Honeymoon – David Embury

8 parts applejack

2 parts lime juice

1 part Curacao and Benedictne, half and half

Shake with crushed ice. This drink is sometimes also called the farmers daughter

 This was yet another cocktail found by Ivo at Goat in the Chelsea Prayer room.

We had a good Saturday night, the bottonless brunch was crazy as ever, then the evening went super smoothly so ducked upstairs for my cocktail. David Embury has found a permanenet position out of the cabinets and behind the bar for ease of access, and the people I work with are buying into the challenge.

Applejack is like a rough colonial cousin of Calvados. This was originally made by getting a bucket of fermented apple juice, or cider, and leaving it outside in winter. The water and cider solids would freeze, to be removed periodically, leaving a relatively high form of alcohol behind. This process was called ‘jacking’, which is where the name came from.

Charmingly as I google this I’ve discovered that Applejack was also the name for one of the original my little pony characters, I love it when children’s toys are named after booze in a ‘innocent’ kind of way, I’ve just bought one from amazon for my friends 3 year old boy, he apparently has developed a penchant for my little pony much to his fathers distress, I see this as something to encourage.

Curacao is an orange flavoured liqueur, we’ve used Cointreau, and Benedictine is a herbal liqueur, its manufactured to look like a old monastic product, the truth is slightly less romantic as its origins lie purely as a created product in a distillery by a astute French businessman. It uses 27 herbs and spices, some secret, the bulk not. The easiest way to describe the taste is herbal, and french. According to Professor Wiki the Burnley miners club in Lancashire is the worlds biggest single consumer in the world, which is wonderfully Britishly bizarre

The drink itself is a classic 8-2-1 Embury sour, although a little more complicated with the two liqueurs together to form the sweetening 1 part. The flavour of the benedictine just peaks through, and complements the Applejack nicely. I found this a little unbalanced, I think due to the Cointreau. Probably not one I’ll go back to.