The Spirits #44: The Gold Rush

A camomile twist ~ Le grand retour ~ The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around ~ Band of Gold ~

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~ THE GOLD RUSH ~

50ml camomile-infused bourbon (see method)
15ml lemon juice
10ml honey (loosened with a little hot water)

To make camomile-infused bourbon, simply leave a good tablespoonful of dried camomile flowers (or a couple of decent teabags) in a jar of bourbon for an hour or so. Then strain. For the cocktail itself, simply shake everything up with a decent amount of ice and then fine-strain into a coupe.

Some Gold Rush Notes:

1) You don’t need to infuse your bourbon with camomile of course but it does give the drink a certain je ne sais quoi. Camomile and honey is a fine combination; so too is camomile and bourbon; so why not make it a ménage à trois? With a lemon fluffer of course.

2) You can also serve this drink down, over a single large ice cube.

3) It was invented at Milk & Honey in NYC in 2001. The proportions are 60ml bourbon (Elijah Craig), 20ml lemon, 20ml honey syrup, but as with almost everything American, I found this a little over-sweet. This may be because I am in a holiday cottage and had to use a baby bottle for measurements, which is less than 100% accurate. So I have reverted to my favoured 50:15:10 sour formula. Give this one a really good shake - you’ll find the extra dilution improves the drink.

Hello there. Some music! Hurry on in, it’s cold outside.

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I am Richard Godwin and this is my 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 for a cabinet here - and here is the full archive of weekly specials. Do please share the Spirits with anyone who might like it - and feel free to tag me with your creations on Instagram or Twitter. Also scroll to the bottom for what to get in for next week! And please consider subscribing for the full experience! 👇

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I have come on holiday with my parents this week, to the ancient port of Watchet in Somerset. I nearly said: I have come on holiday by mistake. With the best will in the world, transplanting a one-year-old to a different part of England and a rental place that contains at least 11 variants on ‘Live Laugh Love’ wall décor is not a holiday exactly, it is more of a change of scene. However: I did manage an icy swim in the Bristol channel… and I scored 149 in a single move in Scrabble… and this is not such a bad place to hide from the last of this shapeless non-summer. Porlock Weir, if you ever get a chance, is a delight. And there is a certain downbeat charm to Watchet too: steam trains, ammonites in every rock, good cider, a shop that sells antique Lego sets, a haunting sculpture of the Ancient Mariner at the harbour, plus a first-rate basketball court where my parents beat my seven-year-old and me at a game of 2 v 2. So I suppose we have lived, laughed and indeed loved.

But what is that? It is a different kind of chill in the air; it is a rustle and a crunch; it is a new season shimmering into being. I have long thought that the Calendar Year ought to be brought into alignment with the Academic Year, with the 1st September anointed as the new New Year’s Day, for this is really when things begin to renew themselves. Le grand retour, they call it in France. And I find I am more grateful than ever for this promise and this passing, the return of routine, shape, and actual mandated autumn coldness as opposed to the coldness of a stillborn summer.

September always gives me a pleasing, melancholy school-type feeling: quite specifically, an intense desire to be listening to Nirvana’s Drain You on a Walkman on my paper round under an orange street light. And it just feels like years since we had a definitive season. The last 18 months or so is more defined in my memory by phases of lockdown in the same schlumpy indoor clothes. Now I find myself craving proper trousers; proper jackets; to see my brown brogues kicking brown leaves. And I am hoping too that friends will cease to post awful pictures of dream trips abroad on Instagram and actually be around for drinks and dinners and damp walks to gigs and dark walks across town. Culture will resume. Work too. Ideas, conspiracies. Balls, dances, duels!

And Autumn drinks are a tonic, too. Bourbon makes a lot more sense for a start. Hence, this week’s cocktail: summer fading into memory. May it mark the transition from pale washout to the golden glow of things past.

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PLAYLIST

A collection of oldies but goldies. Yes, all of this week’s songs are about gold in some form or other. Do please note that the criteria for inclusion on my playlists is not simply that the song has X in the title; it has to be something that I and hopefully you will actually want to listen to while drinking cocktails. So: no Spandau Ballet.

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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 HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I have been meaning to read this for quite some time, and finally I found the stillness required. It consists of Marco Polo describing a series of cities to the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan … such as a city suspended from a spider’s web of ropes between two mountains, and a city which has created its own living necropolis and no one can tell anymore which city is alive and which dead, and a permanent city of rollercoasters, ferris wheels and big tops that is occasionally visited by another temporary travelling city of banks, schools and courthouses. Here’s Salman Rushdie on Calvino from 1981 (LRB)

Also: The Grand Banks Café by George Simenon, the best Inspector Maigret mystery that I’ve read so far. A small pleasure of these books is the insights they give into the drinking culture of the time (1930s France). I particularly liked this little exchange:

“What are you having?”
“Not hot chocolate, that’s for sure. A kummel.”
What was that if not a declaration of war?

Not familiar with kummel? Sounds like you need to subscribe to the Cabinet.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

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SHOPPING LIST

White rum, lime, tamarind paste (look in the Indian section of the supermarket), sugar.