Ginger Cocktails - Bushwalking Style

(To jump straight to the recipes, go to Gem Gin Mule and Black Gingerberry Smash)
In honour of the Australian Mountaineering Club’s new ginger president (the first ginger president the club has seen this millennium), the recent Cocktails on the Castle event had a red theme. This meant finding red clothing for the cocktail party outfits, and preferably finding some form of red/ginger theme for the food and drinks. For a full description of this mildly absurd and thoroughly brilliant club tradition, see the Words and Wilds blog entries about the last two that have been held (The Heatwave Edition and The Red Promenade) and Hills to Hoists’ comic post about November's trip.

In a car group with two people who both had functioning ovens (mine is presently undergoing repairs) and plans to make various dishes for the main courses to be served atop the Castle, I turned my attention to making ginger-themed cocktails instead. There’s no lack of cocktails featuring ginger in one form or another, but I had further restrictions to place on them. They had to suit the drink preferences of said ginger El Presidente (a balance of sweet with sour citrus - no great challenge), and be something that could be made en mass atop a mountain in the middle of a national park after its ingredients had been dragged up its slopes in a heatwave. Much trickier.

Gem Gin Mule

Original Gin Gin Mule recipe, pre-modification

Inspired by a Gin Gin Mule I had tried at Molly in Canberra, I tried to adapt this rather delightful cocktail to the outdoors. Muddling mint was possible, but impractical if I wanted to both provide cocktails for more glasses than mine and do more during the evening than crush mint leaves. The ginger beer was another problem. Glass bottles and bush-walking don’t mix, so I was decanting everything into plastic. Commercial ginger beer that’s already in plastic is readily available, but has no discernible trace of ginger even without being mixed. Decanted ginger beer rapidly loses its appeal as the fizz fades away. So I crushed mint leaves back in Canberra and left them to steep in sugar syrup.  The evening before we left, I passed the syrup through a pourover coffee filter and chilled it to survive the following day’s walk in the heat. For the ginger flavour, I delved back into my early university memories of drinking with the Tasmanian University White Water Rafting Club, and withdrew a bottle of Stones Green Ginger Wine. Unlike ginger beer, it doesn’t change flavour when decanted and shaken in a pack at 30+ degrees for a day. It also has one of the strongest ginger flavours that you can find in a commercial beverage. A drop of red food colouring in the gin to reinforce the reference to the party’s theme, some fresh limes (there’s just no substitute worth using) and I had one seriously tasty cocktail ready to go, the newly dubbed Gem Gin Mule in homage of the Stones at its core.

Black Gingerberry Smash

Original Ginger Smash recipe, pre-modification

Of course, one cocktail hardly seemed adequate. I searched further, and found another promising recipe, just waiting to be adapted to an absurd bushwalk. The Ginger Smash (or at least one version of it, for there are many) is another cocktail requiring plenty of muddling, but testing a few days before we left showed that preparing a second syrup and steeping slices of crushed fresh ginger made an excellent substitute. The original recipe also called for cranberries, which (while providing a nice red shade to the finished drink) were not exactly optimal for bushwalking. I tried swapping them out for a splash of Chambord Black Raspberry liqueur, in part because I had a bottle just begging to be used, and found it a satisfactory replacement. Cider was easy to use without substitution; unlike ginger beer, there are a few good ciders available in cans. The resulting combination proved to have a most pleasing flavour, that was entirely different from the Gem Gin Mule in spite of them both being gin-based ginger and citrus cocktails. Ideal.