abbey cocktail

2 oz Hayman's Old Tom Gin
1/2 oz Orange Juice
1/2 oz Lillet Blanc
1 dash Angostura Bitters

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Shortly after Andrea showed up, two seat opened up at Sam Treadway's station at Drink and we moved our base of operations over to the ice bar. For my second cocktail, I asked Sam what he would recommend with Old Tom gin and he rambled off a few but steered me towards the Abbey which I approved of as a good next step from the Refined Speech. While I am not sure of the origin of the cocktail, the recipe appears in the Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930 with a 2:1:1 ratio instead of the more modern 4:1:1 gin-forward version Sam chose. This recipe and overall flavor effect were very similar to the D.O.M. Cocktail I had at Green Street where the D.O.M. used Benedictine and orange bitters instead of Lillet and Angostura bitters.

The Abbey was very gin and ethereal orange flavored on the first part of the sip and rather orange juicy and Angostura bittery at the swallow. The orange peel flavors in the Lillet worked rather well with the orange juice in the drink and functioned in an analogous way as Benedictine did in the D.O.M. (I noted that the Benedictine "formed a faint wisp of flavor complexity behind the orange juice and gin.")