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COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK: BLACKWATER Nº 5 FOUR LEAF CLOVER SPRITZ
Mar 12, 2015
Below is an excerpt from GINNED! Magazine about Blackwater Distillery's Nº 5 London Dry Gin. Every month, Craft Gin Club members receive a bottle of amazing small-batch gins accompanied by GINNED! Magazine which is full of features about the gin, the distillery and loads of fascinating features.
Feeling down on your luck? Blackwater’s Gin Spritz cocktail can reverse your fortunes! Just replace the mint leaves the recipe calls for with the leaves of the Irish good luck charm, the four-leaf clover.
The tradition of the four-leaf clover bringing luck dates back centuries. Legend has it that Eve left the Garden of Eden carrying one. Druids in Ireland made use of them for protection from evil spirits and to ward off bad luck. Children in Medieval times carried them in the hopes of finding fairies.
In modern times, the legends continued with American big bandleader, Art Mooney, who propagated the myth of four-leaf fortune through song. Mooney made his name in the late 1940s and 1950s by rehashing songs the public already knew, recording them and selling them in the millions of copies, one of those being his 1948 hit “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover”. With the song, Mooney caught a green wave of luck that began swelling 21 years prior when the song was composed. A trite love song, however cute, brought the singer plenty of fame which persisted through the years into the 1980s when he was still playing shows in Vegas.
Mooney’s “Four Leaf Clover” became so quickly ingrained in popular culture that he scored the ultimate accolade of the time: immortalization in animation.
The producers behind the Merrie Melodies series of cartoons had a soft spot for the singalong. It was whistled by their characters like Bugs Bunny to build up tension for the next amusing pratfall and as the soundtrack for those animated shorts in which the penciled personalities left the storytelling to their antics, the most well known of these being Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner.
“I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover” features in the series’ 1949 debut, Fast and Furry-ous, which paved the way for forty-eight follow up cartoons. For the skit’s popularity, its Merrie Melody producers were certainly lucky. But their antagonist Coyote, not so much. The less-than-wily canine is always hysterically outsmarted by his speedier - and smarter - cuckoo rival. Beep! Beep!
Blackwater Nº 5 Four Leaf Clover Spritz
Juice of one lime
4 to 6 mint leaves
1 tablespoon sugar
35ml shot gin
Prosecco
Muddle the lime, mint, and sugar together. Transfer to a cocktail shaker with ice and the gin. Shake until chilled. Pour into chilled wine glass and top up with Prosecco
Food pairing: Apple Walnut and Raisin Salad
