Yale Fence – David Embury

1 part Italian Vermouth

1 part Applejack

1 part Gin

Stir. Twist of lemon over each drink.

There are four cocktails named after Ivy league schools, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and a Pennsylvania (and I’m grasping a little at the last), and these are from Embury. Online there’s a plethora of ‘modern’ drinks named after Universities, most of these in the school ‘colour’, which for Yale is blue, so best avoided (I have one exception to my rule about not drinking things the same colour as cleaning products, and that’s an Aviation).

The Yale fence was built as a divide to separate all that was good in Yale, from New Haven next door, to preserve the ‘Manly democracy of Yale life’, and served as a meeting place for students, perched along its rails, location based on seniority, like a telephone wire covered in crows. In 1888 it was removed to an outcry from the alumni, terrified that as men were no longer guarding the corner “ladies will undoubtedly begin to tread the sidewalk of the campus side of Chapel Street, so long left sacred to the students and men generally”. Ladies or more correctly a Lady had already snuck past this fortification, the first female graduate was admitted in 1886, although it wasn’t until 1920 that the next female graduates, no doubt admitted after a war thinned the ranks of American men, and on a surge of woman’s rights spurned on by Carrie Nation and prohibition, began to change things for good.

The drink is a good one, very similar to an Ampersand (30-01), swapping out the brandy for apple ‘brandy’ and without the orange. I used Pink Pepper gin made by the nice chaps at Audemus in Cognac for the gin, which has picked up the flavours of the applejack and vermouth beautifully.