The Spirits #43: The Bramble
~ A British drink with British ingredients ~ Al frescoisation ~ Walrus penis ~ Ramble Tamble ~ Bucket hat
~ THE BRAMBLE ~
A handful of blackberries
50ml gin
25ml lemon juice
15ml golden sugar syrup
Everything in the shaker please, step to it! Fill with ice and shake like billy-oh. Now fine-strain into a tumbler filled with ice - ideally crushed ice - heap more ice on top and garnish with mint and/or blackberries.
<<NB This is lightly edited from the version that I emailed out.>>
Ooh-welcome. You’re a sight for sore eyes! Please: make yourself at home. Have a bagel, have a donut, have some music and relaxxxxxxxxx.
📯 I am the journalist Richard Godwin and this is my cocktail newsletter. You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, orgeat ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations here - and here is the full archive of weekly specials. Scroll to the bottom to find out what to get in for next week. Please consider becoming a member of the ✨THE CABINET✨ for the full experience. This way you will learn about exciting things like Maraschino and Green Chartreuse and (coming soon…) apricot brandy.
YOU might also be interested in my book, The Spirits, which being republished thanks in no small part to the success of this newsletter! You can get it from 30th September from Foyles, Blackwells, Hive, Waterstones, Amazon, or best of all, ask your local bookshop to order it for you and all your most interesting friends. 📯
I HAVE been on a long overdue trip to the nation’s Capital this week, catching up with old friends, careering around Soho, looking at jars of pig embryos and pangolins in the Grant Museum of Zoology, gossiping, laughing, and nursing hangovers in playgrounds while one-year-old bounces on my head. It has been a real balm for the soul. I particularly love the al-frescoisation of Soho, with all the restaurants and bars spilling onto the streets. Ban cars forever I say. My friend Sally and I had a particularly fun midweek carouse there, bookended by Martinis at the Academy Club and a Manhattans at Swift, where the staff seemed initially a little surprised that we had no reservation (impromptu cocktails, in this economy?!)… and yet found us a nice little perch all the same. A cocktail made by someone else is always 30% better: discuss. London doesn’t often just work but somehow it has this week. Stars have aligned; things have mostly slotted into place. It’s nice when that happens. Then I lost my bank card. Oh well.
Anyway: the Bramble. It’s a Soho classic invented by the great Dick Bradsell during his days at Fred’s Club. It’s one of the drinks that established his reputation, alongside the Treacle and Espresso Martini. Bradsell cited his inspiration as the Singapore Sling and described the drink as a homegrown take on this tropical fizz. It’s a “British drink with British products” - i.e. lemons from Spain and liqueur from France? But I suppose what he really meant was the blackberries, which reminded him of childhood in the Isle of Wight, and do indeed combine with gin in a deeply nostalgic way.
Assiduous readers will notice that I have tampered with his recipe. Yes, it’s true. I’m very sorry. But I do so in the interests of those who will find it easier to procure actually blackberries than blackberry liqueur. Bradsell’s original consists of a lemon’s worth of juice, two bar spoons of syrup and two shots of good gin, shaken up and then poured into an old fashioned glass over crushed ice. You then lace the glass with good-quality crème de mûre (blackberry liqueur), which then slowly sinks and purls through the glass. And you will have yourself an early modern classic, a cocktail that has spread around the world and is, indeed, fairly widely available in can form, the mark of a true “hit”.
Should you happen to have some crème de mûre, by all means, make it that way. Gabriel Boudier is nice and not so hard to find, and crème de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur) is a nice sub too. You can also make you an “instant” blackberry liqueur, simply by muddling a handful of blackberries in a little gin (maybe even sloe gin?) and adding sugar syrup to taste. Nonetheless, for pure rusticity and ease I much prefer simply throwing some freshly foraged blackberries into the shaker. Also: a splash of soda or tonic isn’t the worst idea here, if you find it a little too tart. Here is a photo of a walrus’s penis bone.
PLAYLIST
Brambling, ambling, rambling, tambling and gambling, pure assonant bliss.
THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. Here is an ongoing archive of past songs. Sometimes this formats weirdly - but rest assured, it is all new!
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
A tribute to Charlie Watts, by other drummers (Guardian)
Why the world needs a rest (New York Times)
On Sally Rooney merchandise (GQ)
Parents are not OK (The Atlantic)
SHOPPING LIST
Bourbon, camomile tea (dried flowers best, but good quality tea bags are fine too), honey, lemon.
🥃🌼🍯🍋
Really enjoyed this! I've had it in bars a number of times but it really works with the fresh blackberries.
On another note, given the number of entries it would be really useful to be able to search by ingredient/tags. Otherwise I end up doing a lot of scrolling back and forth...