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Illustration of a Pineapple Gimlet

Illustration — generated, not photographed

Pineapple Gimlet

Pineapple rounds off the gimlet's sharp edges, giving it a fuller, softer body while the lime keeps the acid bright. Shaken hard, it comes up cold and lightly frothy. It wants a gin with real juniper and citrus peel behind it; a soft floral bottle vanishes under the fruit.

50 ml
gin
30 ml
pineapple
20 ml
lime
15 ml
sugar

Measures — house pour, not sourced

Shaken hard with pineapple and lime cordial, strained up.

The drink and how it got here

The parent drink is the gimlet: gin and lime cordial, first attested under that name in 1928 and described then as gin with a spot of lime. There is a scurvy story attached — that a Royal Navy surgeon, Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Gimlette, invented it to get his messmates to take their lime juice — but it appears in neither his obituary nor his entry in the reference books, so treat it as a story. The likelier reading is the tool: a gimlet drills small holes, and the word was already in use for anything sharp or piercing.

The proportions have moved a long way. The Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930 says half gin and half lime cordial, and Raymond Chandler's narrator in The Long Goodbye insists in 1953 that a real gimlet is exactly that and nothing else. Modern taste runs much drier — up to four parts gin to one of cordial — so a 1930 gimlet and a 2020 gimlet are barely the same drink.

It is a template that takes substitutions well. Wikipedia lists a vodka gimlet, a version with both lemon and lime, one with bitters, one with elderflower liqueur — the shape survives all of them because there is so little in it to disturb.

The pineapple version is ours, not history's: fresh pineapple juice standing in for part of the cordial, which softens the acid and gives the drink a body that gin and lime alone do not have. So the two guides below are the Savoy's half-and-half original first, then the house build — one is where this comes from, the other is what we actually pour.

Read from Gimlet (cocktail) — Wikipedia (lead, Etymology, Variations)

Half and half

1930 — The Savoy Cocktail Book · The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), quoted in Wikipedia

  1. Pouring a clear colourless spirit from a plain blank bottle into a metal cocktail shaker on a dark walnut bar top.

    1 Gin, and only half the glass of it. This is the version Chandler's narrator says is the only real one.

  2. Pouring a pale green-gold cordial from a second plain blank bottle into the shaker, matching the first pour exactly.

    2 The same again in lime cordial. Sweet, and to a modern palate startlingly so — this is what a gimlet meant for thirty years.

  3. A sealed metal cocktail shaker held raised just after a hard shake, heavily frosted and beaded with condensation.

    3 Shake it hard with ice. Cordial is thick, and it needs the force to actually come together with the gin.

  4. Straining a pale green-gold drink into a chilled stemmed coupe, a cut half lime lying on the bar beside it.

    4 Strain it up. Try it once at these proportions before deciding they are wrong — the sweetness is the point of the drink, not a mistake in it.

The pineapple build

House — pineapple standing in for part of the sugar · House build — our own recipe on this page, not a documented classic

  1. Pouring a clear colourless spirit from a plain blank bottle into a metal cocktail shaker on a dark walnut bar top.

    1 Fifty of gin, and now it is the larger measure rather than half. Modern gimlets run dry, and this one follows.

  2. Cloudy golden pineapple juice being poured from a small plain jug into the shaker, a wedge of fresh pineapple lying on the bar beside it.

    2 Thirty of pineapple juice, fresh if you can. This is where the body comes from — gin and lime alone are all edges.

  3. A cut half lime being squeezed over the shaker, juice running in, a small plain jug of clear syrup standing beside it.

    3 Twenty of lime and fifteen of sugar, taking the place of the cordial. Fresh juice and syrup separately gives you a dial the bottled version does not.

  4. A sealed metal cocktail shaker held raised just after a hard shake, heavily frosted and beaded with condensation.

    4 Shake it harder than you think you need to. Pineapple whips up a light foam, and that thin line at the rim is how you know it worked.

  5. Straining a cloudy tropical yellow drink into a chilled coupe, a thin pale foam line settling at the rim, a wedge of pineapple resting on the bar.

    5 Strain up and drink it cold. Softer than a gimlet, still sharp enough to be one — which is the entire reason for the swap.

These images are generated, not photographed

From the collection — 1 bottle