Gin Punch

Gin Punch descends from the broader punch tradition that English sailors and merchants of the East India Company brought back from the Indian subcontinent in the 17th century, a mix of spirit, citrus, sugar, water, and spice. Gin itself did not enter the mix until the spirit became the everyday drink of London's urban poor in the second decade of the 18th century; by the 1730s, lower-class drinkers who could not afford brandy or rum began making punch with gin instead, and physicians of the era even prescribed it as medicine. It took until the last quarter of the 18th century for Gin Punch to shed its downmarket reputation and become a fixture of respectable inns, clubs, coffee houses, and officers' messes.

No early written recipe for the drink survives, but its most celebrated 19th-century versions are well documented. Limmer's Hotel in London was already renowned for its gin punch by 1814, served in the coffee room by headwaiter John Collins, whose name later attached to the drink that became the Collins family of cocktails. A related, more embellished version was created around 1835 at the Garrick Club in London, where the American club manager Stephen Price is credited with mixing gin punch with maraschino liqueur and chilled soda water for the writer Theodore Hook, producing the Garrick Club Punch. That switch from still to soda water in the 1830s marked the transition from the old-style Gin Punch toward the Collins-style drinks that eventually eclipsed it.