20 Apr Daisy Week: Blackberry Cognac Daisy Cocktail Recipe + Gum Syrup Recipe

Blackberry Cognac Daisy Cocktail Recipe

We’re spending this week acquainting ourselves with a very old, mostly forgotten class of cocktail called the Daisy, a sort of sour with something(s) extra. It’s a deliciously refreshing and aptly named cocktail for the current season of warming temperatures and blooming flowers.

Yesterday, we shared and used Waldorf barman Frank Caiafa’s Make-Your-Own-Daisy rules. We highly recommend you try it. It was so fun and satisfying that we went ahead and created a new recipe for today.

For our sweetener for today’s daisy, we used gum syrup. You might have noticed that gum syrup was called for in Monday’s Whiskey Daisy, and listed as one of the possible sweeteners in Caiafa’s rules yesterday. Gum syrup (sometimes spelled ‘gomme’) is often called for in the oldest recipes. Not having any on hand, not knowing what it tastes like, and being a bit lazy, we’ve always just substituted simple syrup for gum syrup when we’ve seen it. However, we recently noticed that there’s a fairly simple recipe for making gum syrup in Cocktail Chronicles (see below), and we figured that since gum syrup kept coming up in our daisy investigations, this might very well be the time to find out what we’ve been missing.

Gum syrup, we discovered, is simple syrup with gum arabic added. Gum arabic is the sap from acacia bushes, and you probably eat it all the time without realizing it; it’s commonly added to candy to keep the sugar from crystallizing. To get a good sense of the difference that gum arabic makes, we made two vodka old fashioneds, one with simple syrup and one with gum syrup (0h, the things we do for science!). The gum syrup has a noticeably fuller body, and a soft texture; simple syrup tastes like dissolved sugar, whereas gum syrup is more legitimately syrupy. It made enough difference that, on a probationary basis, we’ll use our bottle of gum syrup when it’s called for; the big test will be whether or not we make a second bottle.

For what it’s worth, we felt like it added a nice, silky texture to today’s recipe.

Blackberry Cognac Daisy Cocktail Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 oz VSOP Cognac–make it the cheapest you can find, but make it VSOP and make it Cognac. We highly recommend Maison Rouge if you can get yours hands on it; it’s delicious for mixing, and comes at more than a reasonable price.
• 3/4 oz lemon juice
• 1/2 oz blackberry liqueur, aka creme de mure
• 1/4 oz gum syrup
• lemon wheel, for garnish
• 1/2 oz club soda

Instructions

• Shake all liquid ingredients except the club soda with ice for about 20 seconds.
• Strain into a cocktail glass.
• Top with club soda.
• Garnish

Gum Syrup Recipe

from Portland bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler via Paul Clarke’s Cocktail Chronicles.

• Buy some food-grade gum arabic, at a natural foods store or on amazon, as we did.
• Combine 2 oz of gum arabic with 2 oz of water and let sit in a closed container for about 2 days, until the gum arabic is fully dissolved.
• Mix 12 oz of sugar and 6 oz of water in a small saucepan, and heat on medium until the sugar is dissolved.
• Add the gum arabic mixture, and stir to combine.
• Refrigerate for storage.