BFC’s Substitute COTW, From the Archives to the Innovation Lab

Greetings and Salutations. Sharkbait is still off on his walkabout. Which is somewhat ironic because I’m the one down undah (in the Southern Hemisphere) (I don’t mean of your mom). Regardless, you are stuck with me one last and final time in 2025.

Anyhoodles, (prior to writing this) I had some raspberries that were going to go to waste if I left them in the fridge before one of my (other) flights. Perfect since we’ve already covered cranberries and snozzberries remain out of reach. With the surplus raspberries I decided to whip up some raspberry syrup and make a clover club! What a great idea knowing Sharky would be exploring UK bars and I’d be tapping in soon enough. But wait, a quick little search of DFO showed….Sharkbait did the Clover Club for COTW way back in 2020.

Well fuck that guy, let’s do it again.

2 ounces gin (as you can see, I used Bombay)

1/2 ounce lemon juice

~1/2 ounce Raspberry syrup

One egg white

Typically garnished with fresh raspberries but I’d already made the syrup and wasn’t buying more for garnish

Dry shake all the ingredients, then add ice and shake again, double strain into a chilled coupe, consume.

That was….fine. Honestly, I wish that I had made the raspberry syrup even sweeter. Maybe a 2:1 sugar to water ratio instead of 1:1. Or at least added more to the cocktail to make it pinker and sweeter. The egg white gives it great smoothness and the classic mouthfeel you want from a sour variant. But the lemon dominates, which is suboptimal. And to Sharky’s point from five fucking years ago, the garnish does go a long way. So that’s kind of a bummer.

In addition to this not being my best effort, repeating isn’t really in the spirit of substituting, so let’s try something new! And so new that it requires a bit of innovation. Given that I’ve already shared a cocktail failure, I feel no shame in telling you that I found this next idea by searching for raspberry syrup in the cocktails subreddit. I looked at a few options but saw one particular comment about how raspberry went well with Green Chartreuse (wonder if I have any of that lying around) and that focused the search. Eventually I decided to roll with some Internet rando’s raspberry riff on a Sazerac. (You’ll have to scroll down and he didn’t include specs but someone replying did so let’s roll with that):

1 ounce rye (I used Bulleit)

1 ounce Brandy or cognac (E&J XO)

1/2 ounce raspberry syrup (generous measure of 1/2 ounce)

1/4 ounce green chartreuse (I went up a little on this because I’m a freak)

2-3 dashes peychauds bitters

Swirl your chartreuse in a rocks glass and then throw that bitch in the freezer. Throw some ice cube into your mixing vessel, stir until chilled AF, then strain into your chilled chartreuse washed rocks glass (take that out of the freezer first). Garnish with a lemon twist or don’t, and then drink.