Juliet Gin · Recipe 33
The Southside
Chicago's most elegant street fight.
Ingredients
- 55 ml Juliet Gin
- 25 ml fresh lime juice
- 20 ml simple syrup (1:1)
- 10-12 fresh mint leaves
Method
Shake & double strain. Serve in a Coupe. Garnish with Fresh mint sprig.
The story
The Southside has two origin claims and neither can be definitively proven. One story places it at the 21 Club in New York; another at a Chicago bootleg operation on the city's South Side, where mint and citrus were added to mask lower-quality gin. Either way, the drink's formula — gin, lime, mint, sugar — is one of the purest in the canon. Juliet Gin's botanical profile makes it an ideal home for the Southside. The mint here isn't muddled (which produces a green, sometimes bitter result) but shaken hard with the other ingredients, releasing its volatile oils while keeping the liquid clear. The double strain removes any herb fragments. The result is a jade-green, aromatic gin sour that thinks it's a martini.
Tasting note
Clean, cold, and mint-forward without being a mojito. The lime and gin botanicals create a dry aromatic framework that the mint fills like light through leaves. This is a gin drinker's gin drink.