Drink Like A Character: Champagne Cocktail Recipe

Now I know that’s not a scene from The Big Sleep but it’s one of my favorites from The Godfather Part II and he mentions champagne cocktails so there ya go.

Chandler liked his Gimlet’s but Marlowe’s client General Sternwood reminiscences of his champagne cocktails while in a hot house wearing a wool blanket in the Southern California heat. In response to Philip Marlowe taking his brandy “any way at all,” Sternwood says:

“I used to like mine with champagne. The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about a third of a glass of brandy beneath it.”

So we did just that.

Ingredients

2 parts Brandy
Top with Champagne

Instructions

Chill champagne until it gets as cold as “Valley Forge.” Add 2 shots of brandy into a frosty champagne flute. Top with champagne

Thoughts:
This is what a Mimosa should be. Forget that orange juice shit, if you’re mixing anything with champagne make it booze. And while you’re at it make it a classy booze like brandy. General Sternwood was a captain of industry and he drank like one (in his youth, by the time Marlowe talks to him just smelling brandy would fuck him up).

This, kind of tastes like cold, watered down brandy to be honest. Which is why I bring you a better tasting cocktail:

Audrey Hepburn Champagne Cocktail

When you order a Champagne Cocktail, this is what you’re going to get (and should, it’s better). This recipe was in the original 1862 edition of How to Mix Drinks by Jerry Thomas. It’s also in Speakeasies of 1932 as the drink of choice of Harry at the Club Napoleon at 33 West 56th Street.

They say it was Audrey Hepburn’s drink of choice, it was also in Truman Capote’s novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the movie it’s based off of (starring Audrey). Here’s how you make it:

Ingredients