Lemon Bergamot Gimlet

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 even have beautiful corks!) The Malfy Gin bottle with its whimsical pattern of lemon rinds, and the fluted turquoise glass Italicus bottle would have called to us from the store shelf, but thanks to the #drinkstagram community we learned that they contained some excellent liquor before we even spotted them in person.

This month’s (June) Home Bar Awards challenge is Low-Waste Cocktails. Here at Cocktail Artist HQ, we do what we can to reduce waste (and make the most of our ingredients) – like using both the rind and the juice from citrus fruit. We grow herbs at home to use in our meals and cocktails – giving us fresh ingredients and allowing us to go out and pick only what we need. Of course, we recycle everything we can, however, the glass bottles containing Malfy Gin and Italicus are just too pretty to toss into the recycling bin. We have repurposed the Malfy bottle as a vase for flowers picked in our garden, and the Artist used this arrangement for a still-life watercolor.

Fortunately, we weren’t so distracted by the attractive bottles that we couldn’t come up with a good cocktail. Italicus Rosolio di Bergamotto is a blend of bergamot peel, lemons, herbs, and rose. It’s aromatic and lightly spicy but also rather sweet (this is not a Campari substitute). Bergamot is a citrus plant with a yellow-green fruit that grows primarily in Italy’s Reggio Calabria province. Further up the Italian coast is the Amalfi region – which produces some of the world’s finest lemons (used in Malfy Gin). These two citrus-forward spirits work beautifully together in the Martini/Gimlet/Spritz hybrid we’ve created. A dash of club soda (added at the end) enhances the refreshing citrus notes – making this a lovely cocktail to serve as an aperitif for your summer dinner parties.

We feel like we got some great mileage out of the Malfy… That bottle of gin gave us some great cocktails, a vase for floral arrangements, and a subject for a painting. Now we need to finish up the Italicus so that we can use that beautiful turquoise glass bottle as our next centerpiece.

Cheers!