Juliet Gin · Recipe 26
Kevin's Clover is a Raspberry
A cocktail that embarrassed everyone and was right.
Ingredients
- 50 ml Juliet Gin
- 20 ml fresh lemon juice
- 20 ml raspberry syrup
- 15 ml dry vermouth
- 1 egg white
Method
Shake. Serve in a Coupe. Garnish with Lemon twist.
Raspberry syrup: simmer 200g raspberries with 150g sugar and 100ml water, strain.
The story
The Clover Club is pre-Prohibition Philadelphia — named for a gentleman's club that met monthly at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel from the 1880s. Its recipe: gin, lemon juice, raspberry syrup, egg white. For decades after Prohibition it was considered a frivolous ladies' drink and largely ignored. Then Julie Reiner opened Clover Club bar in Brooklyn in 2008 and proved that the drink was simply misunderstood. The raspberry syrup is the engine of this drink. Juliet Gin's lemon note fuses with the raspberry's tartness while the cherry from the gin adds a depth beneath the surface flavours. The egg white lifts everything into foam. Reiner's bar showed that provenance and quality transform even the most dismissed drinks — and she was, as usual, completely right.
Tasting note
Deep pink beneath a pale foam. Raspberry tartness announces first, then the gin's lemon and cherry notes arrive in close succession. The vermouth adds a botanical dryness that keeps this from being a dessert. A drink with 140 years of credibility and the decency to show it.