Cocktail Experiment: Lamb's Best Friend

This evening I was tasked with creating a drink to accompany roast lamb. It had to be a long drink and not too strong. I'd previously been imagining a sort of sweet martini with gin, red vermouth and orange bitters, so the challenge then was how to extend it without hollowing out the flavour too much.

This is what I came up with:

Lamb's Best Friend

1 measure Bombay Sapphire gin

1 measure Martini Rosso vermouth

1/4 measure sloe gin

1/4 measure Benedictine

1/4 measure Monin grenadine

Juice of 1 orange

Mint leaves

2 dashes Orange bitters

1 dash Angostura bitters

Dash soda water (optional)

Place 5-10 mint leaves in a mixing glass and muddle gently to release the oils (don't muddle too hard, or you'll release chlorophyll into the drink which will make it taste like a freshly mowed lawn). Add the remaining ingredients, add ice and shake hard. Strain into a highball glass filled with ice, and garnish with an orange spiral and a sprig of fresh mint.

This recipe was inspired by the mint sauce and redcurrant jelly that lamb is often eaten with, as well as red wine drinks such as Sangria. The overall flavour is sweet, but not cloying, with prominent herbal notes from both gin and vermouth, and no one flavour dominating. I haven't yet decided whether a dash of soda is required to lighten the whole thing, so I'll leave that up to you. I think this works very well as an accompaniment to lamb, but would also make a perfectly good summer drink.

See what you think! If anyone else makes this, please let me know how you get on!

Note: I would usually use home-made grenadine but I chose the monin version for its more general red berry flavour. In future I might use the home-made stuff for a bit more tang and natural fruit flavours as I think it might give the drink another dimension.