Skip to content

We ship internationally to over 50 countries !International Shipping to over 50 countries    |     Trade Customer?    Placing a large order?    Just need advice?    Please call +44(0) 1225 863988

Hot Cocktails

This current cold weather is perfect for trying some of our new, Hot Cocktails. All based on summer varieties they introduce some new, warming ideas to keep away the winter chills.

Hot Toddy

Based on the traditional Hot Toddy, often used to relieve cold and flu symptoms, this popular night cap is fruity and spicy.

Ingredients

  • 50ml Mosgaard Single Malt Whisky
  • 1 tbsp honey
  • 25ml lemon juice
  • 1 cup hot water
  • 1 lemon wedge
  • 1 cinnamon stick

Method: Combine boiled water, whisky, honey, lemon juice, and water in a mug. Garnish with a lemon wedge and cinnamon stick.

Hackney Homebrew

A little stronger and sharper but a lovely warm sipper.

Ingredients

  • 40ml Mosgaard Danish Gin
  • 20ml Montanaro Rosso Di Torino Vermouth
  • 10ml sugar syrup
  • 2 cinnamon sticks
  • 2 star anise
  • Fresh nutmeg
  • Orange zest, to garnish

Method: Combine gin, vermouth and sugar syrup in a pan. Simmer on a low heat. Break the cinnamon and add with 20 grates of fresh nutmeg and the star anise. Pour into a glass and grate over orange zest.

Hot Old Fashioned Gin

Changing the whisky for gin, and serving it warm, creates a perfect spin on the beloved drink, Old Fashioned.

Ingredients

  • 50ml Mosgaard Danish Gin
  • 10ml sugar syrup
  • 3 dashes orange bitters
  • 50ml boiling water
  • Orange twist, to garnish

Method: Gently heat gin, syrup and bitters in a pan and add the boiling water. Serve garnished with an orange twist.

Christmas Cocktails

This Christmas we are looking forward to drinking some very popular cocktails at home. So, to make things easy, we are offering Cocktail Kits at discounted prices – they will be on sale throughout December on our home page.

The Kits comprise all you need to make these delicious cocktails in the comfort of your own home throughout the festive season:

Negroni

To make the perfect classic Negroni cocktail, use equal parts gin, vermouth and bitters poured over ice, stirred and garnished with orange peel.

The Negroni Kit includes:

Mosgaard Organic Dry Gin

Montanaro Vermouth Rosso Di Torino

Montanaro Bitter Naturale

Tangerine Negroni

Tangerine Negroni

All you need to make delicious Tangerine Negroni cocktails this Christmas is replace the Dry Gin with:

Mosgaard Organic Tangerine Gin

The Tangerine Negroni Kit can be purchased here.

Martini

To make the perfect martini use 60ml gin and 1 tablespoon vermouth poured over ice, stirred and garnished with lemon peel.

The Martini Kit includes:

Mosgaard Organic Dry Gin

Montanaro Vermouth Bianco Di Torino

Celebrate World Calvados Day

World Calvados Day

This is apple harvest time and Friday 20th October is World Calvados Day. To celebrate we thought you might like to try something new.

Apple Calvados is a lovely, warming drink to enjoy on an autumnal evening:

Place a piece of root ginger and a cinnamon stick in a pan over a low heat. Pour in 50ml of Toutain Reserve 3yo Calvados and 150ml of fresh apple juice. Stirring constantly, heat the cocktail but do not let it boil. As soon as it warms up to 70/80 degrees C, pour it into a glass and serve.

And if calvados is not your spirit of choice, then how about some apple gin? Produced in Denmark, our organic Mosgaard Filippa Gin is made from spicy, sweet Filippa apples that have a fresh acidity after harvest. These fresh apples are macerated in the distilled spirit giving a velvet smooth and fresh apple flavoured gin. Try it with tonic because Thursday 19th October is International Gin & Tonic Day!

World Calvados Day Thursday 20th October

World Calvados DayToday Thursday, 20th October, is World Calvados Day.  If you would like to try this fabulous French apple brandy how about making something different?  Calvados and tonic is France’s answer to the G&T and is a staple in Normandy.  Although traditionally served chilled, it is just as fabulous with heaps of ice, a ton of tonic and a simple lemon twist producing a drink that’s “A little bitter and sweet, refreshing and bright”.

INGREDIENTS

Serving: 1

Garnish: lemon twist

DIRECTIONS
  1. Pour the Calvados into a Burgundy glass over ice.
  2. Top with tonic water.
  3. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Reproduced from Punch.

National Calvados Week and Liqueur Day

calvados weekCalvados is a brandy made from apples and produced exclusively in Normandy.  Its history dates back to 1553, when the drink was known as cidre eau-de-vie.  The name calvados was introduced in the late 1700s, when France was divided into departments, and it is now known as one of the Three Noble French Eaux de Vie (cognac and armagnac being the other two).  National Calvados Week is now in its tenth year and will run, alongside the annual apple harvest, from 10 – 16 October in bars and retailers throughout the UK.  World Calvados Day will follow on shortly afterwards, on the 20th October, which falls on the eve of National Apple Day.  If calvados is new to you, now is the time to try it.  We have recently taken on a new supplier, Toutain, whose calvados are some of the finest we have ever tasted.  Rich in fruity, appley flavours they evoke perfect seasonal aromas of autumn in the North of France.

~

Also on the 16th of October we will be celebrating National Liqueur Day.  A liqueur is a distilled spirit-based drink that is further blended with natural sweet flavours (such as sugar or corn syrup along with fruits, nuts, creams, plats, purees, spices, etc).   Although the base spirit will have been aged, the liqueur is not; it just undergoes a brief resting stage for the flavours to blend.  Liqueurs generally have an abv of 15 – 30% and are great for cocktails.  You can also have them straight, mixed with other drinks or desserts, or simply poured over ice.  Check out our range, including Nusbaumerhere.

 

 

Negroni Week 3 – 9 October 2022

NegroniNegroni Week was originally scheduled to take place on 12-18 September brand but it will now take place in the UK on 3-9 October 2022.  The aperitivo brand, Campari, put all marketing activities in the UK on hold in the days following the Queen’s death on 8 September, including the week-long annual celebration of the Italian cocktail.

Brad Madigan, managing director, commented “Whilst it felt appropriate to postpone Negroni Week in the UK, out of respect for Her Majesty the Queen, we are looking forward to being able to celebrate the landmark occasion of the 10-year anniversary with lovers of this cocktail across the country.”  Over the past decade, this special week has raised more than US$3 million for charitable organisations.

Our classic Negroni recipe is:

Vermouth Day – Monday 21st March

Vermouth DayOn the 21st of March, we are going to celebrate Vermouth Day.  Created by Giancarlo Mancino, the date corresponds with the beginning of spring, a period of the year where everything is flourishing.  ‘The first flowers bloom, the plants become increasingly green and the scents in the air are so many and so diverse that you want to trap them all inside a bottle.’

Vermouth is an aromatised fortified wine, flavoured with various botanicals (roots, barks, flowers, seeds, herbs, and spices). The modern versions of the beverage were first produced in the mid to late 18th century in Turin, Italy. While vermouth was traditionally used for medicinal purposes, it was later served as an apéritif, with fashionable cafés in Turin serving it to guests around the clock. In the late 19th century it also became popular with bartenders as a key ingredient for cocktails, such as the Martini, the Manhattan, the Rob Roy, and the Negroni.

So Vermouth Day is a way to celebrate one of the greatest cocktail ingredients of all time.  There’s no Martini Cocktail without Vermouth, there’s no Negroni without Vermouth and of course, there’s no Vermuttino without Vermouth.   Try our selection from Montanaro of Bianco, Rosso and Extra Dry.

Bartenders Champion Old Vintage Cognac

Old Vintage CognacVintage cocktails, made from rare and very old vintage cognac, are trending …… they are also extremely expensive!  Interest began with the World’s most expensive cocktail which was created in 2012 and sold for £5500.  It contained a 1788 Cognac, 1770 Liqueur and 1860 Orange Curacao.  Similar concoctions can now be bought at the very best bars in the Old Vintage Cognacworld for similarly handsome prices.

Cheltenham Festival also followed suit this year producing a cocktail containing 1937 Delord Armagnac, in memory of Golden Miller, Gold Cup winner 1932 – 1936.

Very old (pre-Phylloxera) cognacs and Armagnacs are, by definition, incredibly rare but those that design these hedonistic cocktail treats feel that they are essential components, creating complexity and length not found in today’s spirits.  These qualities are the very reason most would hopefully choose to drink them unadulterated – but single shots of very old vintage brandies do not come cheap either.  Last month the world’s most expensive cognac measure (40 ml) was sold for £10,000.  Perhaps not as unreasonable as it sounds when some of our very old cognac bottles retail at over £20,000 each.  Value is generated not only by the quality of the cognac itself, but in the story of its provenance too.

Victorian Cognac Cocktails

Perhaps because we tend to think of cognac as the venerable grandfather of luxury spirits, the image of mixing it with anything which may contaminate its qualities has isolated it to the peak of individualism – only to be enjoyed by a certain type of aged gentleman, usually smoking a large cigar. On the other hand, perhaps we should thank the big cognac brands who, because of over selling the golden nectar to the Asian markets, are now forced to produce over sugared and caramelised young cognacs which are more readily accepted as suitable for cocktails.

During the mid-nineteenth century cognac became the biggest selling spirit in Britain with nearly sixty five million bottles being sold and the inevitability of cognac mixtures became a certainty. Indeed, Britain was the biggest single market for the spirit until phylloxera struck the vines in the mid 1870s.

Brandy was the obvious choice for mixing with other herbs and fruits as distilled grape wines were the easiest drinks to access for most people. The Benedictine monks in the twelfth century and the Troyan Monks in the fourteenth century who made the plum brandy known as Slivovitz, were famous for their concoctions made from herbs, nuts and fruits, variations of which are still available today. The fruit shrubs, made from vinegar are another form of pre-mixed herbal and fruit essence often used in connection with the modern day cocktail.

By the nineteenth century mixing brandies had become accepted. From the sixteenth century cognac was sold as a strong spirit to be cut back with water and indeed to many it was regarded as a strong wine. It was recorded in the American notes for General Distribution that in 1842, when Charles Dickens made his first trip to America, he made certain to partake of one of the greatest American inventions; the cocktail. Indeed the Cock Tail was the forerunner to the collective range of mixtures for which we use the same name now.  The recipe for the Cock Tail was written down by a Captain Alexander in 1833 and follows:

  • I tablespoon sugar or simple syrup
  • 2oz rye whiskey, rum or cognac
  • 3oz water
  • 4 dashes bitters
  • Nutmeg sprinkled on top.

Captain Alexander also described several other cocktail styled drinks that he had experienced in America including the Apple Toddy (baked apple pulp mixed with sugar, water and brandy) and the Port wine (Sangaree made with port, lemons, sugar and nutmeg).

This was not the first references to cocktails though, indeed during the reigns of the French Monarchy  from around Louis VI lemon was used to both provide a freshness to brandy and to clean the palate. However, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries spirits were used to make punches brought to our shores around 1632 by sailors of the East India Line. Most of these punches were of the Wassail type with either a wine or spirit base as evidenced in the first Punch House established in 1671. Historically the oldest known punch was the Bajan Rum Punch whose recipe was enshrined in rhyme. One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak. These usually contained lemon, orange, pineapple and grenadine but virtually any fruits grown and mixed with the local spirit, or ships brandy taken from the Napoleonic warships, became the norm.

During the reign of Queen Victoria the use of more exotic fruits became favoured by the super-rich to identify themselves as well travelled and wealthy. Oranges, lemons and ginger were quite common additives.  Even some flowers, such as lavender, were used to supplement spices such as cinnamon, cloves and bergamot as well as Asian fruits, such as mangos and pineapple, which by now had become available in the wealthy areas of London.

Although white spirits were available in the Victorian era, they were not regarded in the purist way in which dark spirits were seen. White spirits, especially gin were seen more as cheap spirits which rendered ones senses to a state of inebriation. It wasn’t really until the turn of the twentieth century, when ice became more readily available, that their potential as a carrier of fruit and herb juices became obvious.

By the turn of the twentieth century many of the drinks discovered by the wealthy had started to attract a wider section of the population. The Mint Julip (1837) and the Gin Sling (1862), see below, complimented the more up-market Victorian bars and meeting places as well as the Brandy Alexander, made with chocolate and cream and its variants made with coffee from a brandy base. There were other variations that used banana and cream, also chocolate which perhaps may explain the wide girth of some of the wealthy Victorians.

Mint Julip  (1837)

  • 6-12 sprigs of mint
  • 1 tablespoon fine sugar or sugar syrup
  • 1 ½ oz brandy
  • 1 ½ oz peach brandy

The Gin Sling  (1862)

  • 1 tablespoon fine sugar
  • 2oz gin
  • 1oz water
  • Ice and nutmeg

Most of the cocktails used around the turn of the twentieth century were based on what was available and although the exotic drinks could be found in exclusive bars, such drinks as B and S (Brandy and Soda) and The Horses Neck (brandy and ginger ale) were easy to prepare. Sometimes the lemons and oranges (or mandarins), were combined with sugar to form variations on the more modern Sidecar cocktail where sweeter liqueur drinks such as Cointreau and Grand Marnier are mixed with cognac and lemon juice. Eliminating the orange liqueur and adding sugar, leaves one with a delicious Brandy Sour.

Combinations of the various flavours that were available to the Victorians and their brandies included drinks for every time of the day. Fruit liqueurs and eggs referred to as nogs were sometimes prepared for breakfast whilst brandies and lemons, sometimes mixed with sugar, were used as an aperitif before lunch.  However, the most traditional brandy drink was the neat cognac, often very old and served after dinner with a large cigar as the final drink of the day before retiring to face another day.

Christmas Cocktail

Ingredients:

  • ¾ oz Cognac
  • ½ oz Grand Marnier
  • ¼ oz Campari
  • 3 ozs Champagne
  • Slice of orange

Method:

Place the Cognac, Grand Marnier and Campari in a cocktail shaker with ice and shake. Strain into a wine goblet, top with the Champagne and a slice of orange.

Original recipe from The Cognac Expert