If You Can Make a Gin Basil Smash…
Make a tasty herbal gin sour, and then transform it into something new.
Links About Drinks
Close Company, the newest bar from Death & Co., launched this week in Nashville. It has a conversation pit and mini Martinis. It bills itself as a “neighborhood bar,” which is apparently a big thing now. It very much seems like we are entering an era of “retro” cocktail bars that are designed to capture a laid-back form of nostalgia for the high-end cocktail bars of 15 to 20 years ago. I’m not mad about it. But it makes me feel old.
A small wine importer helped make the winning case against tariffs. Then, as happens, the tariffs were turned back on.
A helpful look at some Chartreuse alternatives. You can always blend your own!
There’s a “hidden” Tokyo-style cocktail bar in Tyson’s Corner, just outside of Washington, D.C. Sure seems like it requires jumping through a lot of hoops in order to get a seat.
Smashes to Smashes…Dust to Dust
The smash contains multitudes.
In last week’s newsletter, we looked at the Whiskey Smash, made with bourbon, mint, syrup, bitters, and muddled lemon. Poke around cocktail books and recipe databases and you’ll find plenty of iterations that merely swap out the base spirit (bourbon) for something else strong and boozy: rye, rum, gin, tequila, brandy, and so forth. Mint, lemon, syrup, booze, and—if you like—a dash or two bitters is usually an effective and delicious combo.
It cannot be said often enough. Where there’s one good drink, there are more good drinks.
The Whiskey Smash is a good drink. And thus, there are many more good drinks that follow from its basic pattern and template. It’s an entire universe of cocktail iteration, a mixology franchise capable of producing endless spinoffs, many as delicious as the original, with much the same appeal.
Perhaps the most famous drink of the Smash Iterated Universe (SIU) is the Gin Basil Smash. The Gin Basil Smash is one of those drinks where the name tells you more or less everything you need to know about it. It’s a gin sour with muddled basil, served over ice. The basil gives it a distinctive, gin-friendly herbal taste and aroma. It’s a simple drink, really, just four ingredients, but it has a quite specific, highly appealing character, and a descriptively servicey name. There’s no mystery to this concoction, no in-joke, nudge-nudge, wink-wink reference to decode in the name. When you order a Gin Basil Smash, you know exactly what you’re getting.
Like the Whiskey Smash, the Gin Basil Smash is a good drink. Which means there are even more good drinks to be made from the same template.
So in this week’s newsletter, we’re going to perform an exercise that will be familiar to longtime regular readers.
We’ll break down the Gin Basil Smash, component by component, and then look at how to use its structure to modify and iterate your way into further good drinks—including a deliciously smoky, herbal, fruity variation with rosemary, mezcal, Scotch, and banana.
Yes. Banana.
It looks like this.
Smash Mouth
You should start by making a Gin Basil Smash. This drink comes to us from Germany, where it was created in the late 00s by bartender Georg Meyer in direct response to Dale DeGroff’s Whiskey Smash, which was itself an evolved riff on the pre-Prohibition style of smash cocktail.
The Gin Basil Smash is thus an iteration of an iteration, a highly evolved creature of the Cocktail Renaissance. It fills its evolutionary niche quite well.
Let’s begin by looking at the core recipe—and then we’ll figure out how to modify it: