The Cabinet: Apricot Brandy

"If you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!”

HI! This is the CABINET, the ultra-premium, triple-filtered version the SPIRITS. Each fortnight or so, I’ll tell you about a cocktail ingredient I like: bit of history, bit of mystery, and a few so things you can do with it should you decide to add it to your cocktail cabinet. At the very bottom, you will see what the ingredient for next time is. Do tell your friends, etc!
AND look out for the usual dispatch at 4pm today: you’ll need brandy, absinthe, sugar and bitters for that one.

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~ APRICOT BRANDY~
Fruit brandy/liqueur. 15-30% ABV / c.£12-25 for 700ml
Friends with: gin, bourbon, brandy, pisco, Zubrowka, vermouth (particularly dry and bianco), sherry (particularly amontillado), citrus (particularly lime), raspberries, woody herbs (e.g. thyme, rosemary), almond, cinnamon, vanilla.

It is not, perhaps, widely enough appreciated that it was apricot brandy that gave birth to modern thought. One evening in the early 1930s, three French philosophers met for drinks at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Raymond Aron. All were in their 20s at the time (though Sartre obviously already looked like he was 56). They spent the evening drinking the speciality of the house, apricot cocktails, and discussing the emerging strain of German thought known as phenomenology. As Aron explained, phenomenology is the wanging on about things as they actually appear as opposed to the pondering of why they happen to be there in the first place. “If you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” he said, addressing his apricot beverage.