Pimm's Cup

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Pimm's Cup with a bottle of Pimm's No. 1
Pimm's Cup in a long drink glass

Pimm's Cup or Pimm's No. 1 Cup (also just called Pimm’s or No. 1 Cup for short ) is a comparatively slightly alcoholic, carbonated cocktail made from the Pimm’s No. 1 liqueur and usually lavishly decorated with herbs and fruits . 1 or a self-made similar approach as a raw material and lemonade . Because of its size, the drink belongs to the long drinks and is also a highball . The cocktail is particularly popular in Great Britain , where it is part of everyday culture as a typical summer drink. It tastes refreshing and herbaceous-tart with a slightly bitter note.

history

The cocktail is said to go back to James Pimm (1798–1873), a farmer's son who, however, enjoyed a higher education and settled in Lombard Street in London in 1823 or 1824 to act as a "shellfish monger" with oysters . He later opened a store nearby (No. 3 Poultry) called Pimm's Oyster Warehouse. There he served, for the first time around 1840, a House Cup, a mixed drink based on gin , to accompany the oysters , the forerunner of today's liqueur Pimm's No. 1.

However, the origin legend has been questioned on various occasions, in fact the drink goes back to Pimm's successor Samel Morey, who named it after the namesake of his business, which is now called Pimm's Oyster Bar . Morey had been licensed to trade alcohol since 1860. At the time, it was not uncommon for traders to serve homemade spirits to mix with liqueurs and juices and to refer to the jugs or mugs in which they were sold as "cups". In the specialist literature of the 19th century, cups formed a large group among the mixed drinks common at the time. Dale DeGroff , who speaks of the time around 1840 in this context, sees a gin sling in the concentrate of the Pimm's Cup , and since the drink was spiced with herbal extracts - possibly with the first cocktail bitters imported to England - he could even matched a bittered sling . As such, namely a mixture of spirit, water, sugar and bitters, the then new word "cocktail" was defined in the United States in 1806 . The year 1859 is mentioned again and again as the start of sales for the Pimm's Cup . In any case, Pimm's Restaurant changed hands several times in the following years until the wine merchant, restaurateur and politician Horatio David Davies bought it. Horatio Davies was later admitted to the nobility , was a Member of Parliament and, in 1897, Mayor of London . In addition to other restaurants that he took over, he also founded four other Pimm's branches. It is not certain when the Pimm's Cup was also sold outside of his company's stores, but it is certain that the original product Pimm's No. 1 gin and was refined with various herbs and spices, including quinine , which is also found in tonic water . Towards the end of the 19th century, ice was also used in the preparation of mixed drinks in England.

In 1906 Sir Horatio Davies converted Pimm’s into a private company (a kind of corporation) and began to market Pimm’s on a large scale. The original Pimm's No. 1 was changed to Pimm's No. 2 (with whiskey ) and Pimm's No. 3 (with brandy ) and was soon known throughout the United Kingdom and beyond in the British Empire. Horatio Davies died in 1912, but his company was controlled by a family trust for 57 years after his death. In the 1920s in particular, Pimm's flourished and was also internationally successful, for example in the United States and Canada: David Embury mentioned the varieties Pimm's No. in the 1958 edition of his standard work The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, first published in 1948 . 1, No. 2 and No. 3. To serve the cups, a piece of lemon and a piece of cucumber peel were placed in a tall glass, filled with ice, added the desired liqueur and topped up with lemonade ("lemon soda or Tom Collins Mix"). After the Second World War , the Pimm's Cups were supplemented by other varieties, of which today (2015) only the version with vodka (No. 6) is offered.

The Pimm's (No. 1) Cup has been offered at the Wimbledon Championships tennis tournament since 1971 and is now consumed in large quantities: 230,000 servings were sold during the tournament in 2010. For this purpose, the manufacturer Diageo offered a ready-made preparation with an alcohol content of 5.6% vol. was slightly lower than the 6.5% that would result arithmetically with the recommended mixing ratio of 1: 3 of the liqueur (25% vol.) to lemonade. Further dilution, for example with melt water, led to an alcohol content of only 2.5% vol in some of the Pimm's Cups tested. and a taste “like a soft drink ”.

Preparation and variations

Decoration with different fruits, cucumber and mint

A Pimm's Cup is a typical high ball from only two ingredients: the Pimm's liqueur (today usually one Pimm's No. ) and carbonated lemon lemonade (recommended usually 7 Up or home-made lemonade). Alternatively, the cup can also be prepared with ginger ale (ginger lemonade); a variant that occurs mainly outside of England, but is sometimes seen as "boring". Liqueur and lemonade are usually mixed in a ratio of 1: 2 or 1: 3, the manufacturer's recommended mixing ratio. The cocktail is mixed directly in a highball or long drink glass (so technically “built”) by filling the glass with ice cubes , adding the liqueur, lemonade and various seasonal fruits and herbs and stirring. Which these are depends on the source, for example "lemon and cucumber peel", "cucumber and apple", "cucumber peel or borage , citrus fruits, berries, apples, mint "; the manufacturer Diageo calls it "mint, orange slices, cucumber, strawberries".

The variant with champagne instead of lemonade is called Pimm's Royal Cup . The PDT Cocktail Book recommends another variant of the Pimms Cup ( sic! ), In which 2 cucumber slices are crushed with 1.5  cl sugar syrup in the cocktail shaker , with 6 cl Pimm's No. 1 and 2.25 cl lemon juice are topped up, shaken with ice cubes, strained over fresh ice cubes in a pre-chilled Collins glass and finally topped up with 3 cl ginger ale, garnished with another slice of cucumber.

Instead of the liqueur, a self-made mixture can be used as the base of the cocktail, for example from gin , red vermouth , dry vermouth, Triple Sec Curaçao and orange bitters . For your own summer cup, the bartender Gabriel Daun recommends experimenting with “various blends of gin, sloe gin , fortified wines (vermouth and tawny port are particularly good here) and possibly a dash of dry curacao and aromatic bitters ” and to fill up with one Ginger flavored lemonade instead of ginger ale .

Since the Pimm's Cup is a signature drink of the trademarked liqueur Pimm’s , mixtures prepared without this liqueur may not be sold using the “Pimm's” brand .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Simon Difford: Cocktails # 10. Odd Firm of Sin (self-published), London 2012, ISBN 978-0-9556276-2-0 , p. 375.
  2. ↑ See William Terrington: Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks. Collection of Recipes for 'Cups' and Other Compound Drinks. George Routledge and Sons, London and New York 1869; on the importance of cups in particular p. 156 f.
  3. ↑ a b Dale DeGroff : The Essential Cocktail. Clarkson Potter, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-307-40573-9 , pp. 162f.
  4. ↑ a b Helmut Adam, Jens Hasenbein, Bastian Heuser: Cocktailian. The manual of the bar. Tre Torri, Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 978-3-941641-41-9 , p. 251.
  5. ↑ a b c Kelly Magyarics: Pimm's Cup: the Wimbledon Cocktail. In: winemag.com. Retrieved July 4, 2015 .
  6. ^ A b David A. Embury: The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. Reprint of 3rd edition (1958) with new forewords by Robert Hess and Audrey Saunders. 2nd Edition. Mud Puddle Books, New York 2009, ISBN 978-1-60311-164-5 (English), p. 315.
  7. ↑ The sacred lawn (infographic). (PDF, 951 kB) In: zeit.de . Retrieved July 5, 2015 .
  8. ↑ Adam Withnall: Pimm's at Wimbledon costs £ 8 but served at 'a third' of recommended strength and 'tastes like a soft drink'. In: independent.co.uk. June 29, 2014, accessed July 4, 2015 .
  9. ↑ Marco Beier: Pimm's Cup. Made for every summer. In: mixology.eu. June 18, 2013, accessed July 5, 2015 .
  10. ↑ Please, what's Pimm's? In: welt.de (ICON special supplement). October 25, 2007, accessed July 5, 2015 .
  11. ↑ a b Pimm’s original recipe on the manufacturer's marketing website, accessed on July 3, 2015.
  12. ^ Charles Schumann : Schumann's Bar. Collection Rolf Heyne, Munich 2011 (1st edition), ISBN 978-3-89910-416-5 , p. 157.
  13. ↑ Jim Meehan, Chris Gall: The PDT Cocktail Book. Sterling Epicur, New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-4027-7923-7 , p. 207. German edition: The secret cocktail book. Gestalten Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-89955-436-6 .
  14. ↑ Darcy O'Neil: Pimm's Cheater Recipe. In: artofdrink.com. October 2, 2010, accessed July 10, 2017 .
  15. ↑ Gabriel down: Beer service . Mixology 3/2017, p. 58.