Bramble

The Bramble was created by British bartender Dick Bradsell in mid-1980s London, with most accounts dating it to 1984, while Bradsell himself, in his posthumously published notes, later placed it in 1986. He devised the drink while working at Fred's Club, a private members' bar in London's Soho district, setting out to build a distinctly British cocktail on the template of a spirit soured with citrus, sweetened, and flavored with a liqueur.

Bradsell built the drink as a hybrid of a Gin Sour and a Cobbler, lengthened with crushed ice in the manner of the 19th-century Fix, and finished it with a drizzle of crème de mûre, a blackberry liqueur that gave the cocktail both its color and its name — a bramble being the bush on which blackberries grow. He described it as a personal, all-English reworking of the Singapore Sling, and said tasting the crème de mûre triggered a rush of childhood memories of picking blackberries among the thorny brambles on the Isle of Wight, where he grew up.

The drink was originally served over crushed ice in an old-fashioned glass and garnished with raspberries, since Fred's Club lacked blackberries at the time; blackberries later became the standard garnish.

The Bramble went on to become one of the IBA's officially listed cocktails, alongside Bradsell's other modern classics, the Espresso Martini and the Russian Spring Punch, cementing his original recipe as the standard reference build served internationally.