The Spirits #158: The Bebbo

Bebbo, bebbo, bebbo, bebbo!

~ THE BEBBO ~

50ml gin
15ml lemon juice
15ml orange juice
15ml honey, loosened with a little hot water

Freeze your coupe. Now add all of the above to your cocktail shaker along with, yes, half a trayful of ice. Shake furiously. Now strain the liquid into your cold coupe. Lemon or orange garnish, I think.

Some notes:

1) The Bebbo may sound like a mischievous wish-granting bee-type creature you found beneath your bed when you were five chanting its own name maniacally… but it is in fact a Prohibition-era variation on the the Bee’s Knee, a classic gin/honey sour.

2) The quality of the honey that you use makes a difference here. Something wild and ideally local is best.

3) The innovation is the addition of the orange juice. On its own, orange juice can be a little bland. The thing is to cut it with lemon juice for extra acidity and then it shines brightly; a pleasant sun-kissed thing.

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✨WELCOME TO THE SPIRITS✨
The neighbourhood bar of the internet

🖊️I am Richard Godwin, journalist by trade…
📚… cocktail writer when I’m skirting deadlines.
🧑‍🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
📃My full A-Z recipe archive is here.
⚗️The bottles I think you should get in first? Here.
🍾The bottles you should get in next? Here.
🛒A great place to get these bottles is the SPIRITS STORE.
➡️Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
🏥And here is a list of trusted charities helping people in Gaza.
🍒Here is my favourite poem about maraschino cherries.
📱And if you like The Spirits, please forward this to your friends.

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PLAYLIST

HEY HONEY! A little sweetness. Sometimes you just have to do the obvious thing.

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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SOME CABINET POSTS YOU MIGHT ENJOY

🐿️ Amaretto
🧡 Aperol
🍏 Apple Brandy (coming soon!)
🍑 Apricot Brandy
🕊️ Bénédictine
❄️ Brancamenta
☕ Coffee Liqueur
🍌 Crème de Banane
🍫 Crème de Cacao
🫐 Crème de Cassis
🌷 Cynar
🦌 Drambuie
🌸Elderflower Liqueur
🏝️ Falernum
🦅 Fernet-Branca
🌿 Green Chartreuse
🐻 Kümmel
🍒 Maraschino
🌵 Mezcal
🦙 Pisco
🐂 Sherry
🧙‍♀️ Strega (incorporating Yellow Chartreuse)
🌻 Suze

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WHAT I’VE BEEN DRINKING

An extremely good Roku gin Martini at Scarfe’s Bar in the Rosewood hotel. Followed by the Paper Glider, a Paper Plane riff involving Highland Park 12, Aperol and maple and peach verjus. I’m a fan of Scarfe’s bar. The place was humming on a Thursday evening - something your higher end hotel bars do not reliably achieve - the service is excellent, the drinks are cold and there’s actual live music too.

We also went to dinner at Café Francois afterwards, chicken + chips followed by some outrageous desserts. The Paris-Brest) really is as good as they say.

WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING

DID you know that 50% of the world will need glasses by 2050? Rather worse: 10% of the world will be classed as “high myopic”, which means they will need a prescription of -6 dioptres or higher. And one third of high myopes end up visually impaired. If you do the maths - that’s a USA’s worth of blindness. What’s causing this epidemic of shortsightedness? Well, you’ll have to read my piece - but the basic answer is, children spend too little time outdoors and surprise, far too much time on devices. In other words, our shortsighted attitudes are literally making us blind. (Telegraph)

I also wrote about the appalling energy costs of the AI boom. Data centres, the memory banks of the internet, already consume about 1.5% of the world’s electricity supply. That’s predicted to double by next year and increase by further multiples before the decade is out owing to the fact that AI requires vastly more processing power. And given that most electricity still doesn’t come from renewable sources - that means an amazing amount of carbon will be burned to bring us ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Grok and the rest. The US, the world’s worst polluter, has meanwhile lobbied successfully to remove all references to climate change from the recent AI Action summit. I barely scratched the surface with this article but it really is worth stressing that no one who knows anything about anything thinks any of this is remotely sustainable. (Standard)

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Meduza does really great work reporting from Russia and Ukraine. (Meduza).

“Maybe America is not now ruled by arrogant, vengeful, petty, patriarchal, racist imperialists. But where’s the evidence?” writes James Meek (LRB)

Saving up these two for the weekend and something strong with rye in it… The Murdoch Succession Drama (New York Times) and Growing up Murdoch (Atlantic)

Working my way through Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright! Which reads on one level as Aboriginal Australian version of The Bee Sting only with five million feral donkeys but on 300 other levels at the same time. I think I’m still with it. Anyone feel like keeping me company?

Oh and this little thing by Sean ‘Vibe Shift’ Monahan on the metaphysics of technology did strange things to my brain… “The gambling addict is not suffering from compulsive behavior; he is possessed. Schoolchildren are not distracted by screens; they are hypnotized. Ozempic is not a medication; it’s a potion. Propaganda does not use communications strategies; it casts spells…” There’s an epoch-defining novel in that! (8Ball)

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SHOPPING LIST: OK, so next week, you’re going to need… rye (or bourbon), cherry brandy (the sweet stuff), Italian vermouth, absinthe.