Julie Reiner’s Clover Club

Julie Reiner, Clover Club | Brooklyn, NY

clover club cocktail

The Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia was the fashionable, see-and-be-seen hotel of the late 1800s. Like the Friars’ Club or the Algonquin Round Table of its era, the establishment hosted The Clover Club, an all-male salon of lawyers and writers—including the likes of William Butler Yeats—until World War I. The cocktail didn’t appear until later in the Club’s history and eventually fell out of fashion, most likely due to the use of egg white and feminine associations with raspberry. But like many of the pre-Prohibition stalwarts, it was rediscovered as part of the classic arsenal, and made immortal by Julie Reiner’s Brooklyn cocktail bar of the same name.

Ingredients

Serving: 1

  • 1 1/2 ounces gin (preferably Plymouth)
  • 1 1/2 ounces gin (preferably Plymouth)
  • 1/2 ounce dry vermouth (preferably Dolin)
  • 1/2 ounce dry vermouth (preferably Dolin)
  • 1/2 ounce lemon juice
  • 1/2 ounce lemon juice
  • 1/2 ounce raspberry syrup (see Editor's Note)
  • 1/2 ounce raspberry syrup (see Editor's Note)
  • 1/4 ounce egg white
  • 1/4 ounce egg white

Garnish: 2 or 3 raspberries

Directions
  1. Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice.
  2. Shake until chilled and strain.
  3. Add the drink back to the tin and shake again, without ice.
  4. Pour the drink into a chilled cocktail glass.
  5. Garnish with skewered raspberries.
Editor's Note

Raspberry Syrup:
1/2 cup fresh raspberries
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 ounce vodka

Smash the raspberries and mix thoroughly with the sugar. Allow them to macerate for 30 minutes. Heat the water to warm (not hot), pour over the fruit mixture and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Strain the mixture through a chinois and fortify with the vodka.

Alternatively, the cocktail can be made by replacing the half ounce of raspberry syrup with a half ounce of simple syrup (1 part sugar to one part water) muddled with 3 to 4 fresh raspberries directly in the shaker.