Monkey Gland

Wayfinder

The Monkey Gland has the strangest name origin in the classic canon and wears it proudly. Harry MacElhone mixed it at his Paris bar in the early 1920s and named it for Dr Serge Voronoff’s celebrity surgery of the day, which grafted monkey gland tissue into ageing men on a promise of restored vigour. The science was quackery. The cocktail was sound. It is the Bronx’s Parisian cousin with the vermouths sent home: fresh orange against gin, grenadine supplying colour and a pomegranate seam, and absinthe doing measured shadow work that keeps the fruit from simple sweetness. The drink reads sunlit at the front and mysterious at the finish, which was presumably the marketing. It survives as the era’s best conversation piece that also happens to drink well. The story is the garnish, the spec needs only honest juice and a counted absinthe measure, and the name has been raising eyebrows profitably for a century.

ShakenClassic

Variations

Glassware: Coupe Glass

Garnish: Orange Twist

Ingredients

Serves

Gin

45ml

The Parisian frame: a dry gin holding the fruit and the shadow apart from one another. Its juniper is what stops this reading as flavoured orange juice.

Fresh Orange Juice

45ml

Equal to the gin and fresh or nothing. It is fully load-bearing at this measure, and carton juice fails here for exactly the reasons it fails in a Bronx.

Grenadine

15ml

Colour and a pomegranate seam. Real grenadine tints the drink and adds a tartness underneath; the synthetic sort candies it and contributes nothing else.

Absinthe

15ml

The gland itself: the herbal shadow that turns fruit juice into a cocktail with a past. The official specification pours a tablespoon, at which point the shadow is standing in front of the drink rather than behind it. Measure it either way, because this is the ingredient that decides what the glass tastes of.

Instructions

Add the gin, orange juice, grenadine and absinthe to a shaker with ice.

Shake hard for 12 seconds.

Double strain into a chilled coupe.

Express an orange twist over the surface and drop it in.

Source: the IBA (Official IBA specification; method ours). Last checked 13 August 2026.

Expert Tip

Measure the absinthe rather than pouring it. The official specification calls for a tablespoon, which is a great deal of anise against forty-five millilitres of orange juice, and it produces a drink that leads with liquorice rather than with fruit. That is the official reading and it is a legitimate one; it is also not what most bars serve. If it tastes like a séance, you want the variation below. Harry MacElhone's build takes a third of the absinthe and lets the gin and the orange lead, and the difference between the two is the whole argument about this drink. The orange is the other exposure, at equal measure to the gin and fully load-bearing: squeeze it to order, because carton juice here is the same failure it is in a Bronx and there are only four ingredients for it to hide behind, none of which will cover for it.

Flavour Profile

OrangePomegranateAniseJuniper

The Origin

Harry MacElhone poured it at what became Harry’s New York Bar in early-1920s Paris, naming it for the Voronoff monkey-gland grafts then scandalising and delighting the press in equal measure: celebrity pseudo-surgery promising renewed youth to men who could afford it.

The name was topical satire that comfortably outlived its topic, and the drink anchored the bar’s golden decade alongside the White Lady. It is worth remembering that the joke landed differently at the time: Voronoff was famous, the procedure was fashionable, and naming a cocktail after it was closer to a headline than to a curiosity.

The Absinthe Shadow

Absinthe is what turns this from gin and orange juice into a cocktail with something going on underneath it, and the measure is where every version of the drink parts company.

The official specification pours a tablespoon: fifteen millilitres against forty-five of orange juice, which is enough for anise and wormwood to lead the glass rather than to shadow it. Harry MacElhone's original called for a few dashes, and the modern reading that most bars pour sits around five millilitres, where the anise bitters the orange's sweetness from below without announcing itself, which is the same measured-shadow technique a Doctor Funk applies at tiki length.

Absinthe at 60-something per cent has no interest in being subtle, so the gap between those two readings is not a rounding error: it is the difference between a drink about oranges and a drink about anise. Both are recorded below. Pour the official one first and decide which you prefer.

The Fruit Standard

Equal gin and orange juice leaves the fruit completely load-bearing, which means the carton rule applies at double strength here.

Fresh-squeezed orange brings acidity, brightness and a little body. Carton juice has been pasteurised into something flat and sweet, and at forty-five millilitres of a drink barely over a hundred there is nowhere at all for that to hide. Real grenadine matters for the same reason: it brings a pomegranate tartness under the sweetness where the synthetic sort brings colour alone. Two honest ingredients and the drink glows; two lazy ones and the monkey business is all in the name.

Against the Bronx

The two are cousins, and setting them side by side is the quickest way to understand what each is doing. Both put gin against fresh orange juice at a similar ratio.

A Bronx uses split vermouths to hold the fruit in structure, which makes it drier, more herbal and more obviously part of the Martini family. The Monkey Gland uses grenadine and absinthe instead, which makes it fruitier at the front and stranger at the back. Same problem, two entirely different solutions, and Paris took the more interesting road.

How to Serve It

Cold, up, in a chilled coupe, with the story told after the first sip rather than before it. The drink stands on its own before the name needs to do any work.

It is brunch’s strangest respectable option and the best answer available to a bottle of absinthe already open on the shelf, which is a bottle that otherwise tends to sit unused between Sazeracs. Express the orange twist properly: the oils lift a drink that is otherwise fairly low and round.

The Spirit

Gin

A flavour requirement rather than a method. The law asks only that juniper be the predominant taste and that the spirit reach 37.5%, which leaves everything else on the botanical bill to the distiller and permits a gin that was never redistilled at all.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Monkey Gland named after?

Dr Serge Voronoff’s 1920s celebrity surgery, which grafted monkey gland tissue into ageing patients as a rejuvenation treatment. MacElhone bottled the joke in Paris while the craze was still fresh in the newspapers, and it long outlived its subject.

How much absinthe goes in?

That is the argument. The official specification calls for a tablespoon, around fifteen millilitres, which puts anise clearly in front. The reading most bars pour is nearer five millilitres, where it sits underneath the orange as a herbal shadow. Both are legitimate and they are noticeably different drinks.

Is it related to the Bronx?

They are cousins. Both put gin against fresh orange juice, but a Bronx uses split vermouths to hold the fruit in structure while the Monkey Gland uses grenadine and absinthe. Paris took the stranger of the two roads.

Does the orange juice have to be fresh?

Yes. At equal measure to the gin it is fully load-bearing, and pasteurised carton juice is flat and sweet where the drink needs acidity and brightness. There are only four ingredients here and none will cover for it.

Master the Techniques

How to Shake a Cocktail Like a Pro

Bronx

The Bronx was once the third cocktail in America, behind only the Martini and the Manhattan in the pre-Prohibition order of things. It is credited to Johnnie Solon of the Waldorf-Astoria bar around 1906, who named it for the zoo after a customer’s crack about the animals people claim to see when they drink. A Perfect Martini with orange juice sounds like vandalism; for two decades it was the height of fashion. The build is exactly that: gin with both vermouths, split sweet and dry, and a short measure of fresh orange juice shaken through. The juice is the ingredient that dates the drink and the ingredient that makes it. Squeezed fresh it brightens the vermouths into something sunlit; from a carton it commits the murder the reputation never recovered from. Prohibition gin and post-war cartons did the damage between them, and the revival has been slow to forgive. Made honestly it is a genuinely lovely thing.

Doctor Funk

The Doctor Funk is the only drink in the tiki canon named after a real physician. Dr Bernard Funk practised in Samoa in the late nineteenth century, where his patients included Robert Louis Stevenson, and his standing prescription against the tropical heat was a mix of absinthe, lime and soda water. It was medicine by the standards of the day, and better company than most of it. When Don the Beachcomber opened his Hollywood bar in 1934 he added rum and grenadine to the doctor’s formula and put it on his first menu, which makes the Doctor Funk older than the word tiki itself: a genuine South Seas artefact smuggled into a genre that otherwise invented its own mythology. The absinthe is the drink; everything else is the delivery system. Lime and lemon keep it honest, grenadine tints it rather than sweetens it, and the soda stretches it into a long, dry, faintly mysterious cooler that drinks nothing like its neighbours on the menu.

White Lady

The White Lady was created by Harry MacElhone at Ciro's Club in London in 1919, in an early form built on crème de menthe, and then substantially revised by MacElhone himself at Harry's New York Bar in Paris in 1929, when he replaced the mint with gin and added egg white. The earlier drink carries the same name and is a different thing entirely. The 1929 revision is the one ordered today. Gin, Cointreau and fresh lemon in a ratio that seats the gin clearly in front, with the liqueur and the acid holding a balanced frame around it. The official specification stops there; MacElhone's own rebuild adds an egg white, and that version is below. It is often described as a Sidecar made with gin, which is accurate as far as it goes and misses the specific relationship between juniper and Cointreau's orange. The two sit at adjacent points in the canon rather than one being a substitution of the other.