The Spirits #101: The Strawberry Aviation

~ Yes we have no violette ~ Pock, thwack ~ Elliott Smith, reconsidered ~ Enshittification ~

~ THE STRAWBERRY AVIATION ~

One or two fresh strawberries
45ml gin
15ml maraschino
10ml lemon juice

Place the aforementioned into a cocktail shaker. But not before you have chilled your glassware in the freezer! Lightly muddle the strawberry, then fill the tin halfway with ice and shake hard for 20 seconds. Retrieve the now optimally cool glassware and strain the cocktail thereinto, using a supplemntary tea-strainer to catch all the gunky bits. Garnish with strawberry.

Some Strawberry Aviation Notes:

1) Maraschino is a new addition to our collective bar shelf. If you would like a broader introduction to this delicate but funky liqueur, I wrote a “Cabinet” post on it. Right…. HERE.

“MARASCHINO (aka ‘marasquin’) is a liquid to separate your supermarket cocktail drinker from the sort of person who subscribes to pretentious cocktail newsletters…”

Should you feel disinclined to invest in maraschino but still want to drink something elegantly strawberry-ish, sub the maraschino for 15ml orange liqueur, 10ml sugar syrup or orgeat or some other sweetener.

2) The Aviation is an excellent introduction to maraschino. It is a sour made from gin, maraschino and lemon and - occasionally - crème de violette, which gives it a fetching lilac hue. But this last ingredient is optional and, I should warn, an acquired taste. Ask yourself: how much do I like parma violets? If the answer is “not much”, I shouldn’t bother with it. The fact is you can make it without the violette and it’s still an Aviation. (I will note in passing that there are quite a lot of violet-flavoured gins around, a trend I lamented here: “The taste is natural, but tastes unnatural, a bit like biting off a shard of rainbow or licking a My Little Pony.”)

3) The Aviation is simple and yet tricky to balance - as indeed are many cocktails in which the “sweet” element comes in liqueur form (see: the Sidecar, the Margarita, etc). Liqueurs are not as sweet as sugar syrup and add extra alcohol to the mix too and it can be hard to find the right balance. Mine always used to come out on the sour side. However, a “Eureka!” moment came when I discovered TAKUMI’S AVIATION by the Japanese bartender Takumi Watanabe. He used Tanqueray 10, a powerful, floral gin as the base, and - crucially - dialled down the lemon. His recipe is : 45ml gin, 15ml maraschino, 10ml lemon juice, 5ml violette. This is the correct balance. And it still works if you omit the violette.

4) Or, indeed, throw in a fresh strawberry instead. In Italy, maraschino is primarily as a strawberry accompaniment and the fresh fruit adds a lovely seasonal bloom to the drink. I don’t know why, I just came home in the mood to drink one of these this evening and it really did hit the spot. I would like to think it’s the sort of thing they serve at Wimbledon to the player who has executed the most elegant drop shot of the day to the pock-thwack of tennis balls.

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🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here. 
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.

If you like The Spirits, do please forward this to your friends.

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Hello! Welcome back to the Spirits, Summer Edition. I hope you didn’t mind my taking a little hiatus following the big 100 back in May. I wanted to refresh my palate and also, to work on a non-cocktail writing project which I hope I will be able to tell you about some day . But I’ve missed these weekly dispatches and the rhythm they bring to the week. (Also I hit a difficult bit in the non-cocktail writing project and making a Strawberry Aviation felt like a fun way to procrastinate.)

Anyway, while I have not been writing about cocktails, I have still been knee-deep in the blighters. In the last few weeks, I have a) hosted a cocktail party; b) been to New York and drunk cocktails in fancy bars; and c) run a wildly successful cocktail stall at my eldest’s school’s summer fete. I accrued a lot of valuable knowledge which I will impart in due course, but the distilled wisdom is:

a) When hosting, keep it simple. And if you’re going to experiement with a lapsang souchong-infused, blue curacao-tinged, avant-Tiki cocktail called The Lake at Night, choose your audience. “A Listerine ashtray” was my friend Nina’s verdict. I liked it!

b) American Martinis are 2-3 times the size of English ones and may cause you to make a scene at The Village Vanguard.

c) The Jungle Bird is the perfect cocktail to serve to parents at a school fete. Pre-batch and shake to order. Don’t bother making a non-alcoholic version because no one will want it.

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PLAYLIST

Elliott Smith, who died 20 years ago, is one of my formative musical loves. He was an artist I fell for deeply the first time I heard him - a common experience, as it turns out (see Phoebe Bridges, Billie Eilish, Frank Ocean, Madonna for goodness sake…). His message board is the only one I ever haunted, right up to his death in 2003, when it all became a bit much.

If I recall correctly, my first exposure came via a tape on the front of NME in what, 1998, with Pictures of Me on it (Yes! This one. It also featured: Roygbiv by Boards of Canada and Concrete Schoolyard by Jurassic 5). I listened to that song endlessly. “Who'd like to see me down on my fucking knees?” is the sort of lyric that will resonate with a depressed 17-year-old. But everyone concentrates on the darkness. For me, it was those harmonies that opened up worlds. I painstakingly worked the song out on my guitar, simply amazed at the chords - so much more sophisticated than anything else I was hearing at the time! (How does he fit that with that and make it sound like that?) I saved up for XO and listened to Waltz #2 again and again and again and I also bought his self-titled album via mail order from Kill Rock Stars the US, because that’s the sort of thing you had to do in those days. And Needle in the Hay, Southern Belle, St Ides Heaven - God! It was all so startlingly lo-fi, mostly just guitar and a tape and a whisper. But since that’s all I had to work with in my bedroom, that was all I needed. It all felt within reach. And even amid the tape hiss, you could hear the outlines of the sonic marvels he would go on to make when he had access to a full studio.

Anyway, this is all a long pre-amble to me saying how much I loved the recent dive into Smith’s own schoolboy archive by Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene: Elliott Smith As You’ve Never Heard Him Before. Green unearthed six whole albums of material from Smith’s high-school bands and interviewed his bandmates too. It turns out that many songs that were taken as evidence of demons - Condor Ave, King’s Crossing, Junk Bond Trader - were actually half-written when he was a goofy teenager. Some of the lyrics weren’t even his. It makes you hear the songs in a whole new light.

This will mean little to you if you’re not a fan, but then I tend to find there are usually two reactions to Elliott Smith: people who consider him one of the greatest songwriters of the last 30 years or so - and people who have never heard of him. If you’re in the former, I guarantee, you will get a kick out of that Pitchfork podcast. And if you’re the latter, here is a piece I wrote about him a few years back - prompted by his resurgence among contemporary singer-songwriters. And here’s a playlist of some my favourite Elliott Smith songs. There is much more to explore - everything he wrote had something interesting about it - but for whatever reason, these are the ones I return to most.

XO.

(For the true heads, here is a song that I wrote soon after he died, never to be mentioned again).

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of past playlists.

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Please enjoy these CABINET posts!

🌿Green Chartreuse
🍒 Maraschino
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🌷Cynar
🏝️ Falernum
🌵 Mezcal
🐂 Sherry
🧡 Aperol
🍌 Crème de Banane

Coming soon: Bénédictine, Fernet-Branca (incorporating Branca Menta), and Ancho Reyes

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WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING

I interviewed the implausibly beautiful and also implausibly messed up young actor and musician, Dominic Fike, in actual New York. (ES Magazine)

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Fun! Made me want to play more computer games.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Mindbending! Made me want to visit ancient Babylon.

Where Be Your Jibes Now? New Patricia Lockwood has dropped! On David Foster Wallace and damn. (LRB)

This essay on the ENSHITTIFICATION of Amazon, Google, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and (projecting forward…) Threads by the excellent Cory Doctorow. If you want to understand the central dynamic of the internet - and why these sites start good, and then get worse and worse and worse, this is an excellent place to start. (Wired)

That email.

This piece of horrible performance art (Daily Mail)

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SHOPPING LIST

Remember, I promised I wouldn’t do this anymore, so as to free future Richard from the tyranny of past Richard’s whims! But it will almost certainly involve maraschino.

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