By happy accident I created a cocktail that, it turns out, is amazing at showcasing different gins. At least in my opinion for the 3 gins that I tried it with.
The Gin Laser recipe is quite straightforward:
- 40 ml Gin
- 10 ml Cointreau
- 10 ml Ginger syrup
- 10 ml lime juice
- 1 ds rose water
- 1 ds Angostura
Shake & Strain
I’ve tried this with Roku, Tanqueray 10 and Loft House. In all cases it really shows off the particularities of the gin in a very pleasant (dare I say amazing?) way. The differences are even clearer than when tasting the gins neat! You get the grapefruit and rosemary in the Tanq 10, the clementine, cardamom and cinnamon in Loft House (which seems to be a brand exclusive to this chain in the Netherlands) and whatever is in the Roku (blossoms and yuzu I think?).
Now, for proper reference, I need to try with my standard gin too, don’t I? I use Beefeater (or regular Tanq) for almost all my gin cocktails, never felt that I needed to diversify like I did with rum and bourbon/whiskey. But let me tell you, the Gin Laser does nothing for the Beefeater. And I mean that literally. It’s quite strange in fact, the Beefeater Gin Laser is a thoroughly medium, almost dull drink, completely the opposite of all the other 3.
So somehow, this drink has managed to “neutralize” the base gin botanicals while simultaneously enhancing all those others. Although intuitively I’m not surprised that ginger and rose water bring out those extra notes, I can’t explain why regular london dry gin botanicals are not enhanced Next steps involve grabbing my Foodpairing book to see if there are any scientific leads there, trying more gins, and also seeing if any the Laser’s ingredients are superfluous.
If you try it out for yourself please do let me know what you find!
What about the name then? Obviously I’m going to use a physics reference here. Should be easy enough considering the process of reducing one component while amplifying another is very common in nature and science. There were, in fact, a lot of contenders!
Interferometry, where waves interfere constructively or destructively depending on the frequency and/or phase of the wave comes to mind instantly. You get a lot of techniques in this field with cool names like Very Long Baseline Interferometry (radio telescopes that are have the world apart) and coronographs (cancel out the light of a star so you can see it’s corona or things just behind it). Related to waves are also things like Apodizing Phase Plates (similar to coronographs, but they move the light around asymmetrically), prisms and diffraction gratings (basically prisms but over a large field-of-view).
Then I also tried to play with the abbreviation of “light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation” to see if I could replace “light” and/or “radiation” with words relevant to gin or aromas. It would be a very clever word play, if it worked. Because a LASER emits a very specific wavelength of light, which it does my amplifying only that wavelength and dampening all the others, which is (almost) exactly what does cocktail does (almost). But it would be clunky and no-one would get it. Luckily, we also use lasers to take things apart, so it still works even by not changing anything!