Sharkbait’s Cocktail of the Week: Can We Fix It?

Yes we can! Or, at least it is in the process of being fixed. The powers that be ARE working on this as we speak. Turns out, years of dick jokes in the backlog really inflate the size of a website. Who knew?

Anyway, hopefully you are reading this, and I implore you to stick around. Repairs and improvements are underway. I promise.

On to this week’s drink! This week I’m going back to the Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails book for a gin & sherry based cocktail that intrigued me: the Barbara West.

I’ve like the sherry based drinks I’ve featured here before. So I wanted to see if this one is just as good as the others. Let’s find out shall we?

Barbara West
2 oz. Gin
1 oz. Sherry
.5 oz. Fresh lemon juice
1 small dash Angostura bitters

Shake in an iced cocktail shaker and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

This has a very bright and citrusy nose to start. It is amazing how half an ounce of fresh lemon and a twist can really take over the aroma of a drink. Especially a gin based one. No small feat here!

The sip is smoother than I thought it would be. I get a lemon/sherry combination up front that lingers all the way through the sip itself. The gin comes through a little bit underneath, but not a whole lot. After a few more sips, the lemon seems to fade away faster, or the sherry takes over more, but the balance seems to skew more towards the sherry the more times I keep going back. The finish is slightly sour/ tangy. There is a little bit of a lingering sherry aftertaste at the end of each sip as well.

I don’t hate this, but this one isn’t doing it for me. I suspect the choice of sherry is to blame here. The sherry is not exactly…top shelf. I most recently used it to cook with. While it isn’t a “cooking” sherry per se, I think this wine is to be relegated to cooking only status. Perhaps if I obtain a bottle of Lustau or something of that caliber, I’ll give this one another go. For now, I’ll go with a different gin/lemon based drink.

(Banner image found here)