Charlie Chaplin

Wayfinder

The Charlie Chaplin is equal parts sloe gin, apricot brandy and lime juice, shaken. There is no full-strength spirit in it at all: the base is two liqueurs, and the lime is the only thing keeping them honest. It comes from the bar of the old Waldorf-Astoria in the 1910s, recorded in the hotel's pre-Prohibition bar book, at a point when Chaplin was arguably the most famous person alive and naming drinks after celebrities was what bars did instead of headlines. What makes it work is that the two liqueurs are natural neighbours. Sloe gin is plum with an almond edge from the stones; apricot brandy is stone fruit with a kernel note of its own. They lean into each other rather than competing, and a full third of lime stops the whole thing collapsing into cordial. It has the architecture of a Last Word at the strength of a garden party, and it goes down faster than it should.

ShakenClassicSessionable

Glassware: Coupe Glass

Garnish: Lime Wheel

Ingredients

Serves

Sloe Gin

30ml

A third of the glass, so a poor bottle ruins the drink outright. Real sloe gin has tartness and an almond note from the stones; the cheap versions are sweetened red spirit with flavouring.

Apricot Brandy

30ml

Apricot liqueur made with real fruit, not the artificially flavoured sweet version and not an unsweetened eau-de-vie, which would leave the drink hollow where the sweetness should be.

Fresh Lime Juice

30ml

A full third, which looks aggressive against two liqueurs and is exactly right. It is the only structural element in the drink and the only thing stopping it reading as cordial.

Instructions

Add the sloe gin, apricot brandy and lime juice to a shaker.

Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 12 seconds.

Double strain into a chilled coupe.

Garnish with a lime wheel.

Expert Tip

Buy real sloe gin. The cheap supermarket versions are sweetened red spirit with flavouring, and in a drink where one liqueur is a third of the glass there is nowhere for that to hide. A proper sloe gin, bought or made, has genuine tartness and an almond note from the stones, and it is the difference between a sour and a squash. Apricot brandy is the other trap. What the recipe means is apricot liqueur with real fruit in it, not the artificially flavoured sweet stuff, and not eau-de-vie, which is dry and unsweetened and would leave the drink hollow. Do not trim the lime. A full third against two liqueurs looks aggressive on paper and is exactly right in the glass.

Flavour Profile

Sloe PlumApricotLimeAlmondTart

Where It Comes From

The old Waldorf-Astoria, the original hotel on Fifth Avenue that was demolished in 1929 to make room for the Empire State Building, had one of the most influential bars in America before Prohibition closed it. Albert Stevens Crockett later published its recipes as The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book, and the Charlie Chaplin is among them.

It dates from the 1910s, when Chaplin's fame was at a level that is difficult to convey now: the Tramp was probably the most recognised image on earth. Bars named drinks after whoever was in the papers, and most of those names have not survived. This one has, which says more about the drink than about the man.

Two Liqueurs and No Spirit

The base is unusual. Almost every sour is a spirit, a citrus and a sweetener, and here the spirit is missing entirely: two liqueurs share the base and the lime does the rest.

That should not work. Liqueurs are sweet and relatively low in proof, and a drink built from two of them ought to be flabby. What saves it is that both are fruit liqueurs with genuine tartness of their own, and that the lime sits at a full third rather than the smaller measure all that sweetness might suggest. The result has structure and lands somewhere around fifteen per cent alcohol, which is a large part of why it disappears so quickly.

Why Sloe and Apricot Suit Each Other

Both are stone fruits and both carry a kernel note, which is why the pairing is more than a coincidence of what happened to be on the bar.

Sloe gin gets its almond edge from the stones left in during steeping. Apricot liqueur, made properly, carries the same faintly bitter kernel character from its own fruit. Put them together and the two almond notes stack, which gives the drink a marzipan undertone that neither bottle produces alone. The lime cuts across all of it and keeps the fruit tasting fresh rather than jammy.

Getting the Bottles Right

This is a three-ingredient drink where two of the three are liqueurs, so the bottles are the recipe. There is no full-proof spirit to carry a weak one and no sugar syrup to adjust with afterwards.

Sloe gin is the more common failure. The mass-market versions are sweetened, coloured neutral spirit with flavouring, and they turn the drink into fruit squash. Apricot brandy is the more confusing one, because the name covers three different products: cheap artificially flavoured liqueur, proper apricot liqueur, and dry eau-de-vie. The middle one is what you want.

How to Serve It

Shaken hard for twelve seconds, double strained into a chilled coupe, lime wheel if you like one.

Cold and early. It is light enough for an afternoon and disappears fast enough that a second is worth making a conscious decision about.

The Spirit

Sloe Gin

Sloes steeped in gin and sweetened, which makes it a liqueur rather than a gin, legally and in practice. The fruit is the sloe, from the blackthorn, and it is far too astringent to eat off the bush.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Charlie Chaplin cocktail?

Equal parts sloe gin, apricot brandy and fresh lime juice, shaken and served up in a coupe. It comes from the bar of the old Waldorf-Astoria in the 1910s and contains no full-strength spirit at all.

Why is it named after Charlie Chaplin?

Because the bar named drinks after whoever was famous, and in the 1910s that was Chaplin more than anyone. There is no evidence he had anything to do with it. Most drinks named this way have been forgotten, and this one survived on merit.

What kind of apricot brandy should I use?

Apricot liqueur made with real fruit. The name covers three different products: cheap artificially flavoured liqueur, proper fruit liqueur, and dry unsweetened eau-de-vie. The middle one is what the recipe means, and Rothman & Winter and Giffard both make it.

Does the sloe gin brand matter?

A great deal, because it is a third of the glass. Real sloe gin has tartness and an almond note from the stones. The mass-market versions are sweetened coloured spirit with flavouring, and they turn the drink into squash.

Master the Techniques

How to Shake a Cocktail Like a Pro

Blackthorn

The Blackthorn is a Manhattan built on sloe gin instead of whiskey. Sloe gin, sweet vermouth and orange bitters, stirred cold and served up. The sloe brings plum and almond where rye would bring spice, and the vermouth doubles the fruit rather than cutting against it. What arrives has a Manhattan's shape and about half its strength. Several drinks answer to Blackthorn. The old manuals also carry an Irish whiskey version built with dry vermouth and absinthe, and the two share a name rather than a recipe. Both take it from the blackthorn bush, which is where sloes come from. This is the sloe one. The low proof is the whole character. Sloe gin pours at around 25%, so the drink lands gentler than its silhouette suggests. That makes it a genuine second drink of the evening, where a Manhattan would end one. It also makes your choice of bottle matter more than usual: with only vermouth and bitters alongside it, the sloe gin is most of what you taste.

Sloe Gin Fizz

Sloe gin is England’s hedgerow in a bottle: blackthorn sloes picked after the first frost, steeped in gin and sugar through the winter, emerging deep garnet and tasting of plum skin and almond. For most of its history it stayed a sipping liqueur for hip flasks and shoot lunches, until American bartenders got hold of it and gave it the fizz treatment, and the hedgerow discovered it could dance. The fizz is the great American lengthener: spirit, citrus, sugar and soda, shaken hard and served effervescent, with an optional egg white turning the drink to silk. Applied to sloe gin the formula is transformative. The liqueur’s jammy depth gets stretched over lemon and bubbles into something long, blushing and berry-bright, with the almond note of the sloe stones surfacing at the finish. A measure of dry gin stiffens the frame, since sloe gin alone runs low-proof and sweet, and the result balances English autumn against American fizz: a drink that tastes like late September poured over July.

Last Word

The Last Word is one of the great equal-parts cocktails: gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and fresh lime juice in identical measures, shaken and served up. No component leads and no component follows. Each of the four is assertive enough to dominate a lesser recipe, and the fact that none dominates this one is the drink’s central achievement. It originated at the Detroit Athletic Club around 1915, documented by Ted Saucier in his 1951 book Bottoms Up and attributed to vaudeville performer Frank Fogarty, who allegedly introduced it to the club. It disappeared almost entirely during and after Prohibition and was rediscovered in the early 2000s by Seattle bartender Murray Stenson, who found it in Saucier’s book and put it on the menu at the Zig Zag Café. From there it spread through the craft cocktail world and has not left. The revival was deserved. Green Chartreuse brings herbal intensity, maraschino brings cherry sweetness and a faint bitter almond note, fresh lime brings tartness, and gin holds it together. Each sip reveals a different component leading depending on where in the glass you are. It is a drink worth paying attention to.