A Honey Apricot Gin Sour — Transformed Into a Kinda-Sorta Tiki Drink?
The Pendennis Club, and a rum-based tropical cocktail inspired by it.
I try to read the comments.
I say try because, well, it’s aspirational, situational, contextual. Most weeks I read most of the comments. For the last several weeks, however, I have had a lot going on, and I have been neglecting my duty. (In my defense, I did notify you all that this would be the case. Most likely, it will still be the case this week, because there is still a lot going on. I will try to come back and read and respond to the comments, in the fullness of time.)
I try to read the comments for several reasons. First, I enjoy your reactions, your questions, your recollections, and yes, even (most of) your criticisms. This is a community and a collective effort.
Second, I learn from them. I learn about your swaps and substitutions, your suspicions about my recipes, your approaches to making the same drink. And sometimes I even learn about new, or new to me, drinks. Because the universe of cocktails is vast, so vast, practically infinite, and sometimes there are drinks you know about that I don’t — but should — know.
For example, the Pendennis, also known as the Pendennis Club, which comments section regular Jake Y has politely nudged me about. And you know what? Jake was right to nudge me!
It’s not that I’d never ever heard of this drink before, but six months ago, if you’d bumped into me at a bar and asked me for a recipe or an opinion, I could not have given you one without a bit of Googling.
I have tried a lot of drinks in my time. So many drinks. But even I have not tried all of them.
Yet the drink fits nicely into one of this year’s subthemes — the uses of apricot liquor in otherwise straightforward drinks. There are a range of specs online, but all of them trend in the same direction: gin, apricot, lime, Peychaud’s bitters, perhaps a bit of added sweetener.
It’s a spicy, simple gin/apricot sour, perfect for the dawning weeks of summer, like an Avaition — a drink to which it bears a surprising resemblance.
You want a Pendennis while the sun sets, when it’s 79 degrees and shorts weather, but not in the sweaty throes of a muggy August afternoon. That’s tiki time.
On the other hand, with its lime and apricot, this drink bears more than a little resemblance to a tiki drink. So close, in fact, that with just a bit of tinkering and a bottle or two of rum, I think you can, in fact, convert it into one, or something pretty close.
And since my air conditioner has been out for the last two weeks, well, I’ve had muggy-afternoon tiki drinks on my mind.
So this week we will make a Pendennis Club with a few small tweaks. And then we will transform that drink into a rum-based, fruity-sweet tiki-esque variation, a kind of apricot-honey Mai Tai, fit and friendly for when those sweaty 90-degree August days do roll around.
Both drinks are delicious, summer-y, and relatively easy to make. And together, they help demonstrate the difference between classic sour-type cocktails and their decadent, multi-layered tropical counterparts.
You make. You drink. You learn. The cycle repeats. Let’s begin.
Tweaking the Ratio
Many recipes for the Pendennis look more or less like this:
2-3 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
¾-1 ounce lime juice
1 ounce apricot liqueur
2 ounces gin
You can find recipes that alter the lime juice or reduce the amount of gin, but this gives you a sense of the standard spec.
It’s not bad in this form — but it’s a little bit dry, a little bit thin, a little bit underclocked. And the main reason why it doesn’t fully hold together is that most apricot liqueurs aren’t quite sweet enough.
This is a common issue with older drinks sweetened entirely by fruity liqueurs. They end up with just a bit too much bite.
That’s true, for example, of the Sidecar (a Cognac sour sweetened with orange liqueur) as well as the Aviation (a gin sour sweetened with maraschino liqueur and crème de violette).
And in both cases, there’s a very simple fix.