Paradise cocktail

The Paradise is a short gin cocktail with apricot brandy and fresh orange juice, in a ratio of 3 cl, 2 cl, and 1.5 cl. Shake it with ice and serve it without ice in a small, chilled cocktail glass. It is an official IBA cocktail in the The Unforgettables category. It has nothing to do with tropical drinks full of rum and pineapple, even though the name suggests otherwise: it is a dry European classic from the 1920s. The color is warm orange, and the flavor is fruity and rounded, with enough gin to keep it from becoming too sweet.

In cocktail recipes, apricot brandy almost always means an apricot liqueur of 20 to 25 percent ABV, not a dry apricot brandy. You need the sweetness of the liqueur, because there’s no syrup in the Paradise. Bols and De Kuyper make affordable versions that are easy to find. If you want more apricot flavor, you can try a French apricot liqueur; taste and adjust the proportions again, because each liqueur has a different sugar content. An opened bottle will keep for a long time, and you can also use it in the Angel Face.

A classic London Dry is the safest choice: the juniper gives structure to a drink that would otherwise quickly lean toward fruit juice. A gin with a distinct citrus note, for example with orange or grapefruit peel among the botanicals, complements the juice nicely. A heavy, spicy, or particularly floral gin can overpower the apricot. Because gin makes up almost half the drink, you can clearly taste the difference between brands. Choose a bottle around 40 to 43 percent ABV; lower than that and the drink quickly becomes weak.

If you don’t have a shaker, a screw-top jam jar works perfectly. Fill the jar two-thirds full with ice, add the gin, apricot brandy, and orange juice, and shake for twelve seconds. The juice needs that movement to mix properly and develop a light, airy texture. Then pour through a tea strainer into the chilled glass. Because the serving is small, it dilutes quickly in a jar with too little ice, so it’s better to use too much ice than too little. You can find a shaker with a built-in strainer among our cocktail shakers.

For eight glasses, mix 24 cl gin and 16 cl apricot brandy in a bottle and refrigerate it. Juice the oranges, 12 cl in total, just before serving; that’s about two oranges. Then shake two glasses at a time: 10 cl of the mixture and 3 cl juice in a shaker full of ice, for twelve seconds. Double-strain into chilled glasses. Because the Paradise is small, you can also shake three at once, but no more, or it won’t get cold enough.

At 1.5 cl, the juice may seem like a minor detail, but it determines the freshness of the entire drink. Freshly squeezed orange juice contains acids and aromatic oils from the peel that have largely disappeared from juice from a carton. Carton juice is also usually pasteurized, which makes it flatter and sweeter. Together with the apricot brandy, the Paradise quickly becomes liqueur-like. So squeeze half an orange per glass. The same applies to any drink in which orange plays a leading role, from the Screwdriver to the Monkey Gland.