The Gin & Tonic has probably has the richest history of any gin beverage. Tonic water’s history in Europe dates back to the 1600’s, but it has been in use far longer by the Quechua Indians of Peru. The unique flavor of tonic water comes from quinine, which the Indians derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, or “quina”.  It has been used as medicinal “tonic” to relieve the symptoms of malaria and alleviate shivering in cold temperatures. Some believe it can help restless leg syndrome, leg cramps and other problems because it acts as a muscle relaxant.

Today’s commercial tonic water is only a distant, sweet “lite” version of the original. In the United States, this quinine-less flavor arises from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) limits for tonic water content to be less than 83 parts per million. That’s for good reason. Health benefits aside, quinine at medical concentrations has plenty of side effects, from cardiac arrhythmia, Cinchonism and other risks from overdose. Consult the FDA summary for more information. Therefore, if you dare to explore this “how to make tonic water” post, be careful that your concentration of quinine is not too strong and check with your friendly neighborhood chemist to confirm it. Legalese: Don’t blame us if you get sick.

Nevertheless, homemade tonic water is delightful – much more flavorful than the processed dreck that most purveyors sell (Q Tonic, Fentimans and John’s Premium Tonic Syrup are notable exceptions). Many interesting recipes on the web (such as here, here and here), include exotic ingredients like saffron, lemongrass and allspice that only distract from the taste of a gin – even though they may be fine beverages to help rescue a vodka and tonic from inadequacy. After skillful research, many catastrophes in the Wired Gin labs – as well as some delightful tastings – here is how to make the best homemade tonic water in the world:

The Ultimate Tonic Water

• A scant 1/4 cup of Cinchona Bark
• One quart (four cups) of water
• Juice and zest of two limes (or lemons if you want a brighter “right of the pond” taste)
• 1/4 cup of Citric Acid (also known as sour salt at some local grocers)
• 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
• 1 3/4 cups cane sugar
• Sparkling water, such as from a Sodastream, an iSi Soda Siphon or just club soda purchased from your local grocer

In a small pot, boil the water with the cinchona bark and lime juice at a low simmer for 30 to 45 minutes. Filter the resulting “tea” through a coffee filter to remove the debris from the cinchona bark and lime zest. While the liquid is still hot, add the sugar, salt and citric acid and stir vigorously. Cool the syrup in your refrigerator.

You’re almost there!

After the syrup has cooled, if you want to try plain tonic water,  add 1 part syrup to 2 to 3 parts sparkling water to taste. You’ve just created the most elegant, woodsy and deep-flavored tonic water. Ever. But, as British officers knew 150 years ago, this beverage needs gin! Experience this version, then move on to the recipe below.

To make the perfect homemade gin & tonic, start with a hearty gin such as Junipero or Tanquaray Classic. Into your favorite gin & tonic glass pour:

• 2 parts gin
• 1 part tonic water syrup
• 3-4 parts sparkling water

Drop a few ice cubes into your glass, admire the unique amber color of your beverage and quaff with delight.

Many insightful people have posted tonic water recipes with far more exotic ingredients (here, here and here), including saffron, lemongrass and coriander. Ugh. These only cover up the creativity of the gin maker! Gin has so many botanicals, so why pollute its flavor?  If you buy bad gin (or even worse, vodka), these recipes may be helpful. However, try this recipe with a good gin and your taste buds will fly!

Please comment if you’ve had a chance to make this tonic and have ideas to bring it closer to gin perfection!

Cucumber & Royale

Our friends at Hendricks revealed this delight of a drink:

1 oz Hendricks Gin
½ oz cucumber simple syrup (1 cucumber blended with 4 oz simple syrup)
rosé champagne

Pour ingredients in order into a champagne flute and stir gently. Garnish with cucumber slice and enjoy.

Tower of London

Bulldog Gin suggests this intriguing combination with an earthy green tea foundation and floral overtones:

2 oz Bulldog Gin
1½ oz St Germain Liqueur
2 oz green tea
1 oz simple syrup
0.5 oz sake

Shake well. Serve in a highball or collins glass over ice. Garnish with lychee.

French 75

Many people suggest the French 75 for a springtime cocktail, although we enjoy it year round. After all, a drink named after a World War I artillery shell should be enjoyed across the seasons. Nevertheless, the brightness of the champagne in this drink evokes summertime refreshment while the sweetness keeps the flavor profile grounded in spring. Plus the yellow pastel color matches the finest spring attire:

1½ oz gin
2 oz lemon juice
1 tsp quick-dissolving sugar
champagne

Fill a cocktail shaker two-thirds full of ice and add all the ingredients except champagne. Shake, then strain into a chilled champaign flute and top with a champagne. Garnish with a cherry.

Miller’s Pear-fection

This luscious cocktail from Martin Miller’s Gin also has a fabulous pastel color – orange – that certainly fits the season. The interplay between the gin, Pernod and Pear flavor is also plenty of fun!

2 oz Martin Miller’s Gin
4 oz pear nectar
½ oz Pernod Anise
1 oz simple syrup
0.5 oz sake

Shake well. Serve in a highball or collins glass over ice. Garnish with lychee.

First, the last month’s release of the movie Julie and Julia showcases the cocktail’s creator and advocate, Julia Child.  I’ve always appreciated the fact that she attributed her longevity to “red meat and gin”.  Despite her perceived benefits of gin, vermouth was a far more popular ingredient in her recipes. The Upside Down Martini – with far more vermouth than gin – is naturally her cocktail of choice.

As the New York Times recently noted, the other big event is that Julia’s favorite vermouth, Noilly Prat, are returned to selling its original European recipe in the United States. The availability of this arguably richer vermouth means that we can now easily enjoy an Upside-Down Martini in the original form that Julia enjoyed. The recipe is quite simply:

5 parts dry vermouth (Noilly Prat is ideal)
1 part gin sweet vermouth
Lemon twist for garnish

Pour vermouth into a wine glass filled with ice, top with gin and garnish with lemon twist.

Smuggle into the theater and enjoy the next showing of Julie and Julia from a new perspective.

You can, of course, simply add gin to a glass of your favorite juice and see what happens. Certainly with orange or grapefruit juice, nothing more need be done — and the French G’Vine, distilled from grapes and with a nose of grapevine flowers, might go well with white grape juice, especially if you can get it fresh-squeezed from a vineyard.

But here are some other suggestions:

Lemon juice:
Aviation (8 parts gin, 2 parts maraschino, 1 part lemon juice)
Jasmine (3 parts gin, 2 parts Cointreau, 1 part Campari, 1 part lemon juice)

Lime juice:
Gimlet (1 part gin, 1 part Rose’s lime cordial — or make your own with fresh lime juice and sugar)
The Last Word (equal parts gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino, and fresh lime juice)
Pegu Club (2 parts gin, 1 part curacao, squeeze of lime juice, dash each of Angostura bitters and orange bitters)

Orange juice (or tangerine, clementine, Satsuma, etc):
Abbey (2 parts gin, 1 part Lillet blanc, 1 part orange juice, dash of Angostura bitters)
Astor Cocktail (8 parts gin, 1 part lemon juice, 1 part orange juice)
Bronx (3 parts gin, 1 part sweet vermouth, 1 part dry vermouth, 1 part orange juice)
Monkey Gland (add a couple drops absinthe to a glass and swirl it around to coat; stir with ice 2 parts gin, 1 part orange juice, and a few drops of grenadine, and strain into glass)

Grapefruit juice:
Fibber McGee (3 parts gin, 1 part grapefruit juice, 1 part sweet vermouth, dash of Angostura bitters)
Florida (3 parts grapefruit juice, 2 parts gin, 1 part Galliano, a couple dashes of Campari — this puts the Harvey Wallbanger to shame)
Hollywood Cocktail (2 parts light rum, 1 part gin, 1 part grapefruit juice, 1 part grenadine, 1/2 an egg white; shake vigorously with ice and strain)
Palm Beach Special (5 parts gin, 2 parts grapefruit juice, 1 part sweet vermouth)

Cranberry juice (or substitute pomegranate juice):
Gin Cosmopolitan (2 parts gin, 2 parts cranberry juice, 1 part triple sec, 1 part lime juice)
Ruby Rangoon (1 part gin, 1 part cranberry juice, top with ginger ale in a highball glass)

Nectarine juice:
Diamondhead Variation (3 parts gin, 2 parts pineapple juice, 1 part nectarine juice)

Pineapple juice:
Harlem Cocktail (6 parts gin, 3 parts pineapple juice, 1 part maraschino liqueur, garnish with fresh pineapple)
Jinx (2 parts gin, 1 part pineapple juice, dash of grenadine)
White Velvet (2 parts gin, 1 part Curacao, 1 part pineapple juice)

Mangosteen juice:
Check your local Asian market for mangosteen juice, and then serve it 1:1 with Bulldog gin, or 1:1:1 with Bulldog and pineapple juice. It’s time rum lost its stranglehold on tropical drinks.

1. The Spring Tao recommended by our friends at Hendrick’s provides a refreshing mix of 50/50 Hendrick’s Gin with grapefruit juice aloong with a small does of simple syrup and a bit o’ rhubarb. The bitterness of the rhubarb complements the gin nicely.    

2. Pimm’s & Lemon: Everyone on the other side of the pond knows about this one. As they recommend over at Pimm’s, fill a jug with some ice and add one part Pimm’s Cup to three parts lemonade. Toss in a little mint, strawberry or cucumber and your off to a refreshing, lightly alchoholic treat.    

3. Gimlet: It all started when Sir Thomas O. Gimlette recommended lime juice to avoid scurvy. Sailors throughout the Empire realized that lime juice tasted better with gin. Thus, a drink was born. You can find our recipe and opinions here.    

4. Aviation: We’re planning a post on this delightful drink soon. The recipe is simple: 2 ounces of gin, 1/2 ounce maraschino, 1/4 ounce lemon juice, shaken or stirred.  Its the perfect drink for people who don’t like gin, because the gin becomes but a piece of a piece of a complex puzzle. Remember that shaking or stirring your drink should result in a 15-20% dilution – the dilution is important for a balance of flavors, and the Aviation can be a finicky drink.  Yum.    

5. We’re not fans of drinking in the morning, but the Bubbly Pomegranate & Gin Cocktail described at Fancy Toast is absolutely fabulous. Can’t find the pomegranate molasses the recipe calls for?  We skipped the simple syrup and used a little Pom instead.

This is a drink with a longer history than you may realize. Rose’s lime cordial, a mix of lime juice and sugar, has been around since 1867, when it was used to provide a citrus ration to British sailors, in an attempt to prevent scurvy. (The use of limes in British sailors’ diets is where the term “limey” comes from.) Although many people will make a gimlet these days with fresh lime juice, which is a perfectly good drink, the original was made with Rose’s — which is what I continue to use in mine.

The availability of Rose’s most likely precipitated the drink’s creation, and people continued to insist on it even when fresh limes were available. Raymond Chandler — who lived in Los Angeles and would have had no trouble getting good fresh citrus — called for a 1:1 ratio, half gin and half Rose’s. Most recipes you’ll find in cocktail guides lean more towards 3:1 or 4:1, but I love Chandler’s version. Stirred on ice, and remembering that when we shake or stir a drink we want to wind up with a dilution of about 15-20%, it’s a rich drink, but the sweetness and tartness are in balance. Rose’s gives you consistent results, helpful when you’re making a lot of drinks — which may have been what Chandler found appealing, after all. Fresh lime juice varies more in its sweetness and tartness. I would certainly never give it up in a margarita, but once or twice a week I’ll make my gimlets with Rose’s, till the day they stop making it.

So let’s take that as our basic gimlet, the Chandler version with Rose’s. Because it’s such a simple drink, it’s extremely simple to create variants. The lime-and-mint combination of the mojito has been so popular in recent years that there are mojito-flavored malt beverages, sorbets, and chewing gums now. The cool juniper notes of gin go very nicely with mint — bruise some mint leaves with crushed ice before building your gimlet over them, and you have an excellent summer cooler; it wouldn’t be out of line to top it with a little soda.

Even better in my view, though, is a ginger gimlet, though after the first two you may find yourself accidentally softening the G in gimlet. Like with the Rose’s, I’m going to have to call for a specific brand’s ingredient here — feel free to substitute if you know of one, I just don’t, and making this from scratch is impractical unless you’re making a large quantity of drinks. Add to your gimlet a few dashes of ginger juice from The Ginger People — generally available in your better grocery stores and gourmet shops — and you have a ginger and lime combination that the rum drinks will envy. Unlike ginger-flavored syrup or powdered ginger, ginger juice still has some real heat to it, some definite spice — any other form of ginger makes this a different drink. Again, gin’s strength in this drink is in those big, booming base notes from the juniper — the heat of the ginger and the tanginess of the Rose’s play against that like lights strewn around a Christmas tree.

For a very very dry gimlet … get rid of the Rose’s altogether, and use Hangar One’s Kaffir lime vodka. Even if, like me, you eschew flavored vodkas, it’s worth looking into Hangar One’s offerings, which are high-quality, dry, and interesting cocktail ingredients — no sour watermelon bubblegum vodka to be had here. The kaffir lime is a Southeast Asian lime, used frequently in Thai cooking. The vodka has a pronounced lime flavor with floral notes reminiscent of some of gin’s botanicals; the combination, in about a 3:1 gin-to-vodka ratio with a little simple syrup, well-stirred to dilute, is a potent one. If the gimlet is a casual drink with its collar loosened and its shoes kicked off, this is its more formal cousin, practically a martini — and you may want to take the potency down a notch with a little vermouth. You can even add a dash of orange bitters if you like.

The Italians have always appreciated bitterness, from broccoli raab to radicchio to Sardinia’s corbezzolo honey, which has a tawny caramel sweetness but finishes as bitter as crushed aspirin. Italy is home to a number of bitter liqueurs, often called amari or aperitif bitters, and of those, the one best known outside the country is Campari. Made from the same recipe since 1860 and — like so many of those old herbal liqueurs — using more than 60 ingredients that the boom in the spice trade had made available, Campari is a tempting deep candy-red, and would be sweet enough to drink straight if you could handle the bitterness. Most people can’t when they’re first introduced to it — it’s a drink with a learning curve. Give Campari four tries and you may go from aversion to obsession.

Most of the first Americans to discover Campari were G.I.s sent to Italy in WWI, but it was the Lost Generation — Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and their gang — who first encountered the Negroni, invented in 1919 in honor of gin-lover Count Camillio Negroni. A simple-sounding drink, the Negroni is equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, stirred (like a martini) and served over ice with an orange twist. The combination is bitter and bracing, but enjoyably, quaffably so — the way fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice is. The gin tames the Campari but doesn’t cover it up, even if you tilt the ratio a bit more towards the gin as you become accustomed to the aperitif. It is, plainly, one of the best excuses to be thirsty.

The Pimm’s Cup is a similar drink, but as British as the Negroni is Italian. A British bartender in the 1820s, James Pimm, invented the liqueur; by the 1960s, his company offered six versions of it, each of them using the same basic herbs and spices to flavor a different base liquor. Today, only one version is still produced — the first and best, Pimm’s No. 1, a 50-proof gin concoction. Pimm’s is a ruddy russet, like reddish tea; the taste is slightly bitter, citric but not tart, subtly spicy. The Pimm’s Cup combines one part Pimm’s No. 1 with 2 parts lemon soda and garnishes it with aplomb: the original recipe, which you rarely find followed outside of Britain, adds leaves of mint and borage and slices of lemon, apple, orange, and strawberry. The Napoleon House in New Orleans simplifies this, using cucumber (which tastes similar to borage), mint, and an orange slice.

Easy variants are found by using ginger beer or tonic water instead of the lemon soda; if you do use the soda, be sure to use one with real lemon juice, like Essn’s Meyer Lemon soda or San Pellegrino’s Limonata. The tartness makes all the difference to the drink. In the winter, you can dispense with the garnishes completely unless you want to float a few cranberries on top: make a hot Pimm’s Cup with three parts hot lemonade and one part Pimm’s No. 1, and if you’re celebrating, add an extra part of gin.

But the simplest combination of gin and bitters is so simple that, in combination with the name, you may shy away from it. Pink Gin may not sound like a serious drink, but it’s an excellent way to try a new gin — or an old favorite. It uses Angostura bitters, which happen to be the easiest to find, though Peychaud’s are a good variant; like the soft drink Moxie, both take their bitterness from gentian root. Simply shake a few dashes of bitters into your glass, and swirl it around until the whole surface has been coated; add a couple ounces of gin, and rocks if you like. This isn’t a drink for gin beginners, but if you’re used to martinis or gin and tonics, it’s a great change of pace, especially with a really excellent gin.