The Leap Year is a cocktail where the gin in it becomes the star of the drink. Choosing carefully from our selection of gin, we decided to be slightly unconventional. By using Elephant Gin we tried to add that extra bit of drama to an otherwise relatively simple recipe.
Elephant gin is made with several African ingredients, among them curiosities such as lion’s tail, devil’s claw, mountain pine, buchu and African wormwood. It creates a unique, but surprisingly smooth gin and it’s actually quite exciting to make cocktails out of it.
The recipe for the Leap Year we found in Robyn M. Feller’s book “The Complete Bartender”. This book with more than 2 000 recipes in it was published 1990. We found it in a bookstore selling used books in Chicago. Couldn’t resist buying it and start recreating some of these 1990s cocktails. As we left the eighties and entered the nineties cocktails started to change, from being about quantity to being more about quality according to Feller’s forewords. And without it being called so at the time, it was maybe somewhere in the late nineties the craft cocktail movement began. This drink is probably a good example of that, using gin rather than vodka, real lemon rather than sour mix and containing a high quality spirit such as Grand Marnier.
1,5 oz gin
0,5 oz Grand Marnier
0,5 oz sweet vermouth
1 tsp lemon juice
Shake with ice, strain and pour
After you’ve finished a glass of this cocktail you might feel extra good knowing that Elephant Gin donates fifteen percent of all proceeds to different elephants preservations projects. Quite cool!
