The Spirits: vegetable cocktails go hardcore

Richard Godwin eschews a dry January in favour of mixing up vegetable cocktails with bite
p45 Richard Godwin for cocktail column Pic: Graham Jepson
Graham Jepson
2 January 2014

The British Dietetic Association has compiled the worst celebrity detox trends of 2014. If you’re living the life of a breatharian à la Michelle Pfeiffer, you are an idiot. Then again, I suspect you’re not on the breatharian diet, otherwise you would be inhaling this newspaper not reading it. You’d also be dead.

Still, your double NYE hangover plus the memory of Christmaggedon may persuade you that January is best approached free of alcohol. I tried it last year and found it bracing for a couple of days. Certainly, if your alcohol intake consists of 10 or 12 Jägerbombs a weekend, you should reconsider not only your diet but your life in general.

But alcohol, in sensible quantities, has many positive benefits, not least preventing heart disease. There is no point having a dry January only to binge in February. Far better simply to drink better forms of alcohol all year round.

You could do a lot worse than inhaling a glass of Kamm & Sons each day, in the manner of its creator Alex Kammerling. It is a bitter ginseng liqueur, consisting of a medicine cabinet of additional ingredients “believed to boost energy, lower blood sugar and cholesterol levels and promote relaxation”. There is a lot of ambiguity “believed to” but that’s honesty compared to the diet industry. Moreover, I have subjected the “promote relaxation” part to rigorous lab tests and find it to be sound.

There is a range of Kamm & Sons five-a-day cocktails available at the Botanist in Sloane Square (as well as the Chiswell Street Dining Rooms and One Canada Square). The Green Twist consists of juiced spinach, spirulina, Kamm & Sons and celery; the Beetroot Mary, a twist on the Bloody Mary only with beetroot in place of tomato juice, is delicious. All are £8.50.

These healthful potations provide a gateway into the world of vegetable cocktails. After experimenting with a juicer, I’ve found kale juice is much better with a tot of Chartreuse. Bourbon has an affinity with sweet potatoes and pumpkins. I developed a pash for cucumbers — better if you remove the skin with a peeler before juicing. Drawing inspiration from the New Rose I recently sipped at the Coal Vaults, I mixed half and half gin and cucumber juice, added a whisper of Noilly Prat and a couple of drops of the Bitter Truth’s Celery Bitters to make a sort of Detox Martini. Garnish with a wally.

I have also been fooling around with Cynar, an Italian cousin of Campari only with artichoke as one of its main constituents. You can just about detect that vegetable note, along with lovely bitter cacao, orange peel, clove... good healthy stuff. Mix it with fresh blood orange and it’s practically a superfood.

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