Pegu Club
The Pegu Club was the officers’ club of colonial Rangoon, a white building above the Pegu river where the gin was cold and the empire was warm, and its house cocktail travelled home in steamer trunks. By the 1920s the recipe was appearing in the great London bar books, with Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book noting it as a drink that had gone round the world and was asked for everywhere it landed. It is a gin sour wearing dress uniform: a big measure of gin, orange curacao carrying all the sweetness, fresh lime cutting through, and two different bitters bracing the finish. Nothing about it is soft. The drink runs dry, aromatic and slightly stern, which is presumably how the club liked its members. Its second act mattered as much as its first. When Audrey Saunders opened Pegu Club in New York in 2005 and named it for this drink, the bar became a proving ground for the modern gin revival, and the cocktail that had outlived its empire found itself, once again, asked for everywhere.
Glassware: Coupe Glass
Garnish: Lime Wheel
Ingredients
60ml
A big, confident measure of London Dry: the club pour, and the drink is built to let it lead.
22.5ml
All the sweetness in the glass, delivered as dry bitter-orange over brandy. Triple sec sweetens the drink toward a gin margarita and off the brief.
22.5ml
The colonial staple doing the sour work, in deliberately modest proportion: the Pegu runs dry by design.
1 dash
Dark spice at the back of the drink: one of two bitters working different ends of the glass.
1 dash
The other end: doubling down on the curacao’s peel note at the front. Dropping either flattens the finish.
Instructions
Add the gin, curacao, lime juice and both bitters to a shaker with ice.
Shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds.
Double strain into a chilled coupe.
Garnish with the lime wheel and serve.
Expert Tip
The drink is meant to run dry. Resist the urge to add syrup and let the curacao do all the sweetening it was hired for; at 22.5ml against 60ml of gin it is already working hard, and a bar spoon of sugar turns a stern drink into a soft one. Use a proper dry orange curacao rather than a sweet triple sec. Curacao is bitter orange peel over a brandy base, and it is where the drink's sternness is set. Triple sec is brighter and sugarier and pushes the whole thing toward a gin margarita, which is pleasant and off the brief entirely. Both bitters, every time. They work opposite ends of the glass, and dropping either one flattens the finish in a way that is obvious the moment you taste them side by side.
Behind the Pegu Club
Flavour Profile
The Origin
The Pegu Club was the British officers' club in Rangoon, named for the river it stood above, and it was the kind of institution the empire built everywhere it went: a white building, a long verandah, and a bar that served the same drinks to the same men for decades.
Its house cocktail travelled home in steamer trunks. By the 1920s the recipe was appearing in the great London bar books, described as a drink that had gone round the world and was asked for everywhere it landed, which was an accurate account of both the drink and the circumstances that carried it.
The club itself did not survive Burmese independence. The drink did, which is the more interesting half of the story: a recipe that outlasted the institution, the empire and the century that produced all three.
Curacao Selection
A proper dry orange curacao gives the drink its bones: bitter orange peel over brandy, sweetness in moderation. A sweet triple sec pushes the drink towards a gin margarita, pleasant but off-brief. The Pegu Club runs deliberately stern, and the curacao is where the sternness is set.
The Two Bitters
They work different ends of the glass: orange bitters amplify the curacao’s peel note at the front, Angostura adds dark spice to the finish, and dropping either flattens the drink. Colonial-era specs ran drier still, with less curacao and a rocks-of-lime austerity worth trying once the standard reading is familiar.
How to Serve It
Everything cold and precise: glass frozen, hard shake, double strain, lime wheel, no sugar rim, no apology. Serve it before dinner beside its Saunders-era descendants and taste a hundred years of gin history joining hands.
The Second Act
Audrey Saunders opened a bar called Pegu Club on Houston Street in New York in 2005, and named it for this drink.
The timing mattered. Vodka owned the back bar, gin was considered a spirit for older drinkers, and Saunders built a room around the argument that gin deserved better. The bar ran for fifteen years and trained a generation of bartenders who went on to open their own rooms, which is how a colonial-era gin sour became a fixture on cocktail lists that had no interest in the empire whatsoever.
The drink was well chosen for the job. It is dry, aromatic and unmistakably built on gin, which made it a decent advertisement for exactly the case the bar was making.
The Colonial Spec
Period recipes ran drier still than the modern reading. Some call for less curacao, some for a shorter measure of lime, and the general direction is a drink with more gin showing and less sweetness to soften it.
That is worth trying once the standard version is familiar, because it explains what the drink was for. This was a hot-climate aperitif drunk before dinner by people who wanted something bracing rather than something enjoyable in the modern sense.
The version given here is the compromise most bars have settled on: dry enough to keep the character, generous enough with the curacao that a contemporary palate finishes the glass. Both are defensible, and the difference between them is about five millilitres.
Make it at home
The Spirit
GinA 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.
More to explore
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the Pegu Club use two kinds of bitters?
Can I use triple sec instead of orange curacao?
What was the original Pegu Club?
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