As seen here earlier, Kerry Greene and I put together a trivia quiz all about gin last year. Here are the next few questions, along with my discussion of the answers. As before, I've obscured the answers by putting them in white text on a white background; just highlight the area between the brackets to see what's there, and click on smaller pictures to embiggen them.
7. Whose portrait is redacted from this bottle shot?
[Queen Victoria]
Bombay Sapphire is a relatively new gin, created in the ‘80s by Michel Roux (who died last April, and who had marketed Absolut Vodka out of obscurity) as an update on Bombay Gin, which was introduced in 1831 as Warrington Gin but rebranded in the ‘50s. The Bombay Gin bottle features the same portrait of [Victoria], but Roux added the iconic blue bottle and named the brand extension after the Star of Bombay, a 182-carat star sapphire given by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. to Mary Pickford, who bequeathed it to the Smithsonian. (Ironically, it’s from Sri Lanka and not Mumbai.) Bombay Sapphire was a monster success and is one of the most popular gins in the world today.
8. What cocktail name has been redacted from this passage from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye?
[Gimlet]
As Troy Patterson put it in Slate, “in 1952, with the first draft of The Long Goodbye already complete, the [gimlet] discovered the writer on an ocean liner and thus worked its way into literary history. No other drink has such a significant presence in such a great performance of American fiction.”
This is actually a crummy [gimlet] recipe, in my opinion: not only is Rose’s Lime Juice a not-very-good lime cordial loaded with high-fructose corn syrup and blue food coloring, but a [gimlet] demands both tartness and sweetness, and a 50:50 mix of gin and Rose’s is just way too sticky-sweet. A mix of just gin and lime juice, however, tips the balance in the opposite direction and is just too acidic and spiky for my tastes, requiring a sweetener. (If you take gin and lime juice and lengthen it with soda, you have a gin rickey, which is also refreshing.) There are lots of ideas on how to achieve the ideal [gimlet], but what I do is split the citrus component between fresh-squeezed lime juice and a lime cordial. I used to use Rose’s, but then I discovered the Employees Only lime cordial recipe (and the bottled version thereof.) I’m also told the Rose’s available outside the US is better and sweetened with sugar instead of HFCS.
(Marlowe goes back in Chapter 22 and orders a [gimlet] in memory of Lennox. “It was both sweet and sharp at the same time.”)
9. The national and traditional liquor of the Netherlands and Belgium is a precursor to gin. It's often distilled from malt wine and can have a whiskylike character, especially if it's been barrel-aged. aka "Dutch courage" or "Hollands gin," what is the name of this spirit?
[Genever/Jenever/Geneva/Peket/Genievre]
Here’s a good primer on [genever] from Simon Difford. Korenwijn is another Dutch grain spirit but doesn’t have to be flavored with juniper...or any botanicals at all, for that matter. Akvavit is something else entirely, from Scandinavia, and is usually flavored with caraway (and sometimes dill.) And wacholder is juniper-flavored, but from Germany.
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