Pendennis Club Cocktail
Louisville's quiet one
- Method
- Shaken
- Style
- Classic
- Glass
- Nick and Nora
- Time
- 5 min
Ingredients
- 45mlGinPlymouth recommended
No Gin? London Dry Gin — juniper forward, and what these recipes assume if you have not got a preference · Old Tom Gin — sweeter and rounder, the older style · Navy Strength Gin — a lot stronger, so save it for a clear afternoon
- 30mlApricot LiqueurGiffard Abricot du Roussillon recommended
- 15mlLemon Juice
- 2 dashesPeychaud's Bitters
Make it well
Shaken, properly.
Add the gin, apricot liqueur, lemon juice and to your with ice.
for 10-12 seconds.
into a chilled coupe.
On the palate
On the nose it's juniper and citrus peel from the gin with something soft and stone-fruity underneath. On tasting, the apricot reads as depth rather than sweetness, which catches people out, and the lemon keeps everything crisp. The Peychaud's dashes bring a faint anise and baking-spice note that pulls it all together at the finish. Drier and more spirit-forward than the ingredient list would have you believe. A proper grown-up gin drink.
Where it came from
Named for the Pendennis Club, a private social club founded in 1881 in Louisville, Kentucky, itself named after the fictional Arthur Pendennis from William Makepeace Thackeray's 1850 novel. Exactly when the cocktail itself was created isn't documented, but its first print appearance was in William "Cocktail Bill" Boothby's 1908 book The World's Drinks and How to Mix Them, as a simpler three-ingredient drink of gin, apricot brandy and dry vermouth. By the time it resurfaces in Charles H. Baker Jr.'s 1939 The Gentleman's Companion, styled "The Pendennis Club's Famous Special," the vermouth had been dropped in favour of lemon juice and Peychaud's bitters, closer to the drink made today. A genuine case of a recipe changing shape over three decades, not just being reported differently.
Keep pouring
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The bartender’s note
One drink, one story, one bottle worth buying.
Thursday evening, so you have time to shop. No more than that.