Tom Collins

You've probably heard of a Tom Collins. It's a great summertime drink - fizzy lemonade for grown ups. There are a few stories about how this cocktail got it's name, but we particularly love the one called "The Great Tom Collins Hoax of 1874". This seems to be a case of fake news going viral more than a century before we had the internet. Go to Mental Floss to read the full story.

Prior to doing some Googling, we had a mental picture of Tom Collins as a old sailor or fisherman (maybe you have figured this out from our original artwork). We could see him coming back thirsty from a day on the water and enjoying a nice cool lemon and gin drink with his lobster roll.

A Tom Collins is an excellent choice as the cocktail for a picnic or barbecue. It's served on the rocks with club soda, so it's cool, refreshing, and offers much less alcohol per sip than a martini. Our version sticks to the traditional recipe - perhaps with a bit more lemon juice and the addition of lavender.

Why lavender? Well, because a couple of years ago we harvested some culinary lavender and started adding it to our home-made baked goods. We found that lavender paired really well with lemon. When we saw lavender bitters in our local liquor store it just seemed like a good idea to try adding them to a lemony cocktail. We (and some of our independent taste testers) were pretty happy with the results, so we've continued to add lavender to our Tom Collins - either as bitters or by replacing the plain simple syrup with lavender syrup.

You can make purchase lavender simple syrup pre-made or make it yourself using dried culinary lavender buds (see our recipe for the syrup below). If you use lavender syrup, use a dash of aromatic bitters in place of the lavender bitters. You can also experiment with other simple syrups or muddled herbs (thyme is nice). Just don't use any of that nasty pre-made Collins mix - Tom would be very unhappy about that!

Cheers!


Tom Collins

2 ounces gin
1 3/4 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 ounce simple syrup (or lavender syrup - see recipe below)
several dashes of lavender bitters (use aromatic bitters if using lavender syrup)
2 ounces club soda

Add gin, lemon juice, simple syrup and bitters to a cocktail shaker with ice cubes. Shake well and strain into a glass. Add ice cubes and club soda. Stir lightly. Garnish with a lemon slice (and a maraschino cherry).


Tom Collins with lavender simple syrup - one of us prefers gin and the other vodka 

Tom Collins out for a sail

Tom Collins ingredients

Lavender Simple Syrup

1 cup water
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons dried culinary lavender buds

In a small saucepan boil water and sugar until sugar is dissolved. Add lavender and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature. Pour through a strainer to remove lavender buds. Funnel into a bottle and keep in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

Dried culinary lavender 

Making the lavender simple syrup

Popular posts from this blog

The Last Call

Image
This post is a week late, but this blog is our hobby (not our real job) so we’re not going to worry about it. Anyhow, we came up with this drink for Mardi Gras as the “last call” before the beginning of Lent – a time when some of us stop drinking for 40 days (we’ll let you know how that works out). The name “Last Call” also references the classic “Last Word” cocktail. The Last Word is really a perfect cocktail. It’s equal parts of four ingredients (gin, Green Chartreuse, Maraschino Liqueur, and lime) and a superb balance of tart, herbal, and sweet. It’s one of our fallback cocktails – one that we mix up when we can’t make up our mind about what we want to drink.  Another classic that we regularly enjoy is the Aviation Cocktail. The Aviation is another gin cocktail and is one of the few that uses Crème de Violette – a sweet, floral liqueur that is typically a deep purple hue. It takes mixing quite a few Aviations to go through a bottle of Crème de Violette, so it’s probably
Read more

Lemon Bergamot Gimlet

Image
In case you don’t know us personally, or haven’t read the bio on our blog , you may not realize the “The Cocktail Artist” is really a partnership between two architects (who also happen to be married to each other). One of us comes up with the recipes, does the photography, and writes the blog posts – the other one creates all of the original artwork and offers opinions on the cocktail recipes. Being architects, we sometimes let our design-sense get the better of us – meaning we have been known to purchase a bottle of booze because we like the design of the bottle.  Occasionally this backfires, but rest assured (with some creative mixology or a bit of barrel-aging) we have always been able to make use of the contents of those impulse-buy bottles. Right now, two of the most attractive bottles in our liquor cabinet contain Italian spirits – Malfy Gin Con Limone and Italicus . Italy has always been a design trendsetter, so it’s not surprising that these bottles stand out (they ev
Read more

Amalfi Martini

Image
Darn! Why didn’t we buy those airline tickets to Italy when they were cheap? It would be so nice to be lounging in a beautiful Italian seaside town right now.  The Amalfi region, on Italy's west coast, is known for it's production of lemon liqueur and fine writing and art paper - sounds like the perfect place for us! Oh well, maybe it would be better to be there during the off season. Italy is probably packed with American tourists right now. Let's  just pull out the watercolor paints and the cocktail shaker and bring a bit of la dolce vita  to our patio. Our Amalfi Martini (naturally) features limoncello. It's a fairly low-alcohol liqueur, so we boost the proof of this cocktail by adding our vodka of choice - District Made Vodka by One Eight Distilling. If you are using a vodka that doesn't have much flavor on it's own (which, honestly, is most vodka) you may want to add a couple dashes of citrus bitters to this recipe. This just wouldn't be an Ita
Read more

Cherry Capital Old Fashioned

Image
Cherry Capital Old Fashioned - original watercolor painting by The Cocktail Artist If you've read some of our previous posts (such as the Up North Raspberry and Rye or the Grand Mariner Cocktail) you know that we're fans of the bourbon and rye produced by The Traverse City Whiskey Co . Traverse City, Michigan is known as the "Cherry Capital" for being the area with the largest production of tart cherries in the United States. In Traverse City, you will find wonderful freshwater beaches, lots of summer tourists, and (of course) cherries! You can attend the Cherry Festival in July, go to the Cherryland Mall, and fly into Cherry Capital airport. So the folks at Traverse City Whiskey (naturally) produce an American Cherry Edition of their bourbon. Here in the Nation's Capital we were lucky enough to find this cherry bourbon at our local liquor store. It's a nice bourbon for sipping neat, but during #OldFashionedOctober we also tried it in an Old Fashioned and
Read more

Douglas Fir Martini

Image
This was one of our very early blog posts. Now that the holiday season is here it seems like a good time to revisit it. Our cocktail recipe remains unchanged, but we wanted to add some information about the ingredients and include a bit more artwork. This martini, with it’s pine forest aroma, is our antidote to holiday stress. Mix up a couple of these to help you through your decorating, gift-wrapping, etc… Doesn’t enjoying a cocktail while you relax in front of the fireplace sound much nicer than struggling to get the Christmas tree in the stand? Along with The Cocktail  Artist's watercolors maybe we can give you the feeling you're walking through a pine forest instead of stressing out over some holiday preparations. At the heart of this cocktail is Clear Creek Distillery’s Douglas Fir Brandy . We discovered this unusual liqueur in our local liquor store a couple of years ago and just couldn’t resist giving it a try. Clear Creek calls it “a tree in a bottle”. It's m
Read more