Historic Cocktails: gin-based cocktail with Vickers London Dry Gin

By Marie-France 30.08.2019

We present some special, ancient historic cocktail recipes, compiled directly from the booklet “puis le gas y dit” by Distillers Corporation Seagrams Limited of Montreal.

The recipes included in this book were found and tasted in law firms of connoisseurs, hotel club experts and world-renowned hotels of the time. Divided into five parts according to the spirit base from gin, Scotch whisky, Canadian and American rye to bourbon.

Today we continue with Vicker’s London Dry Gin. This gin created by John and Joseph Vickers in 1813 in Australia. Based on a recipe with floral and citrus aromas and evergreen juniper, it is elegant and botanically complex.

Vickers made it to the anecdote of a day on the stock market at the time in “Puis le gas y dit” book. Later, a cocktail was asked for the “after-party” of this stock market session: the John Collins.

The story reads:

“After that, there’ s my guy who takes me there to what they call the stock exchange… a hell of a crash it was making in there. The world was shouting, screaming.

From what I understand of this deal, it was selling a lot of things they didn’t have to people who were hoping to borrow money to pay for…

They have machines that unroll a paper where it is marked if they have made enough money in the morning to pay for the afternoon’s losses. From there, the guy said to me, at that time, ‘we’ll take a John Collins’. ”