Pegu Club

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.

Frequently Asked Questions