Gin Cocktail
A dry and citrus gin cocktail ∙ Stir ∙ 3 min ∙ 27.7% ABV ∙
The Gin Cocktail is one of the earliest named cocktails on record: Dutch genever stirred with orange curaçao, sugar syrup and Boker's bitters.
Ingredients
1
Servings
Garnish
Instructions for 1 serving
- Pre-chill a glass
- Stir all ingredients with ice: Oude genever 60 mlOrange curaçao liqueur 10 mlSugar syrup 5 mlBoker’s bitters 2 dashes
- Fine strain into the chilled glass
- Express a lemon twist over the cocktail and use as garnish
Tips
- Two dashes of Boker's bitters is the measure, not a pour; more than that and the drink just tastes bitter.
History
The Gin Cocktail belongs to the oldest documented family of mixed drinks in America, the "cocktail" itself. That drink was first defined in print on May 13, 1806, by The Balance and Columbian Repository of Hudson, New York, as a spirit sweetened with sugar and cut with water and bitters. Applied to gin, or more precisely to Dutch genever and Old Tom-style gin, this basic formula became one of the first named cocktails in a bartending manual. Jerry Thomas's 1862 guide How to Mix Drinks lists a "Gin Cocktail" of gin, gum syrup, Boker's bitters, a dash or two of curaçao, and lemon peel, alongside a "Fancy Gin Cocktail" variant strained into a fancy wine glass with a lemon-moistened rim.
This cocktail sits close to the root of the "Old Fashioned" style of drink-making, and its Fancy version, with curaçao and bitters, is considered a direct forerunner of the Martinez and, later, the Martini. Boker's bitters, the brand specified in Thomas's original recipe, fell out of production and was largely forgotten until being revived by a bitters maker in 2009 based on historical formulas, allowing the drink to be recreated close to its 19th-century specification.
