Glasgow Cocktail Awards: Roobarb & Custard at the Absent Ear

National World - LocalTV

Ahead of the Glasgow Cocktail Awards 2025 in February we visited Van Gogh themed speakeasy the Absent Ear to learn what goes into a Roobarb & Custard cocktail.

Transcript

00:00Hi, my name's Liam, I'm the General Manager of The Absent Ear.

00:02I'm going to make a cocktail today, I am not going to take credit for it because I did not come up with it.

00:07So we're going to say the Royal We made it.

00:09This is the Rhubarb and Custard drink by Ari Smith, who is our Assistant General Manager here.

00:14To my left we've got the artwork that kind of inspired the drink, which is a little excerpt

00:19from Picture Post magazine, which was a US-based magazine in the 1940s.

00:23And the drink itself is kind of based on like an old kind of candy shop

00:26Rhubarb and Custard boiled sweet, so we tried to kind of break down that recipe and

00:30make a sort of texturally experienced drink with that as well.

00:33And what we have as the base of our cocktail is Hendrick's Grand Cabaret,

00:38which is a nice kind of towards the sweet side of gin.

00:41It's got a lot of kind of stone fruit, passion fruit flavours that combine

00:44really well with everything else in the drink.

00:46I'm going to use a nice healthy 30 mils, because who likes a single measure?

00:52We have a couple of different modifiers in this as well.

00:55The first we have is Rancancan, which is a peach aperitif wine from France.

01:00I'm sure that was a terrible pronunciation of it, but nonetheless.

01:03It's also got quinine in it, which has got a nice kind of bitter kind of tonic-esque

01:08flavour to it.

01:08That's a nice modifier for the drink.

01:10We have Zucca, rhubarb, which is an Italian liqueur, a bitter liqueur with rhubarb as the

01:16base of it, which gives you a nice kind of robust rhubarb flavour as opposed to

01:20all the kind of sweet rhubarb flavours that are also going to be in the drink

01:23and gives it a bit more kind of character to that rhubarb flavour and the texture of

01:27it as well.

01:28And we have Bartender Cellotape, which is a liqueur de Coquelicot.

01:33It's a French liqueur, again, that's meant to taste like kind of poppy seed liqueur,

01:38like these old sweets, I think they're called poppy drops, that were quite a

01:41delicacy in France at some point as well.

01:43So we use that as another sweetening agent.

01:45And we have a stewed rhubarb cordial that we also make with lactic acid, malic acid

01:50and a little bit of Dutch forest rhubarb that's stewed for two days in it as well.

01:54And what we do is we combine all that into a bottle, batch it so all the flavours mellow

01:57together and we add 55 mils of our batch, which is about that much.

02:03We stir it down with ice.

02:11This is from our new menu that we just launched six weeks ago,

02:16which has 14 new art-inspired drinks, which you will find at The Absent Ear.

02:21And this is definitely the most popular drink so far,

02:24because of the accoutrements you will soon see next to the drink.

02:32So we stir this for about 40-ish seconds, make sure it's nice and chilled on the outside.

02:39Make sure the flavours have combined.

02:41Give it a little strain into our old thrifted Sunday glasses.

02:44These are just from our charity shop.

02:47But we really like them and we found quite a lot of them, so they're very useful.

02:53Give it a nice little stripey straw to take you back to the gory days.

02:58And then top it up with our vegan vanilla custard cream foam,

03:01which is an oat cream base, vegan custard and a little bit of nitrogen as the air.

03:11A little bit of sprinkles on top.

03:13Hundreds and thousands.

03:16Can never be too liberal with these.

03:19There we go.

03:19Nice messy ingredient for your bar.

03:22Finally finished with a wee 10p mix-up on the side as well.

03:26Hence why it's so popular.

03:27That's the rhubarb and custard from The Absent Ear.

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