Keep it classy with this French 75 recipe

French 75 recipe

  • 30ml Bloom Gin
  • 20ml lemon juice
  • 10ml sugar syrup
  • Champagne to top

Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a flute (or, more likely historically, a tall Collins glass) and top with champagne.

You could be forgiven for thinking that a cocktail named after artillery used in the first world war would clobber your palate, but if it’s made just so, there’s few things more elegant than the French 75.

Don’t get us wrong though — the drink still packs a punch. What with a healthy slug of gin topped up with the effervescence of champagne and all, a couple of rounds of these may result in a head that feels like it’s copped a bombing the next day.

You will see varying recipes out there when it comes to this drink. Though today it’s more often seen as gin plus champagne, it has been seen as a drink containing cognac instead.

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Indeed, noted cocktail historian and authority on all things bibulous, David Wondrich, has pointed out that though the first written reference appears in 1927 (and then again in the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book), the whole premise of drinking champagne with citrus, sugar and spirit dates back well before then — he cites Charles Dickens as enjoying these, albeit under the title of Champagne Cup, back in 1867.

The recipe usually calls for a double measure of gin, but this one, which we’ve cribbed from The Barber Shop, dials it back to a friendlier, less debilitating 30ml. They make theirs with the excellent Bombay Dry, but here we’ve opted for a more floral note, employing Bloom Gin, which is a London dry gin accentuated with chamomile, honeysuckle, and pomelo. 

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