gustin gang

3/4 oz Dry Gin (Hardshore)
3/4 oz Sloe Gin (Glendalough)
1 oz Punt e Mes
1/2 oz Cynar
2 dash Peychaud's Bitters

Stir with ice, strain into a cocktail coupe, and garnish with a lemon twist.

For my shift drink at Our Fathers two Fridays ago, I decided to riff on the 1919 Cocktail utilizing dry and sloe gin as the two spirits. While I kept the Punt e Mes intact, I switched from molé to Peychaud's Bitters due to their working well with sloe's fruit notes. Moreover, I swapped the original's Benedictine for Cynar to pair with the sloe gin akin to Phil Ward's Lipspin especially considering my decent results in the Perverted by Language. For a name, I was looking for a year to attach to the drink and began thinking about 1662, the year that the original bridge on my route to work was built. However, that had little to do with the drink, so I thought about what else was happening around 1919 -- namely, gangs were gearing up for Prohibition. One famous Boston gang to work bootlegging into their operations was the Gustin Gang. The Gustin Gang was formed in the mid-1910s and by the 1920s began to dominate Boston's underworld. During Prohibition, they purchased rum-running boats that brought booze from international waters into South Boston where they supplied their South Boston speakeasy, the Sportlight, as well as other local establishments.
The Gustin Gang cocktail shared a lemon and berry nose. Next, the berry continued on into the sip where it mingled with hints of grape and caramel, and then the swallow proffered bitter, floral, and pine flavors.