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Gin, shaken

Barbary Coast

Barline Q,Q,Q,Q,c

The code is the shorthand off my printed menu; the Key tab decodes every letter.

Shake hard with ice, then strain.

Coupe.

Open in the menu

Taste

Three-quarters each of gin, Scotch, crème de cacao, and cream, so the two spirits are half the glass and the cream is a quarter of it. Shaken, coupe. Chocolate and smoke over a thin cream body, with juniper coming up behind the whisky.

History

The Barbary Coast is a Prohibition-era drink with no known author. Harry Craddock prints it in The Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930 as equal parts gin, Scotch, crème de cacao, and cream, and Crosby Gaige runs the same drink in his 1941 Cocktail Guide and Ladies' Companion under the name Death and Mr. Morgenthau. The name is San Francisco's: the nine blocks around Pacific Street that worked as a red-light district for sailors from the 1850s until the city shut it down. This menu pours three-quarters of each, shaken, coupe.

Same shape, other bottles

The Fancy family, with the bottle that changed.

This is one drink on my home bar's menu. Tick the bottles you own and the menu lists which of all 185 drinks they pour.