Day 15: Good King Wenceslas

The carol for today's cocktail is Good King Wenceslas. The lyrics tell the story of the 10th century Duke of Bohemia, Saint Wenceslas I.  Legend has it that he rose at night from his bed to bestow alms on widows, orphans, prisoners and others afflicted with various difficulties.

While the lyrics were written by an Englishman (John Mason Neale), the tune is based on an old Finnish spring carol, Tempus adest floridum ("The time is near for flowering"). Consequently, we wanted the cocktail to reflect Finnish culture in some way. There is a traditional liqueur made in Finland using cloudberries (called bakeapple or knotberry in other countries) so we decided to use that as the cornerstone of the cocktail.

Unfortunately, the Finnish liqueur is nearly impossible to get in North America. Luckily for us, a Quebec company makes its own version of a cloudberry liqueur using cloudberries (there called bakeapple) from Newfoundland. Even more lucky for us, Kate has a contact in Quebec who generously shipped a bottle to us (because BC Liquor stores don't stock it - what up with that, BC Liquor?!). So thank you very much, Michelle Sullivan! We couldn't have done this without you.

We want to keep as much of the cloudberry flavour in the drink as possible, so we riffed on a French 75.

Good King Wenceslas Cocktail
1 oz gin (we used Hendricks)
1 oz cloudberry liqueur
1/2 oz peppercorn simple syrup
champagne, prosecco or other sparkling wine
Bittered Sling Denman Bitters
champagne flute

Place the gin, cloudberry liqueur, simple syrup and bitters into a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until chilled. Fill the flute half way with champagne. Strain the contents of the shaker into the flute.

Cocktail Notes
We used Hendricks gin because we thought the floral nature of the gin would pair well with the cloudberry. The peppercorn syrup (mostly pink with some black thrown in) added a nice spiciness.

We tried two different bitters in this cocktail, Dillion's DSB & Bittered Sling Denman. Both worked well but the Denman enhanced the cloudberry the best.

Listen Along

Comments

[Michelle]

Yay! Glad it got there safely.
Thanks for the recipe - I'll try it myself!

[Kate]

Thanks again for sending it! The taste is very interesting. I understand why Newfoundlanders call it "bakeapple". Nice, subtle apple flavour. With just a hint of "je ne sais quois" :)