welcome friends welcome back to cocktails after dark a little video
series where I am exploring cocktails and then using different base spirits
to see how that changes the flavour to try and find out what I like today we're
gonna do a cocktail from 1937 called the greenfly and it is pretty much a gin
and chartreuse cocktail lemon juice and gum syrup now it calls for booth's
London Dry Gin and that is not a brand that I can get where I live so the
obvious choice would be to use one of these London Dry Gin
but I already know that I don't like Beefeater I've tried it in a few
cocktails and the flavor never seems quite right to me the other obvious
choice would be Gordon's London Dry Gin not a big favorite of mine either in
fact there's a little bit left in this bottle this bottle has been hanging
around for a long time it was distilled in Canada by UDV Canada so I just looked
that up I thought that's kind of interesting
I thought Gordon's was Diageo and Gordon's is Diageo UDV produced this for
Gordon's for time in Canada and they went out of business probably 20 years
or more ago when Diageo bought the whole thing up so that's been hanging around a
while I don't think I want to use it I'm gonna use Ungava and the dillons which I
know both go well with the chartreuse so let's get right into the cocktail we're
gonna start out with this is a shaken cocktail so we're gonna start it with a
little bit of gum syrup and I'm gonna put a bar spoon worth of gum syrup in
the bottom of my shaker glass then we need to put in the gin so we need an
ounce and a third of gin and of course the recipe is below the video third of
an ounce of chartreuse and a third of an ounce of lemon juice
just mr. to get the gum syrup off the bottom of that spoon ice the tool and
shake and dump the ice out of the glass
and this will get a double string and will make the second one same as the
first okay right back at it so bar spoon of gum syrup gum syrup is
really nice because it coats the inside of your mouth it brings sweetness but it
coats the inside of your mouth and that coating helps to release flavors slowly
so you kind of experience the cocktail long after you've swallowed the flavors
just sort of develop and and fill your mouth in a way that that you just don't
get with simple syrup and that's something that I really like so so at
this point when I see cocktails it just called for simple syrup I will sometimes
put in gum syrup instead just because I like the flavor that it brings or the
flavor experience that it brings kind of hard to describe until you've tasted it
so ice in the tin and we give it a shake
lose the ice
and double straight and straight off the top you know which is which just based
on color okay so this is called the green fly and I'm expecting to like this
cocktail just based on the ingredients and the combinations I think I'm really
going to enjoy it first off the Dylan's definitely right
on the nose you know that it's gin the chartreuse is coming through but sort of
really soft in the background and I'm not getting any lemon on the nose at all
okay maybe not as balanced as I'd like it to be uh you are getting the spicy
note coming out pretty prominently from the Dylan's gin this is made with a rye
base spirit so it's got those spicy notes that you kind of expect with a bry
let's try the Ungava the Ungava on the nose I'm getting much more of the
chartreuse the woody the woody tones from the chartreuse strange I'm getting
like a spice shop you know when you walk into a spice shop and you've got all of
the spices mixed together the smells that's what I'm getting here
yeah yeah the one with the Ungava is a much more balanced cocktail to me
the one with the Dylan's has some harsh notes it just doesn't come together the
parts aren't working well together which is surprising because in the past I've
really liked the Dylan's in other cocktails
yeah not as nice to me the Ungava definitely wins this one man
I'm kind of surprised I know that a lot of people are gonna look at this and say
that's not what gin is supposed to look like but it has this other range of
botanicals that you don't normally find in gins that really seems to lend itself
well to a lot of mixed cocktails I find it very interesting it's not something
that if I saw this in the liquor store I probably wouldn't take a chance on it
but I I got a chance to taste it at an event one time and I just came back to
it yeah so the green fly another gin and chartreuse cocktail this is a handy
little thing to have in your cocktail bar thanks for stopping by
see you again soon
you