-growing regions in the country.

I say “distillery” — and that might make you imagine something vaguely industrial. In fact, we are in his dad’s garage. The still itself is in the shed. The production is defiantly domestic. At one point Wilczak uses the word “Burgundian” to describe his set-up, alluding the great shed-based pinot-noir-smiths of that blessed wine region; and given the emphasis that he places on the locality of his fruit and his extremely lengthy fermentations, this is indeed a form of spirit-making that is much closer to wine-making than, say, commercial Scotch production. Indeed, Wilczak, who has a background in botany, wildlife photographry and graphic design, is blithely dismissive of workaday commercial considerations — preferring to concentrate on making the best spirit he possibly can, even if this limits his audience.

One such consideration might be the fact that hardly anyone know what eau-de-vie is in the first place. So we may as well dispense with that now. The term literally means “water of life”; whisky and aquavit have the same root. I have also heard eau-de-vie additionally referred to in France as simply “un alcool” which gives you quite a lot to work with. But for our purposes, I am talking about transparent, unaged fruit brandy — and while I’m using the French term, I’m using it as catch-all for various different spirits from various different places made to various degrees of refinement.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE MY EXHAUSTIVE GUIDES TO

🌶️Ancho Reyes
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
🌸 Elderflower Liqueur
✈️ The Lillet-Bianco Family

…and MORE.

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In Germany they call it schnapps. The best known is probably kirsch (or kirschwasser): cherry eau-de-vie, a speciality of Austria, Germany and the Alsace (though it says something about its present obscurity that you’re more likely to buy it as a fondue ingredient than a cocktail ingredient). Poire williams, distilled from pears, is something of a Swiss apres-ski obsession (you may have encountered the kind where they grow the pears inside the bottle itself as I did in this charming column from 2013.) Across the Balkans as well as in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Poland, you will also find slivovitz, which is distilled from plums. And then there is the Hungarian palinka — made from whatever surplus fruit the farmer may have had lying around (ideally: apricots!) I also own an extremely likeable bottle of Albanian rraki rushi — unaged grape brandy — that I picked up at Mrizi i Zanaze, the finest farm-to-table restaurant in Europe. Rough stuff but somehow it’s often the thing I reach for when I need a quick consolatory slap round the face.

All of this points to the cultural niche of eau-de-vie: it is for the most part a rural product, made domestically, around harvest time in a waste-not-want-not spirit. As such, there aren’t really any huge brands; the closest would probably be Jelinek, the Moravian slivovitz giant, or perhaps the Distillerie G. Miclo in the Alsace. Quintessentially, it will be served to you by a Hungarian farmer from a jerry can — or nipped in the dead of winter to fend off the blues.

There is, moreover, no particular English tradition of making eau-de-vie, hence the French borrowing. Indeed most of Wilczak’s equipment is Czech, including his pot still, which on my visit had recently seen a batch of quince distillate and smelled like autumn in heaven. But actually, a lack of tradition can be a good thing; it forces you to do things from first principles. Each of the 60-litre containers in Wilczak’s garage represents around 4,000 kilos of fruit from local orchards, all picked within a day of ripeness, fermented into a fruit wine, and then triple-distilled to exacting specifications that vary fruit by fruit, batch by batch. Some of the recipes he had to translate from German or Polish sources. Some he had to figure out himself — since no one had ever thought to try and make, say, gooseberry distillate before.

Barney Wilczak and two million raspberries

Obsessive doesn’t quite cover it. When Wilczak made the first batch of raspberry eau-de-vie, he reckons he and his wife hand-graded two million raspberries, rejecting any fruit with the slightest imperfection — which he assured me would only be magnified in the final product. The raspberries were then wild-fermented using naturally occurring yeasts A typical whisky distillery will use off-the-shelf yeasts to ferment their grains ; the process will last a couple of days. This took three to four months. “Honestly when we first tasted that raspberry wine, we were tempted to bottle it immediately, it was so delicious,” he said.

What he did instead was to distill this wine not once, not twice but thrice, amplifying the potency each time. He is, he thinks, the only person in the world to make raspberry eau-de-vie like this. You may come across products labelled raspberry eau-de-vie or schnapps from time to time — but these will be made using a Geist; by macerating raspberries in neutral spirit (i.e. vodka), to extract their flavour and then redistilling, a bit like gin. This is the sensible way of doing it because raspberries don’t really give up a lot of juice. But for Wilczak, this isn’t really a true spirit — merely something raspberry-flavoured. He sees his mission as capturing not only the fruit but the entire orchard: the blossom, the bark, the soil, the sensory memory of all of the above. Distillation as a four-dimensional photograph. “We are really reductive in the way we think about plants,” he says. “We say: this is the fruit and this is the plant, but that fruit has all the elements that make that plant just in lower concentrations”.

Now. As with using terms like “burgundian”, one needs to be careful not to sound extremely pretentious when describing this stuff — but when I stuck my finger into that vat and tasted the undiluted c.85% ABV distillate, it reminded me why we call these things spirits. It took me right back to what must be my earliest memory of raspberries. My great granny, who died at 98, was a terrific jam-maker. Her garden was full of raspberry bushes. My memory of this is extremely hazy; I must have only visited her house once or twice when I was four or five. But tasting the eau-de-vie immediately disinterred some long-buried memory of scones and homemade raspberry jam in her kitchen. It was more like having some intra-species communion with raspberriness than merely drinking something raspberry-flavoured.

Now. I don’t normally make a practise of feeding spirits to minors. But I tried a version of this out on my son Teddy, 12, when I returned home with a few little Capreolus sample bottles. (The finger-dip method only imparts minimal alcohol). He immediately said it reminded him of that patch of raspberry bushes that grew outside the nursery classroom of his old primary school — which his reception class used to go and pick sometimes. How interesting, I thought, that the liquid exorcised a formative rapsberry experience from within him, too. How intense the world must taste to a four-year-old! Is this what we are forever chasing as adult drinkers — alcohol a kind of methedone, a rough shadow of the amazing sensations we experience as children? Quite possibly!

HOW TO BUY EAU-DE-VIE

The Spirits #194: The Fitzgerald

Richard Godwin — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:02:39 GMT

~ THE FITZGERALD ~

50ml gin
15ml lemon juice
10ml golden sugar syrup (2:1)
Many dashes of Angostura bitters
Pinch salt

Freeze a coupe. Now add all the ingredients to the shaker, along with a half-trayful of ice. Shake hard. And fine-strain (i.e. through a mesh) into your very cold cocktail glass. A lemon zest twist seems apt.

A green playlist

Notes on the Fitzgerald

1. The Fit…

The Spirits #193: The Gin Rickey

Richard Godwin — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:02:58 GMT

🌺🌸🌷SPRING SALE🌺🌸🌷

Hello! To ensure as many of you as possible are able to access all of my RECIPES, DEEP-DIVES and ESSAYS all of the time I wanted to share a very special 24-hour only 40 per cent discount on ALL annual subscriptions. (That means that instead of the normal £50 a year subscription, you simply pay £30.) All you have to do is hit the b…

The Spirits #192: The Demi-Martini

Richard Godwin — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:03:21 GMT

~ THE DEMI-MARTINI ~

30ml gin (or vodka!)
5ml French vermouth
Fino sherry rinse (optional)

Pour a little dry sherry into your cocktail glass, swirl it around, discard any excess — into your mouth? Now freeze the glass. Measure the liquids into some sort of mixing vessel (which, if you really care about these things, you will also freeze). Stir with plenty o…

The Cabinet: Irish Whiskey

Richard Godwin — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:45:36 GMT

~ IRISH WHISKEY ~
Aged grain whiskey from Ireland! Of course. / 40-50% ABV / £18-£80+ for 700ml
Friends with: bourbon, Scotch. Citrus. Orchard fruits: apples, pears, apricots, cherries. Floral and herbal liqueurs. Cream! Coffee-based barista drinks.

These are heady days in the world of Irish distilling. It wasn’t so long ago that the industry was in the bog. Now look at it. Just as Irish actors are earning Academy Awards and AN Wilson columns; Irish writers are totally dominating the contemporary literature endzone; Irish bands are writing songs that have been carved into stone for 1000 years; and Irish columnists are wondering how long this high can possibly last… well, so, Irish whiskey, long overshadowed by its Scottish, American and Japanese booze-mates, has risen from near oblivion to become one of the world’s fastest-growing spirit category over the past ten years.

Which is only fitting really, since Ireland invented the stuff. As everyone knows, whisky comes from the Gaelic uisce beathadh (aqua vita / eau-de-vie / water of life). The first recorded of the term in an Irish context arrives in the Annals of Clonmacnoise (1405), which tells you everything that happened in Ireland up until the 15th century. Whereupon: “Richard or Risdard maGranell, chieftaine of Moyntir-eolas, died at Christmas by takeing a surfeit of aqua vitae, to him aqua mortis.” And here is a classy literary foreshadowing if there ever was one because Irish whiskey itself nearly did become aqua mortis.

How To Get More Out of Wine

Richard Godwin — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:03:12 GMT

I hope you won’t judge me if I tell you I have been drinking more wine than spirits of late. I’ve been writing a bit for the Guardian’s Feast section, you see, and after a couple of weeks on the rum and the whisky, I asked my editor, Bob, if he wouldn’t mind me doing a column about wine. “Sure,” said Bob. “Great!” I said.

Five spectacular pinot noirs, f…

The Spirits #191: The East India Cocktail

Richard Godwin — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:05:11 GMT

~ THE EAST INDIA COCKTAIL ~

45ml brandy
5-10ml pineapple syrup (see below)
5ml orange liqueur
Dash Angostura bitters

Freeze a cocktail glass. Measure the liquids into some sort of mixing vessel, using an especially light hand with the sweeter ingredients. Once it is to your liking, add plenty ice and stir patiently. Now strain this into the cold, cold glass. A brandied cherry for garnish.

A FRESH Spring playlist for you all xxx

Notes from the East Indies:

It's Pancake Day

Richard Godwin — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:29:44 GMT

EVERY day is pancake day in my house. Well not quite every day - I am not insane - but I do make a lot of pancakes. Not because I am particularly partial to pancakes, mind; I mean I like th…

The Spirits #190: The Sloppy Joe Cocktail

Richard Godwin — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:01:18 GMT

~ THE SLOPPY JOE COCKTAIL ~

40ml light rum (I used Bacárdi)
20ml French vermouth (I used Noilly Prat)
20ml lime juice
10ml orange curacao (Pierre Ferrand)
5-10ml grenadine (homemade)

Now, darling, I want you to put your prettiest cocktail glass in the freezer. Can you do that for me? Wonderful. Now, carefully measure all of the above ingredients into your sha…

The Cabinet: Sloe Gin

Richard Godwin — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:12:43 GMT

~ SLOE GIN ~
English gin-based fruit liqueur / 25-28% ABV / c£20-£32 for 700ml
Friends with: gin, naturally enough. Also Scotch, calvados, dark rum, rye. Honey is a great sweetener and Drambuie a nice partner. Apricot brandy and other stone fruits. Lemon, lime, orange. Champagne.

The blackthorn tree is a common sight across rural England — common for a particularly English reason. As the rural reformer William Cobbett noted in The Woodlands: A Treatise (1825), in addition to making fine walking sticks, flail swingles and shillelaghs, the blackthorn is an excellent hedge. It’s hardy, it’s spiky, and it’s dense, a kind of natural barbed wire — formidable enough to discourage trespassers, be they animal, human or even machine. Blackthorns can apparently puncture tractor tyres. “Better the bramble than the blackthorn, but better the blackthorn than the devil,” says the proverb. It grows fast, too, entangling in upon itself by means of voracious suckers. It’s nature’s way of saying: “Get the fuck off my land.”

The blackthorn was therefore a popular choice among the new class of “landowners” (ponder the word for a moment) created the Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th century. From mediaeval times, much of our landscape had been held in common; peasant farmers had the customary right to gather firewood and graize their cows more or less where they pleased. After the enclosures, this way of life was no more: larger tenant farmers, local gentry and urban speculators acquired the legal means to keep them all out. As the great poet of the Enclosures, John Clare, wrote in The Mores:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Mulberry-bushes where the boy would run
To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and done
And hedgrow-briars - flower-lovers overjoyed
Came and got flower-pots - these are all destroyed
And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft
Fence now meets fence in owners' little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease

Even with the benefit of two and a half centuries, I still don’t think it’s widely enough appreciated that the classic English landscape, with its little parcels of fields, its hedgerows and fences dry stone walls — the landscape that for Stevens, the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, “possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess” — is not some age-old arrangement. It is the fairly recent result of internal colonisation by deed, title and Parliamentary act; avarice mandated by force; the original enshittification. Blackthorn is merely the scar tissue.

Still, nature has its ways of giving back. The blackthorn bush acknowledges its part in this war on the commons in the form of its melancholy blossom, a pretty white spray of white flowers that usually appear in the cold of late March when they’re easily mistaken for snow. Hence the term “blackthorn winter”; a final reprise of coldness before the spring arrives. It’s always darkest before the dawn.

And then, come Autumn, the blackthorn bush bears its bitter fruit, the sloe — a kind of plum. Indeed, the ancestor of all plums. It’s not much to eat; it’s no mulberry and no boys ever ran to fill their hands with them. Should you bloody your smock with its juice, it will stain for ever. But if you leave these bare-black bullets macerating in gin with sugar, you’re rewarded with a lovely rich, woodsy liqueur that has been an English mainstay since, well, since the time that landowners started planting blackthorn bushes everywhere. It’s dark and sweet and bitter, almost a native amaro — though from what I can make out, it seems to have been prized as a domestic alternate to port (a drupe dupe, no less!). Port would have been heavily taxed; whereas gin was cheap and sloes were just there for the scrumping. Indeed, it’s really not that hard, still, to make your own sloe gin — though I’m afraid you’ll have to revisit this post with the first frosts, which is the time to harvest sloes.

And I can’t help wondering if sloe gin represents a small draft of compensation — however meagre — to the enclosed. The slow strangulation of the rural poor during the Enclosures created a new class of wage labourers, pushed off their native soil and forced to look for work elsewhere — either in the cities, or further away in the New World. The families whod stayed would become the new proletariat, easy prey for the owners of the new factories and mills. And it’s a historical coincidence that this internal migration coincided, more or less, with the London gin craze, the mother of all moral panics (and a great episode of In Our Time). It’s probably a bit ahistorical to say that the one influenced the other; but it’s not such a stretch to imagine a disgruntled wage labourer arriving in London from his enshittified village and finding consolation in gin, the harsh new urban stimulant. Maybe he had a couple of sloes in his pocket; maybe the lightning zag of opportunity struck; maybe he made it taste a little more like home.

For there is a weird alchemy in the fact that this barbed wire fruit should have such an affinity with gin, the spirit of melancholy and mayhem. Indeed, what those early landowners may not have realised is the blackthorn is magic. The blackthorn was, supposedly, where the fairies lived; blackthorns were haunted by the ghosts of witches; it was a blackthorn that pricked Sleeping Beauty; blackthorn helps you see beyond negatives to opportunity; blackthorns that marked the boundaries not merely of property but of worlds.

To think! All this is there in the principle ingredient of the Alabama Slammer. But the poets have long been alive to these mysteries. Here is a poem about sloe by the Cumbrian poet and sea trout fisherman, Tom Rawling — sometimes referred to as the “John Clare of the Lakes”. It’s a response to Seamus Heaney’s own poem about sloe gin, equally stirring — though I feel this one suits our mood a little better. I like how the blackthorn pierces the skin of the narrator; and the narrator then pierces the skin of the fruit; and I suppose in turn, the elixir of this bloody transfusion pierces the consciousness of the poet and time is distilled for a moment or two.

Sloe Gin
by Tom Rawling (1916-1996)
for Seamus Heaney

Let the first hard frost
expose the spiny twigs,
reveal the bare-black fruit.

Reach through jutting thorns
for the blue-hazed sloes,
ignore the blood on your wrist.

Needle prick to the hard stone,
watch their transfusion seep
through the gin. Each day

an agitation of the jar,
and after many days of alchemy,
decant this ruby in your glass

to taste silk-sliding fire
of frost and thorns
and bitter fruit.

YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY:

🐿️ Amaretto
🌶️Ancho Reyes
🧡 Aperol
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
💕 Cherry Brandy
☕ Coffee Liqueur
🍌 Crème de Banane
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🫐 Crème de Cassis
🌷 Cynar
🦌 Drambuie
🌸Elderflower Liqueur
🏝️ Falernum
🦅 Fernet-Branca
🏄 Galliano (coming soon!)
🌿 Green Chartreuse
🐻 Kümmel
✈️ The Lillet-Bianco Family
🍒 Maraschino
🌵 Mezcal
🍈Midori
🦙 Pisco
🐂 Sherry
🧙‍♀️ Strega (incorporating Yellow Chartreuse)
🌻 Suze

HOW TO DRINK SLOE GIN

Anyway. Enough socialism and poetry! What about the drink? “Sloe gin is to Britain, what limoncello is to Italy. Everyone goes out harvesting, everyone makes it at home, serves it to guests after supper, and is fiercely proud of theirs,” said Sipsmith’s Jarred Brown to this US publication — which is a bit of an exaggeration but still, it does make a pretty nice after-dinner digestif, somewhere between port and an amaro (serve it nice and cold).

The Spirits #189: The Fireside Flip

Richard Godwin — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:02:51 GMT

~ THE FIRESIDE FLIP ~

Fresh ginger
15ml honey, loosened with a little hot water
25ml Scotch
25ml sloe gin
1 whole egg
Dash Angostura bitters

Freeze a diminutive cocktail glass. Peel a little coin of ginger and muddle it up with the honey and water in the bottom of your shaker. Now, add the spirits and the entire egg (yes, yolk and all). Shake once without ice …

The Spirits #188: The Sloe Gin Fizz

Richard Godwin — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:03:07 GMT

~ THE SLOE GIN FIZZ ~

45ml sloe gin
15ml gin
20ml lemon juice
10ml honey (loosened with a little hot water)
Dash Angostura bitters
~150ml fizzy water

Freeze a tall glass. Now, measure all of the ingredients into that new shaker you got for Christmas. All the ingredients except the fizzy water, that is! Add ice, apply the lid and exercise your shaking muscles. …

Five Cocktails for New Year

Richard Godwin — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:03:41 GMT

Hello friends —

I hope we all had good Christmases and didn’t come down with the quademic? Mine was lovely, thank you. I got a Boston Shaker, among other items — a sign that it’s time to get serious with this cocktail business.

Everything that happened in 2025

Richard Godwin — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:03:29 GMT

JANUARY

THERE is a momentary pause in the music and I repair to the kitchen to mix a strong gin and tonic before returning triumphant to the dancefloor. It is a New Year and we are all starting it as we mean to go on. Intentionally.

The King is Charles III. The Pantone colour is Mocha Mousse. Bradford is the city of culture. You laugh but Bradford’s actua…

The Spirits Gift Guide 2025

Richard Godwin — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:48:32 GMT

Note: This might be “too long for email”. So click on the link and head to the app.

Oh fuck. I have caught you at the precise pivot between “there’s loads of time” and “there’s no time at all”, haven’t I? You had all these organised, benevolent thoughts, three weeks ago, of what to get for Cora and Jim and Uncle Feather and the Aspen Girls; you planned s…

The Spirits #187: The Manhattan

Richard Godwin — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:36:24 GMT

~ THE MANHATTAN ~

50ml bourbon (or rye)
25ml Italian vermouth
Dash Angostura bitters
Lemon zest (optional)

Freeze your glassware. Combine the bourbon and vermouth in a mixing vessel, half-fill with ice and stir until a melancholy thought occurs to you. Now strain this mixture into the cold glass. Garnish with a cherry or an orange zest twist — though I actu…

How to throw a cocktail party REDUX

Richard Godwin — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 13:32:18 GMT

What with it being the season and all, I figured it would be useful to ~~compile~~ republish some advice for those of you who are hosting over the next few weeks. And also, to provide some impetus for those of you who are thinking of hosting. Because as diverting as it is to prepare a Baby Turtle for oneself of a winter eve, it is 100x more fun to drink Baby Turtles with all of your favourite people in a room. It’s sort of what Baby Turtles are for.

Some people fear hosting. I don’t, I love it and see it as the logical endpoint of becoming good at making cocktails. I can’t remember who it was who wrote that the most important thing about cocktails (alcoholic or not, I should add) is that they make people happy. “Honestly, people really light up when you offer to make them a cocktail. If there’s one thing that you need to know to make good cocktails, it’s that. Why would you not want that for as many people as possible?”

In other words, we’re all coming to your house. Friday? Great.

Naturally, constitutions and temperaments differ. It may be that nothing less than a strangers having sex in corners type of party will do for you. It may be that throwing a few random acquaintances together is all the fun you need. In all cases, however, I feel you’re aiming for a certain alchemy. A good party is exponential. It’s what happens when spirits multiply and the bowl overflows. It’s the work of a few moments — but you can feel these moments for days, weeks, sometimes years afterwards. Cocktails, says the authoritative volume quoted above “provide the feeling that this moment is special and that feelings and moments are important.”

So I’m afraid there’s no getting out of it. We’re coming over. What there’s no time before Christmas? Well, some of the best parties I’ve hosted have been in January. Step to it. Here’s how.

1. Just fucking do it.

Seriously. There are 305 reasons not to have party. I mean, that horrible damp patch on your wall, for a start - no one wants to look at that! The size of your home, the reluctance of your children to go to bed in a timely manner... Also, do you know enough cool people? Is there enough time between now and Advent? Won’t everyone be busy? What if everyone laughs at your drapes?

None of these are good reasons. The fact is, if someone says: ‘Hey, we’re having some friends over for cocktails - come?’ You’ll probably be quite pleased. Particularly if you know that this person has been talking about this great cocktail newsletter they subscribe to and how it had really upped their mixing game. You might even think it incumbent on this friend of your to have a few of the rest of you over for cocktails. Particularly as all you really need to do these days is create a WhatsApp group entitled “PARTY”, add various acquaintances and hit send. No one will mind the damp patch on the wall besides you. Although you should think about changing your drapes.

2. Don’t overthink the guestlist.

It’s so tempting to curate. It’s so easy to think, ah but what do these disparate people in my life have in common? And also, what if Terence gets talking to Diane, it will be a FUCKING DISASTER! But here’s the thing. Your friends are adults (even Diane, technically) and they will have hopefully worked out how to be civil and interesting around other adults by now.

In fact, I would advise actively inviting incongruous groups of people from your life (as per this rather good Vox article). It’s more generous, I feel? Try to include: someone you just met the other day who seems interesting; someone who has known you your whole life; one or more actual neighbours; someone who is on holiday in your country; someone who just got home after a long trip; someone who has recently moved to the area; someone who seems interesting but it would be a bit much to invite them over to dinner; the chief of the fire dept; a member of the clergy; two or three people who can perform a musical number in a tight spot; an ex-con; at least three people you fancy; and as wide a varity of ages as possible. OK, seriously, I suppose the main point is, if you JUST invite colleagues or people from the school gate - or solely members of the clergy - you will end up talking about the same boring stuff you talk about every day. Throw them all together and: gesundheit! Hopefully.

Naturally, you want to set a number that is within your level of whelm. I mean you don’t want to be either over- or underwhelmed by guests. You will want to ensure three or four of your most reliable friends are available too - I mean those who can be relied upon to mix drinks, fix playlists, talk down Diane, etc. But be warned. No matter how pessimistic you are about RSVPs, the house is always 31% more full than you mentally envisioned.

The Spirits #186: Blow My Skull

Richard Godwin — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:36:03 GMT

~ BLOW MY SKULL ~

50ml dark rum
25ml brandy
15ml lemon juice
15ml sugar syrup
~150ml ale or stout

This is a species of punch - so make it in the glass. Introduce the spirits, and the lemon, and the sugar, and give it a stir. Add ice. And top up with beer to taste.

Some BMS Notes:

1) Some of you may remember Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Davey (1758-1823), the Devon…

The Spirits #185: The Baby Turtle

Richard Godwin — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 16:01:51 GMT

~ THE BABY TURTLE ~

50ml tequila (reposado)
10ml Campari
20ml grapefruit juice
20ml lime juice
15ml cinnamon syrup
20ml egg white
Pinch salt

Measure the ingredients into your shaker. Apply the lid and perform the action with unusual viguour. This is to froth up the egg white. Now stop. Add lots of ice and shake once more. Strain this admixture into a tumbler fi…