Eagle – David Embury

1 part Parfait Amour 

2 parts Lemon Juice 

8 parts Gin 

1 Egg White to each 2 drinks 

Shake with cracked ice.

I have never worked in a bar which has stocked Parfait Amour, in 26 years. It’s a bright purple liqueur, loaded with sugar, which every major distilling house that produces liqueurs makes differently. Bols, the people that proudly claim ownership use an orange base flavoured with rose petals, vanilla and almonds. DeKuyper uses lemon, coriander and violets.

I still don’t work in a bar that has Parfait Amour so I decided to cobble together the flavours from Bols, with violets for colour to get something along the lines of what it should be like, and to be honest it was a bit of a non-event.

We used aquafaba instead of egg white and I’m getting a nagging feeling that aquafaba and gin do not make good friends, the gin seems to hold onto some very faint aromas and flavours from this normally flavourless liquid, and its not that pleasant. At Goat we normally hide this with something aromatic on top of the drink, like the cornflower and marigold petals in the picture below, but even these weren’t a silver bullet this time.

The drink is bland, it looks ok on paper, but just doesn’t really seem to have anything going for it. I find that often with Embury’s 8-2-1 formula feels like it needs a little bit more sugar to properly bring out the flavours, and this seemed to be an extreme example. I actually went back and tried it with just violet liqueur as it seemed only a fraction away from an aviation cocktail. This fraction turns out to be enormous.

Not a keeper.