Carpano’s lush sweetness makes a nice counterpart to the aggressive herbal nature of the Chartreuse. Vermouth: The Bijou is an excellent opportunity to use the vanilla-dominated Carpano Antica vermouth.
The Plymouth seems to blend with Chartreuse better than the more juniper-forward London Dry style gins like Bombay, Beefeater or Tanqueray. Gin: Johnson recommends Plymouth gin in his original listing, and it is a very good choice. Express lemon over the drink optionally, add the lemon twist into the glass. Stir all ingredients with ice until very cold strain into a chilled cocktail stem. (Thomas seems to be completely unaware of vermouth as an ingredient for mixed drinks in his 1862 edition.) Jerry Thomas mentions it once in his 1862 Bartenders Guide, as a component of the “Parisian Pousse Café,” but it seems to have taken a couple more decades for it to become a proper ingredient in cocktails. The Bijou CocktailĬhartreuse already had been available since mid-century, but apparently was not used much. There were plenty of successful experiments, notably the Manhattan, the Martinez, and the Bijou. At the time, “vermouth” meant sweet vermouth-dry vermouth wasn’t available until the 1890s. (The earliest mention of Bijou that I know is Harry Johnson’s 1882 Bartender’s Manual.) Its combination of gin, sweet vermouth, and Chartreuse is a classic mini-lesson in late nineteenth-century cocktailing.Ĭommercial vermouth was a relatively new product to American barmen in the 1870s and 1880s, and they were eager to see what they could make of it.
Take, for example, the Bijou.īijou is one of our oldest cocktails. The combination of gin and dry vermouth is a natural, and it’s so well entrenched in our thinking, thanks to the Martini, that modern cocktails hardly ever pair gin with sweet vermouth.
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