New cocktail ingredients – Summer 2020. Life has been miserable for many so far this year and challenging for most. The drinks industry is busy trying to keep us entertained at home. There are some notable new products available. Such as….
Gooseberry Gin
Gooseberry Gin. Yes really. We’ve seen a rush of new rhubarb products including the epic gin, and so I’ve been waiting on this very English summer flavour to appear as an additional cocktail ingredient. Gooseberry is of course a subtle flavour and so, my tip is to combine it with a liqueur. The sweetness from the liqueur that you mix it with brings out the gooseberry fruit flavour. Exactly the same idea can be used with rhubarb gin. Clearly you have to give a bit of thought to what flavours you’re mixing it with. But as a principle it works well. For me, gooseberry is all about England and summertime. So, mixing it with St. Germain elderflower seemed like an obvious choice. And you know what? It works well.
I’ve created a Gooseberry Martini around this flavour base. It will be a new cocktail I’ll try out on others once lockdown post-Covid19 is lifted and we can mingle again.
A Kumquat liqueur
Another one I’ve found recently is Fortunella kumquat liqueur. This is another great fruit flavour, that is good to see as an available cocktail ingredient. I always liked the fruits with their sweet flesh and bitter skin. It makes for a great cocktail ingredient. The Golden Fortune is a good cocktail using this based ingredient. Developed by 2 bartenders in London, they will obviously know what the world of mixology needs at the moment.
The most exciting thing though for me as a mixologist is that this is a liqueur rather than a spirit. The vast majority of development work at the moment is happening in the world of spirits. New gins constantly. New rums and flavoured rums are about to be the next big thing. But relatively little is happening with liqueurs. So it’s great to see new products such as Fortunella. I sincerely wish the 2 guys well with it.