The Story Behind The Pendennis Club Cocktail

While we don’t often think of Kentucky as a hotbed of cocktail creation, things were a bit different in the late 1800s. Well, at least at Louisville’s Pendennis Club. Though it has been falsely attributed as being the birthplace of the Old Fashioned, many now forgotten cocktails were indeed invented at the historic social club, with just one surviving through the ages. The drink is the aptly named Pendennis Club Cocktail: a tart, tangy mix of gin, apricot brandy, lime juice, and Peychaud’s bitters.

The Pendennis Club itself was founded in 1881 and named after Arthur Pendennis, the gentlemanly protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1850 novel “History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy.” Since its inception, the private social club has served as the grounds for countless parties, dinners, and even occasional boxing matches. While the club relocated to a larger, more stately clubhouse about a block away from its original location in late 1928, it’s still in operation to this day. Sadly, on-site boxing is now a thing of the past.

As for the club’s namesake cocktail, we don’t know exactly who invented it, but we can surmise that it was created in or before 1908, given that the drink made its in-print debut in William T. Boothby’s 1908 cocktail book “The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them.” The first rendition of the drink was a shaken blend of Coates Plymouth Gin, apricot brandy, and dry vermouth, but that changed — for the better, in most people’s opinion — when it resurfaced in Charles H. Baker’s 1939 cocktail guide “The Gentleman’s Companion” under the name “The Pendennis Club’s Famous Special.” There, we see the vermouth replaced by Peychaud’s bitters and either lime or lemon juice. Baker also advises stirring the drink and making the curious addition of two kumquat halves to the bottom of the serving glass. Some sources claim that this version was created by the club’s former superintendent, Louis Herring, as the cocktail appears as such sans bitters and kumquats in a 1911 cocktail book with his signature at the bottom of the page, but there is no definitive documentation of its invention.

Over the following decades, the drink appeared time and time again in numerous cocktail books, even as recently as 2009 when Ted Haigh featured it in his book “Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails.” That particular inclusion brought it to the attention of bartenders during the modern cocktail renaissance, who in turn gave the original spec a makeover. The folks at Death & Co. had a Pendennis Club Cocktail on their menu that brought peach brandy and simple syrup into the mix, and bartender Toby Cecchini put another riff on the menu at Brooklyn’s Long Island Bar, dubbed “The Improved Pendennis Club Cocktail.”

For the recipe below, we opted for Haigh’s 2009 spec, mainly due to the fact that it was among the first Pendennis Club recipes to offer precise measurements. Since the cocktail contains fresh lime juice, shaking is now the preferred preparation. In terms of the apricot brandy, know that there are essentially two routes to take: a sweetened apricot liqueur that may or may not contain a brandy base, or an apricot eau de vie, which is a colorless fruit brandy. While the former should pack enough sweetness to hold its own, an eau de vie might run a tad dry, so feel free to add some simple syrup to balance out the cocktail. Alternatively, you could do as Cecchini does and use a blend of the two to get the best of both worlds.