Singapore sling ingredients how to#
Singapore sling ingredients full#

Without re-litigating the provenance, Cherry liqueur is what makes this drink what it is, and the Danish bottle Cherry Heering is the best of the bunch.īénédictine : It’s only used in a small quantity, but the Bénédictine is one of the principal charms of this cocktail. If you have lemon instead of lime, go ahead, it doesn’t matter very much.Ĭherry Heering: As mentioned, some early versions of the Singapore Sling use a distillate of cherry, rather than a liqueur. I’ll keep with that here, but just also note that the pineapple juice helps define the character of this drink more than it does in say the Painkiller, so while I’d still make it with canned pineapple juice, it’s quality will have a ceiling. Pineapple Juice: My standard advice is that while citrus juice must be fresh, with pineapple juice, fresh is better but non-vital.

Garnish with a pineapple wedge, pineapple fronds, a cherry, an orange slice, a little umbrella, a colorful straw, mint or really whatever you want.

But in this, another cocktail author David Embury, writing of the Singapore Sling in 1948, offers rare comfort: “Of all the recipes published for this drink,” he says, “I have never seen any two that were alike.” Singapore SlingĬombine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake for eight to 10 seconds. would’ve had, writing in 1939 of “the Immortal Singapore Raffles Gin Sling, met in 1926, and thereafter never forgotten?” No, it’s not. Though what you’re served at the Raffles Hotel leaves something to be desired, the bones are there to indeed make a terrific drink-bracing with gin and high-proof liqueurs, juicy with cherry, with Bénédictine’s cinnamon and nutmeg giving the pineapple a seductive spice. Someone wants a Singapore Sling: Do we excavate the original recipe and give them what they’re not expecting and perhaps don’t want? And which “original” do we use anyway? Or do we make the best we can from the recipe that’s been the default for the last 50 years, inauthentic as it may be? So we’re back to the foundations, and our spinning compass. Nonetheless, the Raffles’ claim stuck and stuck early, and writers refer to the drink as belonging to the hotel as early as the mid 1920s.

The problem with all of this is that it’s not true-“a bunch of malarkey,” according to diligent cocktail historian David Wondrich-who discovered that by 1915 the Singapore Sling had been ubiquitous on the island for nearly 20 years and was more popular at the bar of a local department store than it was at the hotel. When I was at the Raffles in 2016, you couldn’t go 50 feet without seeing a reference to the famous cocktail and its recently celebrated 100th birthday. Inside, you’ll see many references to the hotel’s Long Bar, and the Singapore Sling, which everyone will tell you bartender Ngiam Tong Boon invented there in 1915. On the south end of Singapore just a few blocks northeast of the downtown core sits the grand Raffles Hotel, as it has since 1887, a beautifully restored relic of the city’s colonial history.

Singapore sling ingredients how to#

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Singapore sling ingredients full#

Some have soda and some others have bitters-minor tweaks, perhaps-but then some have three full ounces of pineapple juice and many have none at all. There’s definitely cherry involved, but whether it’s the sweet red liqueur or the punchy clear distillate is contested. says neither, while Trader Vic, just to be annoying, says both). Almost everyone also agrees that it has citrus, so there’s that too, so long as you don’t mind that half say lemon and the other half say lime (Charles Baker Jr. Let’s start with what we know: Everyone seems to agree it’s a gin drink, so we have that going for us. Some cocktails have a history so contested, so laden with switchbacks and apocrypha, the general experience is like opening a compass to find the needle spinning freely in place. Most of what you know about the Singapore Sling is wrong.