West Eleven is a new range of ready-made cocktails, but these are no ordinary RTDs. Each flavour has been designed by pioneering London bartender Ben Reed and crafted using top-quality fresh ingredients (and no nasty E-numbers) with perfection in mind.
Banish all thoughts of Breezers, take your Two Dogs for a long walk off a short pier and buckle up for a bigtime taste sensation - you are now in West Eleven. Just remember: cocktails as cool as this should be kept that way - always with ice.
West Eleven - in their own words:
With cheesy disco drinks a thing of the past and dressing garish blue cocktails with sparklers a distant memory, people are waking up to the fact that the cocktail is not just a means to an end. It certainly doesn't belong solely on your best friend's hen night or during the first week at the Freshers' week.
The cocktail has recently been going from strength to strength. After a period in the doldrums during the '80s it has found its feet again and since the Millennium the mixed drink is back, it's here to stay and it's a little more grown up this time.
With cocktail bartenders looking to chefs and sommeliers to understand flavour, balance and depth of taste, today's cocktail is infinitely more refined than that of yesteryear. But away from style bars or five star hotels where do your get hands on one of these delights? We tried, couldn't and decided we wouldn't (ever again).
And then we thought, "if a jobs worth doing its worth doing yourself!"
First thing we did was recruit one of the most respected drink-smiths in the business. Ben Reed was a name that immediately jumped out at us with almost 20 years service in London’s mixology circuit, a cluster of books and a Times newspaper column to his name. As the manager of London’s first celebrity, hotel and members Bar - the Met bar in the '90s, he was at the forefront of the cocktail revolution and has been blazing trails there ever since.
Ben has come up with a cocktail range to die for.
‘We were aware of a couple of issues when deciding which cocktails to include. While cocktails have become more mainstream and accepted by a wider demographic of drinker over the years, there is still a tendency for the consumer to relate to a cheesier style of mixed drink. We wanted to avoid drinks like “Sex on the Beach” or “Slippery Nipple” and opt instead for a more credible, grown up cocktail. So we selected classic styles of cocktails and tweaked them to add a modern twist.
‘My main issue was one of compromise: I didn’t want to make any!’
We knew we would have to source the finest, freshest and perhaps crucially the most authentic ingredients if we were going to call these drinks “real cocktails in a bottle”
Elderflower Collins
The Collins was invented in the late 1800s by a gentleman whose surname was, you guessed it, Collins. It was originally invented as a refreshing drink that could be consumed in greater quantity without getting too drunk. Unlike many drinks of that era that were incredibly strong and often contained nothing but alcohol, this drink was served long and called for soda water to lengthen and lighten its potency.
We chose to use 100% grain vodka in this recipe despite the fact that the original recipe called for gin (the original name of Tom Collins was given to the drink as the recipe called for a particular style of gin called Old Tom – a gin that was heavily laced with sugar to mask its unrefined taste). This we mixed with exact proportions of lemon and sugar to balance the drink perfectly.
We wanted to add a British twist to this drink and maintain a refreshing summery element so chose elderflower, and set about tasting as many variations as we could from organic cordials to presses. Our final recipe uses natural elderflower extract. The result is a drink that I personally would choose over a Pimms on any summer’s day!
Passionfruit Mai Tai
The Mai Tai was invented in the 1930s in California by one of two men depending on whom you believe. Whether it was Don the Beachcomber, or Trader Vic, one thing is for certain, its name (Maita'i roa) means “out of this world” in Tahitian.
This drink was the flagship of a cocktail era that started in the 30s and lasted well into the 70s (where all things cool died a death!) until its re-emergence in the Millennium. The Tiki style of cocktail involves rums from all across the Caribbean and the South Pacific mixed with tropical juices and served in elaborate glasses often adorned with the faces of the Tiki gods.
With a special blend of heavy Jamaican and Guyanese rums as a base we needed to give this exotic potion a twist with a flavour that wouldn’t feel intimidated by such a big hitter and passionfruit seemed the obvious choice with its tangy freshness, which combined beautifully with the more-ish sweet almond syrup. And so the Passionfruit Mai Tai was born.
Classic Mojito
The Mojito is the most popular cocktail in the UK at the moment with bartenders in bars, pubs and restaurants across the country muddling mint furiously to keep up with demand.
Would we be able to recreate that fresh mint taste in a bottle? We spent three days in our bar dabbling with flavours and the short answer to that question was, simply, yes! We infused fresh garden mint into sugar syrup by heating it gently, then soured that by adding fresh lime juice and lengthened with soda water.
The only problem we had facing us now was the rum. The Mojito calls for Cuban rum but Cuban rum is notoriously difficult to get hold of in large volumes as the Cuban government knows when it’s got something a bit tasty on its hands and generally doesn’t want to share or play nicely. So once again we had to blend our own rum using a mix of Cuban rum (our blenders, gawd bless ‘em, let us use some slightly aged rum they’d somehow managed to get their hands on and put away for a rainy day) and Cuban style rums. The result is something, we have to say while patting ourselves on the back, we're quite proud of.
Pomegranate Cosmo
The Cosmopolitan has long been a favourite of female cocktail drinkers since it sprung into the public consciousness courtesy of those martini-drinking women in Sex and the City.
We wanted to create a variation on this drink while retaining its refreshing properties. Pomegranate juice comes in many formats often quite heavily tampered with by the juice creators so we went back to basics.
We wanted to create a juice that was as close to the true flavour of the fruit without additives. By substituting the cranberry in the original Cosmo for our pomegranate we updated this classic with a beautifully dry more-ish twist.
