Gimlet (cocktail)

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For the woodworking tool used to drill small holes, see gimlet

The Gimlet is a cocktail typically made of gin and lime juice (such as Rose's)

A 1928 description of the drink was: "gin, a spot of lime, and soda" (D. B. Wesson, I'll never be Cured III). A 1953 description was: "a real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice and nothing else" (detective Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye).

According to the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition on 8/4/06, a gimlet (lowercase "g") consists of the following:

2 oz. gin
1/4 to 1/2 oz. simple syrup
1/2 oz. lime juice (for example, Rose's)
Garnish with a lime

For the Vodka Gimlet, replace gin with vodka. As of the 1990s, maybe earlier, bartenders often answer requests for the gimlet with a vodka gimlet. Vodka gimlets were popularized by renowned proposition gambler and raconteur "Hong Kong" Freddie Wong, whose spirit of choice is quadruple-filtered Belvedere.

Surgeon Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Desmond Gimlette (1857-1943) served in the Royal Navy when cocktails started to become popular. A naval medical officer would certainly have had access to gin and lime juice. However, neither his obituary notice in The Times of October 6, 1943, nor his entry in Who Was Who, 1941-1950, mentions any inventiveness with regard to cocktails.

The film director Ed Wood's favorite drink was supposedly a vodka gimlet, and he used the pen name 'Akdov Telmig' at times; Vodka Gimlet with each word reversed.