Blink your eyes and six months passes  by without a blog post! It’s time for me to start writing again, and today, on a hot weekend Fall day that feels like summer, I’m thinking of a refreshing cocktail recipe I discovered this summer.

While waiting for my lunch order this summer, I decided to browse the gin selection at Barsha Wines in Manhattan Beach. Last year, I discovered St. George’s Gin there, and I wanted to see if there was anything that looked interesting to try.

I noticed this bottle of Indian Summer Gin. I liked the pretty flower on the bottle – because bottle design is always a way to tell if a gin is good, right? The gin being infused with saffron seemed interesting.

And then I noticed this cocktail recipe attached to the shelf near the bottles. Lemon, mint, ginger beer and gin? Sounds like my kind of cocktail (i.e. not sweet)! I purchased a four-pack of Bundaberg Ginger Beer and headed home to try the drink that night.

Indian Spice Cocktail recipe

After converting the metric measurements to ounces, I put everything together.

The makings of the Indian Spice Cocktail

Bundaberg Ginger Beer from Australia and fresh lemons

Fresh mint in a cocktail – always a good idea!

Dave and I enjoyed the drink, but felt that the club soda masked the tastes of the other ingredients. The next time I made it, I did not use any of the club soda, and we both agreed it was better without it.

The Indian Spice Cocktail with Indian Summer gin

This quickly became our go to summer cocktail. Dave, who is normally content with sparkling water, soon started requesting “that special drink you make,” pretty frequently. So frequently that we polished off this bottle of gin in about a month! A record for us.

After we polished the Bundaberg Ginger Beer, I tried this ginger beer I found in Trader Joe’s. The ginger taste was not as strong, and after a taste test, we decided we liked this beer better for this cocktail. But, if you like a strong ginger taste, Bundaberg might be the one for you.

Trying the cocktail with Trader Joe’s Extra Ginger Beer

Trying the cocktail with Ginger Beer from Trader Joe’s

One night, when we were low on the Indian Summer gin, I made one drink using Indian Summer and the other with another gin. I gave both drinks to Dave to taste in a blind tasting. Like me, he preferred the drink with the Indian Summer gin. Since then I haven’t tried any other gin with this drink – why fiddle with something that is pretty close to the perfect summer drink?

Indian Summer gin infused with saffron

The Indian Spice Cocktail – our new favorite summer drink