Purple reign.

The Purple.

The inspiration for the creation of a new cocktail can sometimes be strange but you need to open to such strangeity (being strange and thinking constantly about cocktails helps). The way I came to create The Purple might be an excellent example. I few weeks back I was watering my beloved orchids and clumsy ole me knocked one over which snapped off a branch of beautiful flowers. Sad Andy decided he’d better come up with a cocktail to make use of the soon-to-die flowers* and thus The Purple was born. The term is a bit of an old fashioned turn of phrase used for the rich and royal. “Born into the purple” meaning to be of great privilege and wealth. Running with this concept I decided to set myself a challenge. Limiting your option often (counter-intuitively) opens yourself up to more creativity and I decided to make something with ingredients available 100 years ago which also had an upper-class vibe to them and, yes, it also had to be at least vaguely purple. I decided to go with a split base of London dry gin and cognac. Check! Lemon juice shines well with those spirits but how are we gonna pupleify our new old creation? First thoughts were with crème de mure or similar but I’ve beaning leaning on those kind of liqueurs rather heavily recently and after a bit of trial and error settled on Heering, a rather delightful old Danish liqueur that I’ve been wanting to use for a bit more than just a Singapore Sling. Luckily an equal parts combination of the above ingredients hit the mark best for me. Could I have made it more purple? Yeah, probably. Should we sacrifice flavour for appearance? Not so much. I could also have purpled it up with a few dashes of Ango but it turned out to dominate the drink too much so I dialed it back to just a dash each of Angostura and orange bitters which balanced nicely and left us with an easy to remember formula of 1:1:1:1:1:1 + a dead orchid. Up, double strained into a nice stemmed glass. Classy non?

The Purple.

1oz/30ml Cognac (VS or VSOP).

1oz/30ml London dry in of choice.

1oz/30ml fresh lemon juice.

1oz/30ml Cherry Heering.

1 dash Angostura bitters.

1 dash orange bitters.

Shake with ice and double strain into a chilled Champagne coupé. Garnish with the flower of a martyred orchid. Or not.

Toast orchids.

*The broken branch and flowers will stay in good condition in a small vase or glass of water for at least a couple of weeks.