The Clover Club is a classic gin cocktail right up there with the martini and negroni; it’s a pre-Prohibition classic that appears on the International Bartenders Association list of “Unforgettables”, and one that works wonderfully with our very own Wheadon’s Gin yuzu, lemongrass and green tea infusion.
“Who enters here leaves care behind, leaves sorrow behind, leaves petty envies and jealousies behind.”
- The motto of the Clover Club
The cocktail is named after an exclusive club founded by a group of Philadelphia journalists founded in 1882, that met monthly at the city’s historic Bellevue Stratford Hotel, on South Broad Street, from the hotel’s opening in 1904 up until the 1920s. The club expanded to include lawyers, bankers, and captains of industry, and the cocktail that took its name dates back to around 1909 when it first appeared in print (in Drinks – How to Serve Them by Paul E. Lowe) and began to be enjoyed beyond the wood-panelled walls of the Bellevue Stratford. Early recipes tended to include French vermouth and varied between raspberry syrup and grenadine, however the IBA official recipe settled on raspberry syrup and no vermouth.
The Clover Club cocktail fell out of fashion for many years following prohibition, perhaps partly due to its use of a raw egg and the more complicated methodology that comes hand-in-hand with creating a white foam; don’t be put off though, a reverse dry shake is easier than it sounds and the egg gives a silky texture and that eye-catching white foam top.
Recipe:
- 45ml Wheadon’s Gin yuzu, lemongrass and green tea infusion
- 15ml Sugar syrup or Raspberry Syrup
- 10ml Lemon Juice (this is less lemon juice than a normal recipe, as the gin has high notes of citrus)
- Egg White
- 5-6 Fresh Raspberries
Method:
- Muddle 3-4 fresh raspberries with 15ml simple syrup in a Boston shaker to create a raspberry syrup (the best option if only making this cocktail in small quantities).
- Add the gin, lemon juice and ice and shake to chill.
- Fine strain from one half of the Boston shaker into the other. Add the egg white and shake again for 20 seconds to emulsify and foam the egg white. This is a “reverse dry shake” – the dry shake being without ice and reverse because the dry shake normally happens first, but we don’t want the ice to break up the foam by adding it after a dry shake.
- Pour into a coupe glass and garnish with a fresh raspberry on a cocktail skewer.