We love a Bashall Brunch Martini - our twist on the espresso martini using our Orange and Quince gin, and we also love a Bashall Negroni, which we make with Parkin Cake gin to add an edge of spice.

This week we're mixing things up with the Espresso Negroni, which is a combination of the two - we take the espresso and the Kahlua from an espresso martini and mix it with Campari and red vermouth and a dash of bitters from the negroni for a rich, complex taste. It doesn't sound like it should work, but it really does!

We tried it without the kahlua the first time which worked but was a little bitter for our taste - we found the kahlua really mellows out the coffee flavour and provides a good balance with the bitterness of the campari. The Parkin Cake gin adds a touch of ginger, and we like to spice it up even more with a dash of tabasco. Perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

For two espresso negronis, add 50ml of Parkin Cake gin with 50ml of Campari, 50ml of red vermouth, 50ml of kahlua and 50ml of espresso to a cocktail shaker, add a few dashes of bitters - we use angostura but other kinds would work - and (optionally) a dash of tabasco and shake with ice. If the espresso is still hot, shake for a good 40 seconds to ensure the ice properly cools it. Strain into martini glasses and enjoy!

The easing of lockdown continues, but we’re still enjoying our home cocktails. It’s not exactly sunny here but it’s warm, so today we’re going for an easy and refreshing summer cocktail. Salty Dog is a classic cocktail from the 1920s, the heyday of cocktails. Simply salt the rim of a highball glass, add a good measure of gin, a bit of simple syrup if you find grapefruit a bit tart, and top off with grapefruit juice. Delicious!

We usually like to keep it simple when we’re making our own cocktails, and egg whites has always seemed a step too far. But this week we decided to get adventurous and discovered it’s actually pretty easy and really delicious, giving a creamy smoothness to a fruity cocktail. This is a twist on the classic gin fizz cocktail. This would usually have lemon juice in, but we went with freshly squeezed orange juice to complement our Orange & Quince gin, and it makes a really fresh and delicious cocktail. We made this a fairly short drink, but if you want something longer, just add more fizzy water.

Add 50ml of Orange & Quince gin, 25ml of simple sugar syrup (see earlier posts for how to make this easy syrup), the juice of half a large orange and the white of one egg to a cocktail shaker (if you have one - you can shake in a bottle if not). Shake vigorously for around 15 seconds, and then add ice and shake for another 30 seconds. Pour into glasses and top up with fizzy water.

This is a lovely cocktail for a sunny afternoon, combining a refreshing cup of iced tea with a shot of gin. It’s an easy and refreshing cocktail that you can put together in seconds and enjoy in the garden at your leisure. You can make this with your favourite tea and your favourite gin - we feel that the flowery bergamot flavour of Earl Grey is beautifully complemented by the berry fruitiness of our Damson & Elderberry gin.

Make a cup of Earl Grey to your preferred strength. Add two teaspoons of sugar - or a bit more if you usually like your tea sweet. Stir well and put in the fridge to chill. Once cool, mix three parts tea to one part Damson & Elderberry gin and add a twist of lemon.

Last week we were celebrating summer, but this week (in Bashall at least) it’s rainy and cold, and we’re after something more comforting. A Negroni is a classic Italian cocktail - easy to make, with a bittersweet complexity. Here at Bashall Spirits, it’s one of our favourites. Campari and Vermouth Rosso are both strong flavours, so if you don’t want the gin to get swallowed, you need a robust one. We think it goes brilliantly with our Parkin Cake gin - the sweetness of the treacle complementing the sweet vermouth, and the ginger adding an edge to the Campari bitterness.

Mix equal parts (we went for 50ml) of Parkin Cake gin, Campari and Vermouth Rosso, pour over ice and add a twist of orange.

With the pubs re-opening tomorrow, we’ve been considering the future of Lockdown Cocktails, but we’re decided to carry on for now, because while it’s great to get out and support your local businesses, some people may not be able to. So we’ll see you here again next week!

The last Friday in June is National Cream Tea Day, so what better excuse to whip up or buy a batch of homemade scones and serve them with clotted cream, raspberry jam and the perfect alcoholic accompaniment. Fancy cream teas are often served with sparkling wine, but we’ve gone one better — mashing fresh strawberries and raspberries together and pushing them through a sieve and then mixing them with 50ml of Damson & Elderberry gin and topping up with fizz for an intensively fruity berry treat.

There was really no choice about today’s cocktail - it’s national martini day and we’re going for a classic martini. This is the easiest cocktail of all: two ingredients, dry vermouth and gin (only use vodka if you prefer your drinks tasteless), stir with ice and pour. Martinis are traditionally garnished with lemon peel or olives but this is just to look pretty - you really don’t need anything to enhance the flavour.

It’s common nowadays to call any strong cocktail that’s served in a martini glass some kind of martini (see our Bashall Brunch Martini from earlier in this series), but a traditional martini never has anything but gin and vermouth in - plus perhaps a little olive brine if that’s your taste.

The proportions of gin and vermouth are up to you. Seasoned drinkers prefer very little vermouth - Noël Coward would waft his glass of gin in the direction of Italy (where vermouth generally comes from) and Winston Churchill would allow a ray of sun to shine through the vermouth bottle into his gin - but I prefer a mixture that’s around one part vermouth to four parts gin.

Unless you’re James Bond, you should always stir a martini, never shake it. As Somerset Maugham said “a martini should always be stirred, not shaken, so that the molecules lie sensuously on top of one another". The reason people sometimes like to shake it with ice is because it makes a colder drink. But ice coldness in a drink kills the flavours, so stirring it with ice produces a cold but not icy drink, allowing the botanicals to come through.

Given the minimal flavours, a martini is a chance to let a good gin shine. I’m a traditionalist, so I would always make this with our London Dry and really savour the subtle flavours of the botanicals. We also tried our Orange & Quince which works really well - it’s juniper-forward, so the underlying botanicals still shine, but it adds a bit more background flavour and freshness to the cocktail.

Bottoms up!

All of our gins are available from https://bashallspirits.co.uk. Delivery is free and we’ll give you £5 if you enter the code LOCKTAILS.

Ok, it's not till next Sunday, but now's the time to get prepared for Father's Day. We've been thinking about simple but tasty ideas for the big day. If you don't live with your dad, you can get him the ingredients and easily guide him through it from a safe social distance!

If you use the code DADGIN on our website by noon on Tuesday, 16th June, you can order your dad the gin of your choice with a £5 discount and we'll throw in a Dairy Milk Oreo bar for him to enjoy with it, and a hand-written note with a message of your choice. If you miss the cut off, you can still order for the big day up until noon on Thursday, 19th June, but the discount will be reduced to £2.50 to cover the extra postage costs to make sure it gets there on time.

Today's lockdown cocktail is a classic - a Tom Collins with our Orange & Quince gin.  The gin enhances the citrussy freshness of the cocktail and the quince adds an edge of jammy fruitiness.  Here's to fathers everywhere!

Make sugar syrup by adding 50g of sugar and 25ml of water to a saucepan, stirring over a low heat until dissolved and then cooling. Mix 50ml of Orange & Quince gin with 25ml of lemon juice and 15ml of sugar syrup (or up to 25ml if you like your drinks sweeter), pour over ice and top up with 125ml (or as much as you like) of sparkling water.

This week we’re going back to our roots and delving through the family books for inspiration. This cocktail comes not from one of our hand-written books but from the 1893 edition of the famous Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management - one of two editions collected by the family. It’s a bit more complicated than our usual lockdown cocktails, which are designed to be straightforward, but it’s fun following a Victorian recipe and recreating the cocktails of our ancestors!

This is from Mrs Beeton’s collection of American cocktails and is very different to the mint-based Julep we’re used to. The recipe calls for a ripe pineapple, peeled and sliced (tinned pineapple is an easy substitute), the juice of two oranges (orange juice will do) and raspberry syrup, which we made by adding frozen raspberries to a standard simple syrup recipe and pushing it through a sieve. The alcohol required is sparkling Moselle - we assumed any sparkling wine would do, though Moselles tend to be sweet, so go for a Prosecco or something on the sweeter side; some maraschino (a cherry liqueur which we didn’t have, but on investigation we discovered that the kirsch we had at the back of the cupboard for fondues replicates the aromatic nutty flavour from the cherry stones but is much stronger and not sweet, so we mixed it 50/50 with additional sugar syrup). And of course gin - we feel our London Dry, with its heritage-inspired botanicals, is an appropriate choice! Finally, you add Wenham Lake ice (see our earlier blog post for an explanation of this - don’t tell anyone, but we used ice from the freezer!).

Mrs Beeton’s instructions: peel and slice the pineapple into a glass bowl. Put in the bottle of wine, juice of two oranges, 1 gill (142ml) of raspberry syrup, 1 gill of maraschino (or 50/50 kirsch and simple syrup), 1 gill of gin and 1 lb of Wenham Lake ice.

It’s surprisingly tasty! In our blog post on Wenham Lake ice you can see a picture of the original recipe.

This week we thought we’d take a look through some of our other antique family books — two copies of the famous Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, one edition from 1893, the other from 1906. Two copies might seem excessive, but the later one has a lot more in it, as you can see from their relative sizes!

While having a look at what Mrs Beeton did with gin, we found an intriguing ingredient: Wenham Lake ice. After some research, we discovered that Lake Wenham is a lake in Massachusetts which was famously pure and was the source of a huge industry in ice harvesting.

In the days before cheap electricity, it wasn’t really feasible to make ice, so it was saved during the cold months and carefully insulated until needed. The US was reputed to have the best ice, and when Wenham lake ice became Queen Victoria’s favourite, its popularity was assured. Some Norwegians even renamed one of their lakes Wenham Lake for a while so that they could sell their ice with that name!

It’s amazing to think of ice being collected, sent by train to Boston, shipped across the Atlantic and brought into homes across Britain to be used in cocktails. The cocktail recipes in the 1893 edition call for Wenham Lake ice, but by 1906 this has been replaced by the rather more prosaic “crushed ice” - either the fashion or the economy of shipping ice from Massachusetts must have changed!

Summer is here and lockdown is easing and it’s time for long fruity drinks to enjoy in the evening sun. White sangria is lighter than its more common red cousin and slips down dangerously easily.

We cut an orange and a lime into quarters and muddled with 30g of sugar (add more if you like your drinks sweet). We threw in a couple of peaches and some frozen grapes, but you can use any fruit you have to hand. Then we added 100ml of Orange & Quince gin and poured over a bottle of Pinot Grigio - delicious.

The Orange & Quince makes a zestily citrus mix which is great after a hot day. We also love mixing our Damson & Elderberry gin with elderflower cordial (instead of the sugar) and mixed berries. In either case you can use any white you like but a fruitier one works better than a dry one.

Salut!

All of our gins are available from https://bashallspirits.co.uk. Delivery is free and we’ll give you £5 if you enter the code LOCKTAILS.

Here are a couple of pages from the cake section of Jennet Worsely’s recipe book, which was written during the middle of the nineteenth century. On the left is the recipe that inspired our Parkin Cake gin.

With elder bushes in bloom all over the country, it seems like the right time to try out a cocktail using elderflower cordial - always delicious, but especially so with our Damson & Elderberry gin, with the rich fruit taste perfectly complementing the delicate fragrant elderflower. 

Elderflower grows everywhere, and making elderflower cordial is simple -- it just requires a bit of foraging and some sugar (see our last post for details), but it's also widely available in the shops.

For our elderfizz, we blend 25ml of Damson & Elderberry Gin with 25ml of elderflower cordial and top up a champagne flute with sparkling wine. If you prefer a lighter tipple, top up with sparkling water instead. Enjoy!

All of our gins are available from https://bashallspirits.co.uk. Delivery is free and we’ll give you £5 if you enter the code LOCKTAILS.

I love elderflowers. They are one of the botanicals in our London Dry and are used in so many of the recipes in our recipe books. In anticipation of a delicious cocktail we’re going to post on Friday, I decided it was time to make this year’s elderflower cordial. This is probably the easiest thing you can do with elderflowers and can be used in all sorts of ways - drizzling over fruit salad and ice cream, mixing with gooseberries in a fool or tart, and as a delicious addition to gin - as well as simply adding water to it and drinking.

To make a simple cordial, pick around 20 heads of elderflowers. Try to keep them upright so you don’t lose too much of the pollen, which is the most fragrant part. Take off the stalks and leaves (careful not to leave any in - the leaves don’t taste great) and wash the flowers well, taking care to remove any bugs. Heat 2.5kg of white sugar in 1.5l of water until it has dissolved. Bring to the boil and then turn the heat off. Add the elderflowers, together with the pared zest and sliced flesh of 2 lemons and stir well. Leave to infuse for 24 hours, and then pour through a colander lined with a tea towel. You can keep it in sterilised bottles in the fridge for about six weeks, or freeze into large ice cubes, in which case they’ll last all summer.

You can mix it up by using honey, oranges, etc., and a lot of receipts call for citric acid, but in my opinion simple is best.

Enjoy!

Our Parkin Cake gin is great with tonic, but if you fancy a change, the treacle and ginger combines really well with the sweetness of apple juice.

For a little extra depth of flavour, you can add a dash of bitters -- if you don't have any and are feeling ambitious, you could try making your own:  https://www.liquor.com/articles/make-your-own-bitters

Add a few drops of Angustura bitters to 50ml of Parkin Cake gin and 50ml of apple juice. Stir and pour over ice.

All of our gins are available from https://bashallspirits.co.uk. Delivery is free and we’ll give you £5 if you enter the code LOCKTAILS.

This sampler was embroidered in 1824 by my great-great-great-grandmother Alice Clegg, when she was 11 years old.

She would have enjoyed the recipes from her aunt Jennet Worsley's handwritten collection, one of the family books that inspired our gins.

Today's cocktail is a lovely simple one, perfect for when you don't have any tonic in, or if you're not a fan of quinine. It makes a great summer drink as you can make it as long and refreshing as you like. Just replace tonic water with sparkling water and add a bit of sugar syrup. You can even add the sugar directly if you don't mind stirring for a while.

It works with any of our gins, but we think it's especially good with Damson & Elderberry, allowing the natural sweetness and fruitiness to be the star of the show. With the elder trees coming into bloom in hedgerows and parks all over the country, it is deliciously evocative of the beginning of summer.

Mix 50ml of Damson & Elderberry gin with 25ml sugar syrup (or more if you have a sweet tooth). Pour over ice and top up with fizzy water.

All of our gins are available from https://bashallspirits.co.uk. Delivery is free and we’ll give you £5 if you enter the code LOCKTAILS.

Earn a free bottle of Bashall Spirits gin!

We're so grateful to our loyal customers for helping us to keep going during these strange times, especially those who are helping spread the word, and we want to reward you and encourage you to get your friends enjoying our gins too.

For every three friends of yours who buy a bottle of Bashall Spirits gin from our webpage, we'll send you a bottle of your choice as a thank you!

Just email info@bashallspirits.co.uk with the names of your three friends and your choice of our four heritage gins.

https://bashallspirits.co.uk/promotion

Espresso Martinis have a wonderful indulgence about them -- ideal for lazy weekends when it's neither too late for coffee nor too early for gin.

They're traditionally vodka-based, with the flavour coming from the coffee and Kalua, but we decided to combine them with Breakfast Martinis -- whose decadence speaks for itself! -- using our Orange & Quince Gin, based on an 18th century marmalade recipe (or "marmalet", as they used to say).

During lockdown, if you can't find Kalua, you can easily make a sugar syrup. We found some muscavado in the cupboard, which makes a rich dark syrup, but any sugar will do.

Ingredients (per cocktail): 50g sugar, 25ml water, 50ml espresso, 100ml Orange & Quince gin.

(We used a stove pot, as we don't have an espresso machine -- but even strongly-made instant coffee should work!)

Instructions: add the sugar and water to a saucepan and heat gently till the sugar has dissolved. Allow to cool. If you have a cocktail shaker, add all ingredients to it and shake with ice. If not, simply stir together and enjoy!

All of our gins are available from http://bashallspirits.co.uk. Delivery is free and we’ll give you £5 if you enter the code LOCKTAILS.

We had this problem a couple of weeks ago.

We've tried slices of apple with gin and tonic before but because it’s not easy to squeeze the juice out, they don't add much flavour.

Our solution: peel the apple and crush with a garlic press (or finely chop if you don't have one), and then freeze into ice cubes. They'll brown a little in the process, but it won't affect the taste.

In a gin and tonic, they will slowly melt, cooling your drink and adding a lovely fresh zing.

We think this perfectly complements the botanicals in our London Dry -- in particular the elderflower, cobnut and cranberry.

No apples? It also works well with pear, or any soft fruit you have will perfectly complement our Damson & Elderberry gin.

Out of fruit completely? The citrus edge to our juniper-forward Orange & Quince makes this a complete drink without any additions.

All of our gins are available from https://bashallspirits.co.uk. Delivery is free and we’ll give you £5 if you enter the code LOCKTAILS.