The Spirits #146: The Last Word
A problematic fave
🍸 Short on gin, vodka, light rum, Camparesque bitters, Italian vermouth, etc? Visit the SPIRITS STORE. For the month of October you will find 10% off everything. Simply follow THIS LINK and bung the words RICHARD10 into the box when you check out. There’s no Green Chartreuse I’m afraid. But we can work on that.🍸
~ THE LAST WORD ~
40ml gin
20ml green Chartreuse
20ml maraschino
20ml lime juice
Freeze that coupe! Now listen: introduce your ingredients to one another in a shakeable vessel. Give them some time to say hello, how do you do, etc. Then, add a bunch of ice and shake so that they all become one and cold. It’s important that they’re cold. Alright enough now. Double strain the cocktail into the frozen coupe. Here we all are sitting in a rainbow.
Some Last Word notes:
1) The classic proportions are of course more like 30ml each gin, Chartreuse, maraschino, lime juice. I find that too sweet; see below.
2) If you want to make a slightly more economical version (given the expense of the ingredients), try 40ml gin, 10ml green Chartreuse, 10ml maraschino, ~5ml sugar syrup, 20ml lime juice. But for a full discussion of proportions, I repeat: see below.
3) And for a fuller discussion of Chartreuse and Maraschino, you’ve the Cabinet. “Other liqueurs taste like a boozy version of whatever it is they’re supposed to taste of - fruits and nuts and herbs mostly. But Chartreuse tastes of Chartreuse. Only Campari can match it for itselfness but Campari is everywhere these days. Chartreuse somehow remains apart. It tastes as I imagine Getafix’s magic potion tastes in Asterix and at 55% ABV, it has a similar effect too… but how precisely to describe it? Sunshine on dew? A memory of a forest… somewhere? The Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz? A rainbow? “It’s like swallowing a sp-spectrum,” says Anthony Blanche when he pours some glasses in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He detects “five distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue.” Chartreuse here. Maraschino here.
🖊️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.
🏥 And here is a list of trusted charities who are helping people in Gaza.
🍒 And here is my favourite poem about maraschino cherries.
THE Last Word dates back to at least 1916 when it was one of the pricier items on the menu of the Detroit Athletic Club, which is located in a fine six-storey building downtown. “Many institutions have influenced Detroit’s history,” asserts the club’s website, “but few have impacted the community as much as the Detroit Athletic Club.” Motown? Does that count as an institution? Ah but I’m being facetious. The Detroit Athletic Club gave us the mixture of gin, Chartreuse, maraschino and lime and that is a legacy of which its members can be proud.
The cocktail survived two periods of obscurity. The first was Prohibition (1919-1930) and that barely. Then it doesn’t appear in print until 1951 when it pops up in Ted Saucier’s Bottoms Up!, nestled among the racy vintage illustrations (below). I’m the book, Saucier credits the vaudevillean Frank Fogerty with creating it back in the ‘10s. But then nobody seems to have thought much about the Last Word again until Murray Stenson, bartender at Zig-Zag in Seattle, discovered it while doing a little light leafing one evening, made it and thought… fucking hell, that’s weird, I’m putting that on the menu. The drink has since become a beloved classic, a bartender’s handshake, a venerable standard, prompting many happy Charteuse epiphanies from Aberfeldy to Zuyder Zee.
Like the Negroni - another rediscovered classic - its easy-to-remember equal parts formula has clearly helped it on the road to ubiquity. But… yes, Richard, you’ve had your hand up for a while there, what is it? The equal parts formula results in a cocktail that’s not only undrinkably sweet but kind of a waste of Chartreuse which is not cheap and actually in short supply? Oh. You might have a point.
What I mean to say is that if you break down that original formula you have 20ml spirit, 40ml liqueur (and pretty sweet liqueurs at that) and 20ml citrus. That certainly makes for a powerful impression. But it is about as well-balanced as a dyspraxic rhinoceros riding a bicycle across a glacier. Hence the double gin version above. I have found the same formula works well for the many Last Word-alike drinks such as the Final Ward (sub Islay Scotch for gin) and the Naked and Famous (which Cabinet subscribers will discover forthwith.) When Chartreuse stocks are running low, the more economical formula mentioned in note 2 above has its charms.
I’m glad we cleared that up. For now we can marvel at the miraculous taste of the thing. Luca Turin calls it potable perfume - Romeo Gigli to be exact (wormwood, rose, citrus). To me it tastes a little like a new colour in the rainbow… or a liquified jewel box… with 1940s cartoon characters dancing in it. Tremendously exciting. It would be irresponsible not to let you know that I have also shaken up a Last Word with c.30ml cream with sensational results.
WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING
Still in the deadline trenches I’m afraid - so many words! I will try to offer a less skeletal service next week.
OTHER BOTTLES YOU MIGHT ENJOY
🐿️ Amaretto
🧡 Aperol
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
☕ Coffee Liqueur
🍌 Crème de Banane
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🫐 Crème de Cassis
🌷 Cynar
🌸Elderflower Liqueur
🏝️ Falernum
🦅 Fernet-Branca
🌿 Green Chartreuse
🐻 Kümmel
🍒 Maraschino
🌵 Mezcal
🦙 Pisco
🐂 Sherry
🌻 Suze
Coming soon: STREGA
I very much like how you acknowledge the wild prices of things currently (and probably forever) and, ergo, moving ahead with certain cocktail discipline.
Perhaps it’s the drink talking, but I’ll share my dirty secret that no one asked to hear (but please keep it between us): after I do the ceremonious absinthe wash for a Corpse Reviver (tis the season! 🎃) I pour the extra back in the bottle. Home entertaining only, of course. No need to call the health department.
The classic equal proportion The Last Word is probably in my top five favourite cocktails, so it was great to see it pop up in my inbox from The Spirits earlier. I was open minded to try this variation as I know that others, such as Simon Difford, argue for making it more gin forward. I'm currently sipping this version and it tastes great!
But, oddly, and this may just be me, I almost find that it feels like a sweeter drink than the classic version. I wonder if this is because you get the sweetness from the liqueurs without getting twatted with the intensity of flavour that they bring when in the equal parts recipe. To my palette, changing the proportions keeps most of the sweetness but at the expense of the intensity. I think the original works because/in spite of the fact that it's ridiculous, and I'm not sure that taming it improves it.
I used Plymouth, which i almost always do with a citrus/gin cocktail, so maybe it works better with a more juniper heavy gin. This feels like its more gin forward than the classic recipe, in which it's more of a background flavour. Although this version is great, I do feel like it needs more Chartreuse twang. Maybe upping that to 30ml is something I could try next.