Singapore Sling

Taste

Gin's juniper sits underneath a wash of cherry, pineapple and lime. Bénédictine adds a honeyed, herbal backbone you'd miss if it wasn't there but would definitely notice if it was gone, and the orange liqueur and grenadine round out the sweetness and give it that famous rosy-pink colour. It reads fruity and approachable up front, but there's real structure underneath from the gin and Bénédictine. A properly made one is a lot more interesting than its neon-pink, tourist-drink reputation suggests.

Origin

Officially, the Singapore Sling was created around 1915 at Raffles Hotel in Singapore by bartender Ngiam Tong Boon, who Raffles credits with mixing up a drink that looked like an innocent fruit punch but carried the kick of a proper gin sling. Almost everything past that headline is disputed. The exact date shifts depending on the source, some say 1910, some 1913, Raffles' own materials aren't fully consistent either. The original recipe was never formally written down, and Ngiam died in 1918, just three years after supposedly inventing it, so the version served today is largely reconstructed from a recipe scrawled on the back of a bar receipt in 1936. Cocktail historian David Wondrich has also traced references to "pink slings for pale people" as far back as 1903, well before the Raffles story even begins. Whatever actually happened behind that bar, the pink, fruity drink with a secret kick has stayed famous for well over a century.