Pegu Club Cocktail
Back in December 2020, whilst many others were opening their chocolate advent calendars ever day, I was drinking my way through the month with my Gin Advent Calendar, mixing up plenty of cocktails on my way. One of those was the Pegu Club Cocktail.
As with many great cocktails, the Pegu Club cocktail takes its name from the hotel where it was created. Back in the 1920’s heyday of cocktail making, this citrusy and refreshing drink was first shaken up in the Pegu Club – a gentleman’s club in colonial Burma, now Myanmar. This seemed to be the place to visit and, according to Wikipedia, has had quite the chequered past being everything from a sophisticated hostelry to a brothel and tax office!
These days it has been restored to it’s former colonial glory and is now a heritage site. With delicious concoctions such as the Pegu Club cocktail coming out of it’s history, I do wonder if sipping this cocktail in the club house itself would carry the same sense of delight as smoking a Cuban cigar in a Havana hotspot.
Since the Pegu Club cocktail was first mixed up, it has appeared in several classic cocktail books including Harry’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails and The Savoy Cocktail Book with slightly different recipes. I got my base recipe from my book Gin – The Manual. As I am discovering with a lot of cocktails, the recipe is a good place to start from, but adjusting the proportions according the taste of the drinker and the qualities of your base spirit is very important.
When I mixed this cocktail, I made it with Tarquin’s The Seadog Navy Strength Gin. This is a citrus forward gin so I reduced the amount of lime juice I used whilst keeping the triple sec and Angostura Bitters fairly true to recipe.
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PEGU CLUB COCKTAIL RECIPE
INGREDIENTS
2 measures Gin
½ measure triple sec
½ measure lime juice
2 dashes of Angostura Bitters
METHOD
Pour ingredients into an ice filled cocktail shaker and shake it vigorously. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a lime wheel. Sit back and enjoy whilst contemplating your domain.
