The Clover Club Cocktail

Hey everyone, welcome to Not Your Mama's Martini. Today we're going to make the Clover Club, which is a drink that I think of as somewhat adjacent to the Cosmopolitan, which we made last time. It's a nice refreshing drink. It does have a little bit of egg white in it, so we're going to be experimenting with that. This is also a drink that you're not necessarily going to find at every cocktail bar that you go to. It is a classic Prohibition-era drink, but it is not something you're going to find on everybody's menu, both because of the egg white, but also it just requires a few special ingredients like raspberry syrup that a lot of people do not have on hand regularly. So if you saw my short, you know that I made some fresh raspberry syrup, and so we're going to use that in this drink, the raspberry syrup. You can also just crush a couple of raspberries with some simple syrup, but I really like to have raspberry syrup on hand, and we're going to do a couple of other drinks that use raspberry syrup in them. It also takes dry vermouth, which is going to make it, going to cut some of the sweetness of the raspberry syrup, and its main liquor is going to be our London dry gin, which you can see I'm using beef eater here, and we're getting to the bottom of that bottle. So let's make a clover club and see how it goes. We're going to start off with our gin. We're going to do one and a half ounces of a dry gin. We're going to do a half an ounce of our dry vermouth, and then we're going to do a half an ounce of our raspberry syrup, and again if you want to use fresh raspberries, if you don't have raspberry syrup on hand, you can just put a couple of raspberries in the bottom of your shaker tin, put about a half an ounce of simple syrup in there, or a little bit more. I'm in fact probably going to use a little more than a half an ounce of raspberry syrup because the raspberries and the simple syrup are a little sweeter than the half an ounce version of it, but you can just put some raspberries. You will need to strain it really well to get all that raspberry goop out of there, whereas your raspberry syrup is pre-strained. So we're going to do just a little bit more than a half an ounce just because I like this a little on the sweet side, and then we're going to add our half an ounce of lemon juice here. Half an ounce of lemon juice, and then we're going to add our egg white, and I have just a whole egg white here, and that's actually what I'm going to use. It is about an ounce. Some people say to only use a half an ounce, but I find for myself that using a whole egg white for one thing, it is very hard to separate one egg white into a half an ounce from this, and two, if you have trouble shaking this and getting it to froth, it's helpful to have a little bit more. So I'm going to put this in here, and the way that you work with egg whites is, and there are a couple of different techniques, and different people will say different things, but most people say to shake without ice first, and then to add some ice and shake again. Some people will say to do it the other way around, to add ice first, shake it, and then strain it, and then shake it again. It's a little easier to do the dry shake, as they call it, first without ice, and that's the way I'm going to do it today, and I have tried multiple methods, and I think it's just one of those things that if you're a professional bartender, you do this a lot, and so it becomes second nature and easy to do, but I do not shake egg whites all the time, so it is not as easy for me. So here we go. We're going to put this together, give it a good shake, add some ice, and give it another good shake. We're going to shake it for about probably 10 to 20 seconds. All right, I'm going to pop this off. Looks pretty frothy. I'm going to get some ice. I'll be right back. All right, we've got our ice. I'm going to pour this ice into the drink, shake it up, and see how it goes. We're going to get it cold, just a little 10 second shake to get it cold. All right, nice and cold, feels pretty good, and I've got our nice cold glass here. I am going to actually double strain this. I'm going to get my strainer, single strainer, keep the ice out. All right, here we go. It's looking pretty good, pretty frothy so far. Give it a little tap. Get that all the froth out of our...you can garnish this if you want with a fresh raspberry if you've got one lying around. I do not have one, so we're going to leave it like this. Okay, let's give this a try. Oh yeah, that is a nice drink, and we got a decent amount of froth on there. I've seen other people do a little better than that, but that's not bad. The egg white gives it a nice creaminess. You can taste the dry vermouth just a little bit. It cuts the sweetness of the raspberry, which you can definitely taste. So if you are a fan of a Cosmopolitan, this has actually a lot of the same flavors in it. It's got lemon, it's got a sweet syrup to it, so this might be your next drink that you try, and it's really not that hard to make at home, and if you're worried about the egg white for any number of reasons, maybe you're vegan, there are alternatives out there. There's cocktail foamer, there's aquafaba, or you can, it won't be quite the traditional Clover Club, but if you wanted to leave it off, you'll just be missing some of that creamy texture that you get from the egg white or a foamer or something like that. It'll still taste pretty good. So cheers, the Clover Club!