Pink Gin , or Gin and Bitters, formerly a great favorite in officers’ wardrooms of the British Royal Navy, is as simple as it is historic: English drinkers were combining its two ingredients, gin and bitters, as early as the mid-1700s, and Dutch ones may have been doing something similar even earlier. By the turn of the twentieth century, when the name “Pink Gin” was first applied to the drink, the gin was almost always Plymouth (that town being the location of one of the Royal Navy’s most important bases) and the bitters Angostura, but the earliest versions used Stoughton’s Bitters and the dilute, sweetened gin that was in universal use in Britain. See Plymouth gin. This, of course, means that those eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century versions were essentially identical to the American Cock-Tail, which was not customarily iced until the 1840s. See Cock-Tail.
Pink Gin was in vogue in Britain and North America from World War I through the 1960s. It was favored by military types in the United Kingdom and its colonies and anglophiles in America, where it was one of the few other drinks considered acceptable by Dry Martini cultists. In both places, the addition of ice was common, if not exactly approved.
Recipe: Line the bottom of an Old-Fashioned glass with 5–6 dashes of Angostura. Add 60 ml Plymouth gin and, if necessary 2–3 ice cubes.
See also gin.
Childers, Erskine. The Riddle of the Sands. London: Smith, Elder, 1903.
“An Elegy to the Unlamented Memory of … Anti-Sejanus.” London Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, March 17, 1766, 4.
By: David Wondrich