| Type | Cocktail |
|---|---|
| Primary alcohol by volume | |
| Served | Straight up; without ice |
| Standard garnish | |
| Standard drinkware | Cocktail glass |
| Commonly used ingredients |
|
| Preparation | Chill the glass, then coat the inside with the Bitters. Add the gin very well chilled, garnish and serve. |
| Notes | The traditional garnish is a shave of lemon rind. You can obtain this by removing about an inch strip of lemon rind with a potato peeler. |
Pink Gin is a cocktail made fashionable in the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century, consisting of Plymouth gin[1] and a dash of 'pink' Angostura bitters, a dark red extract of gentian and spices, known from the 1820s at Angostura, Venezuela but now made in Trinidad and Tobago. Lemon rind is also commonly used as a garnish, with the citrus oils subtly complementing the flavour.
Contents |
Pink gin is a typically British way of enjoying gin. It is widely agreed that the drink was first created by members of the Royal Navy. Plymouth gin is a 'sweet' gin, as opposed to London gin which is 'dry', and was added to Angostura bitters to make the consumption of Angostura bitters more enjoyable. [2]
Angostura bitters were discovered as a cure for sea sickness in 1824 by Dr. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert (though their other medicinal uses had been discovered long before this), [3] who subsequently formed the House of Angostura, a company selling the bitters to sailors.
The British Royal Navy then brought the idea for the drink to bars in Britain, [4] where this method of serving was first noted on the mainland. By the 1870s, gin was becoming increasingly popular and many of the finer establishments in Britain were serving Pink Gin. [5]
A typical pink gin is one part gin and one dash of angostura bitters.
Though there are no major variations of pink gin, many bartenders vary the amount of angostura bitters used. Occasionally the drink is topped up with iced water.
A bartender may ask the customer whether he wants it "in or out", upon which the bartender swirls the angostura bitters around the glass before either leaving it in, or pouring it out (leaving only a residue), and then adding the gin.
It is also common, especially in the UK, for pink gin to be served as 'pink gin and tonic', typically consisting of 4 dashes of angostura bitters and 2 shots of gin, which is then topped up with tonic water. This is served in a highball glass over ice, and then can be garnished with lemon.[6]
A horse named after the cocktail competed in the 1997 Grand National steeplechase finishing fourteenth.
Pink gin was drunk by Hattie (Jean Simmons) in The Grass is Greener (1960). She liked her bitters to be burnt with a match prior to adding the gin.
Lottie Cassell offers a pink gin to Logan Mountstuart in Episode 1 of Channel 4's Any Human Heart (TV series). 2010 (UK), 2011 (US).
Pink gin is a popular drink in Graham Greene's 'The Heart of the Matter'.
In the James Bond novel The Man With the Golden Gun, agent 007 orders a pink gin with Beefeater and "plenty of bitters" in the bar of the Thunderbird Hotel in Jamaica, which is operated by his nemesis Francisco Scaramanga.
In Agatha Christie's Poirot, episode Triangle at Rhodes, some of the characters drink Pink Gin, one such cocktail being used as the delivery method of a deadly poison.