I was immediately entranced by Empress 1908 with its majestic bottle and deep blue colour. I enjoyed its smooth citrus aroma that at first I couldn’t identify — not lemon, lime, or orange. And it’s lovely in light drinks, even sours.
But I became frustrated as I tried to work with it in stronger cocktails, as it just didn’t measure up. Fortunately the distiller provides some cocktail recipes, some of which involve obscure ingredients, but with enough variety to give this amateur mixologist some direction to work with. I noticed that they often garnish with a grapefruit slice — a big garnish and likely to impart some serious flavour. So I tried their own gin and tonic that way, and it’s really nice. I’d certainly serve it to grapefruit fans, including myself.
The mystery citrus turns out to be grapefruit and I wondered why their recipes didn’t include a Salty Dog or anything actually featuring grapefruit juice. Would it overwhelm? Yeah, it did, even with 2:3 gin to juice. And the colour was quite murky, not a totally unattractive mauve, but it would need to be garnished well and I missed the usual beautiful colour of a salty dog — similar mauve results in the Gin Basil Smash. Better colour might come from a white grapefruit, but those are out of fashion now and hard to find, and really the Empress flavour didn’t stand up well in the Dog.
To check my recollection of how a salty dog can taste and so I tried one with my stand-by flavourful gin, Dillon’s Unfiltered 22. That was more like it, via both senses.
I’m still hoping to try the Empress 1908 recipe for Cucumber Blue, which looks promising and will preserve the gorgeous blue from the butterfly pea flower, and it seems the Empress has just posted some new and more accessible cocktail recipes. Good on them for that! One drink does not fit all gins. Gins are so varied now that recipes — or even suggested complements — help us make the best of them.
Gin Social 