Stay Up Late
- 45ml Bombay Sapphire Gin
- 15ml VS cognac
- 20ml lemon juice
- 10ml sugar syrup
Shake the gin, cognac, lemon juice, and sugar with ice. Strain into a tall glass with ice. Top with soda, crushed ice, and garnish with moscatel grapes.
The Barber Shop’s adaptation of a recipe from the Stork Club, 1900’s
Story by Sam Bygrave
Photographs by Christopher Pearce
Presented by James Rusty Russell, The Barber Shop, Sydney
GIN is a great spirit — hell, it’s the spirit of the moment, and you need only to take a look at the growing number of Aussie producers at home to get a glimpse of the great demand for the stuff.
But you can grow tired of drinking Martini’s (a hard feat, but it’s possible), and if you’re a bar like The Barber Shop in Sydney which specialises in gin, features gin in each of its cocktails, and is all gin all the time, you have to find ways of catering to customers for whom gin might not necessarily be a favourite.
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“Here at The Barber Shop, the base spirit in everything is gin,” says manager James Rusty Russell. “So, the main thing we face is trying to offer gin in a variety of ways that is approachable even to people who don’t drink gin.”
That’s where this hero drink comes in.
“The Stay Up Late is just a classic twist on a Tom Collins,” Russell says. “It’s got that great base and that spice coming from cognac, which makes it a more full-bodied drink.”
But gin does have a long classic cocktail history, which lends a bartender countless opportunities to explore the spirit — but don’t just copy the specs note for note.
“Most of our cocktails are old, from the Savoy Cocktail Book, or the Stay Up Late is from the Stork Club in the early 1900’s. You’ve obviously got to adjust everything to the Australian palate, which is drier than the States, the citrus is a lot better over here than in the EU,” Russell says.