Singapore Sling

What to expect

Taste

Sweet and sour together at the front, then unexpectedly herbal underneath. Pineapple leads — sweet, tart, faintly resinous, with the odd savoury edge fresh pineapple has and tinned does not — and the lime sharpens it. Cherry brandy comes next and is the flavour most people identify the drink by: dark, almost almondy stone-fruit sweetness. Then the drink does something no other fruit cocktail does, which is that Benedictine arrives underneath everything with honey, saffron, angelica and a whole cupboard of herbs, and turns what should be a holiday drink into something with a spine. Gin's juniper threads through it. The grenadine contributes colour and a little sweetness and, if it is real pomegranate, a slight astringency. The finish is longer and drier than the opening promises.

Aroma

Pineapple first and by a distance, and it smells sweeter than the drink tastes. Under it, cherry and a faint marzipan note from the cherry brandy, then the Benedictine's herbs, which are what make the glass smell more complicated than a fruit drink should. Angostura sits on top of all of it — a single dash, clove and cinnamon, doing exactly what it does on a whisky sour. Fresh lime oil if any got in from the squeezer.

Texture

Fuller-bodied than any other drink on this site, and it is the pineapple doing it. Fresh juice carries pulp and enough natural sugar and protein to give the liquid a genuine weight, and the shaken foam adds a soft top layer. Underneath, the ice keeps it thin and cold. So it drinks light but feels substantial, which is precisely the combination that makes it dangerous.

Sound

A wet, heavy shake — 180ml of liquid against ice sounds duller and slower than a spirit-only drink, more of a slosh than a rattle. Then the strain, then a long clatter as the drink goes over fresh ice. In the glass it keeps making noise for several minutes: ice shifting and settling as it melts, and the foam crackling faintly. It is the noisiest drink here after it has been poured, which is a real difference from a martini's silence.

How the flavour moves

Pineapple and sugar first, then the lime cutting through it about a second later. Cherry in the middle. Then the herbal layer arrives at the back — Benedictine and juniper together — and the finish is where the drink is most interesting: dry, herbal, faintly bitter, and much less sweet than the opening. Over the whole glass the arc is dilution: the first mouthful is the sweetest and the last is the most balanced, so a Singapore Sling drunk slowly genuinely improves.

Serve it

Cold and long-lived. Over a full glass of ice it stays cold for twenty minutes or more and dilutes steadily as it goes, which suits it — the drink starts quite sweet and gets progressively more balanced as the ice melts into it. This is the opposite of most cocktails and it is because the drink was designed for a tropical afternoon, not for a bar counter.

Goes with

Salt, chilli and fried food, which is what it is drunk with in the place it comes from. Satay. Prawn crackers. Salted peanuts. Chilli crab, where the sweetness works against the heat the way a riesling would. Anything from a hawker stall. It also handles spice better than beer does, because the sugar damps capsaicin. Where it fails is with delicate food and with anything sweet, which it makes taste like nothing.

Cook's notes

Difficulty

Easy but fiddly. Nothing in the technique is hard; the difficulty is that the recipe has eight ingredients, four of which are measured in single-figure millilitres, and getting it wrong is a matter of arithmetic rather than skill. Measure everything.

Cost

High to start and low per drink. Benedictine and cherry brandy are both bottles most people do not own and neither is cheap, and between them they account for 22ml of a 220ml drink. Once they are on the shelf they last for years, since almost nothing else uses them.

Equipment

A shaker large enough for 180ml of liquid plus ice, which rules out some smaller cobbler shakers. A jigger with small graduations, because 7ml measures are not something to guess. A citrus squeezer. A tall glass. A strainer.

When to make it

Hot weather, outdoors, mid-afternoon onwards. It is the least wintry drink on the site.

Best season

Pineapples are available all year and are best and cheapest in late winter and spring, which is inconveniently the opposite of when you want to drink this.

You know it is done when

A distinct pale pink foam on top, about a centimetre deep, sitting on a hazy red-orange drink. The colour is the drink's signature and it should be a sunset gradient rather than a flat red — the grenadine sinks slightly and the foam is paler than the body. If there is no foam, the pineapple juice was from a carton and long-life.

And it feels like

The foam should hold a cherry on a stick laid across the surface for a second before it sinks. Thin, disappearing foam means the juice was old or over-processed.

Food safety

Nothing raw and nothing to manage. Worth saying that at 60ml of spirits and liqueurs in a fruit drink, it is considerably stronger than it tastes — this is a drink people have three of.

Where it goes wrong

Long-life pineapple juice, which will not foam and is markedly sweeter, so the drink comes out flat in both senses. Guessing the 7ml measures — Benedictine in particular is powerful and doubling it makes the drink taste of herbal liqueur. Cheap syrupy cherry brandy, which is the main reason people describe this drink as tasting like cough medicine. Using bright red grenadine, which is sugar and colouring. And building it in the glass instead of shaking, which loses the foam entirely.

If it does go wrong

Too sweet: the pineapple juice was tinned and sweetened, or the grenadine is the corn-syrup kind. Add 5ml more lime. No foam: the juice was long-life or over-pasteurised; nothing fixes it in the glass. Tastes medicinal: the cherry brandy is a cheap one, or the Benedictine was over-poured. Watery and dull: not enough ice in the shaker, so it melted rather than chilled, or you topped up with too much juice at the end. Colour is flat red rather than a gradient: it was over-shaken or over-stirred after pouring, which is a cosmetic fault only.

Making it ahead

Everything except the ice can be batched and it works well for a party. Mix the spirits, liqueurs, juices, grenadine and bitters in proportion and keep it cold; shake portions to order with ice, because the foam has to be made at the last minute. The lime is the limiting factor and gives you about a day.

Keeping it

None as a finished drink. See Making it ahead for the batching approach.

Reheating

Not applicable.

Freezing

No.

Leftovers

The rest of the pineapple is the practical leftover. A fresh pineapple yields far more juice than one drink needs, and the surplus keeps a couple of days in the fridge or freezes well in an ice tray.

Scaling it

One at a time in a standard shaker, because 180ml plus ice fills it. For a group, batch as above and shake in single or double portions.

Substitutions

Cherry Heering is the cherry brandy most bars use and is drier and more genuinely cherry-flavoured than the cheap syrupy kinds, which push the drink towards cough medicine. Benedictine has no real substitute — it is a specific herbal liqueur and leaving it out changes the drink's whole middle — but if you must, a very small measure of another herbal liqueur gets you somewhere adjacent. Grenadine should be pomegranate; the bright red corn-syrup kind adds colour and sugar and nothing else, and making your own from pomegranate juice and sugar takes five minutes and improves the drink noticeably.

Dietary swaps

Vegan, dairy-free, nut-free and gluten-free as written, with the usual caveat about grain spirits. Some commercial grenadines contain colourings worth checking.

Shopping for it

Cherry Heering or a comparable proper cherry liqueur rather than a cheap cherry brandy. Benedictine, which is a single specific product. A fresh pineapple, ripe enough to smell sweet at the base. Limes rather than bottled juice. If you cannot find real pomegranate grenadine, make it.

Keeping the cost down

The two expensive bottles are the barrier and there is no way round them if you want the real drink — but both keep indefinitely and a bottle of each covers dozens of drinks, so the cost per glass after the first is low. Make your own grenadine from pomegranate juice and sugar rather than buying it; it takes five minutes, costs less and is much better. Buy a whole pineapple rather than juice, which is cheaper and gives you the foam.

Sustainability

The pineapple is the item with the real footprint, and using the whole fruit — juice for the drink, flesh for the garnish, the rest eaten — is the only meaningful thing to do about it.

Nutrition

Around 290 calories and roughly 2 UK units. It is the most calorific drink in the collection and most of it is fruit sugar rather than alcohol, which is worth knowing given how easily it goes down.

Worth it?

Worth it if you are prepared to buy two bottles you will use for almost nothing else, and genuinely not worth it if you are not, because the versions without Benedictine and a decent cherry liqueur are what gave the drink its poor reputation. Made properly with fresh pineapple juice it is far better than its tourist-bar version and it is one of the few long fruit cocktails with any complexity at all.

Where it comes from

Origin

The Long Bar at Raffles Hotel, Singapore, around 1915, in the usual account.

Also called

Singapore Sling. Earlier and related drinks in the region were simply gin slings, and the 'Singapore' qualifier attaches to this particular elaboration.

Said out loud

As it looks.

What the name means

A sling is a very old category of drink — spirit, sugar, water and a flavouring — that predates the word cocktail in print. The name says where this one was made and what family it belongs to, which is a more honest name than most.

History

The standard account credits Ngiam Tong Boon at Raffles around 1915. What is certain is much less: the hotel did not preserve his recipe, and the version it now serves comes from a 1930s reconstruction assembled from the recollections of people who had drunk it. Gin slings were already being served in Singapore decades earlier — there are references from the 1890s and 1900s — so the category is older than the drink. A widely repeated story holds that the drink was coloured pink so that women, who were not then free to drink alcohol publicly, could appear to be drinking fruit juice. It is told everywhere and there is no contemporary evidence for it; it may well be true and it is not established.

Why it matters

It is one of very few cocktails that functions as a national emblem, and the Long Bar is a tourist destination in large part because of it. That has had a cost: the volume of drinks served there means most are made from a premix, and a great many people's experience of the Singapore Sling is a sweet red drink that bears only a family resemblance to what this recipe makes.

When it is eaten

Hot afternoons and early evenings. It is an outdoor drink and a slow one, and it is a poor choice in a cold room or before a serious meal.

The traditional way

Shaken and served long over ice. The shake matters more than it looks — it is what aerates the pineapple juice, and a Singapore Sling stirred or built in the glass is flat and noticeably duller.

How it changed

Almost beyond recognition, twice. The original is lost; the 1930s reconstruction is what the hotel has served since; and the mid-twentieth century's premixes made the drink much sweeter and much redder than any of the written versions. The modern craft-bar revival has largely gone back to the reconstruction and to fresh pineapple juice, which is the version here.

Regional variations

The hotel's own current recipe, the various published reconstructions, and the many simplified versions that drop the Benedictine or the Cointreau all differ meaningfully. Outside Singapore it is frequently made with cherry brandy, gin and lemonade and nothing else, which is a different drink wearing the name.

How this version differs

It does not differ from the standard reconstruction in its ingredients. Where it is more specific than most is on the pineapple juice — pressed rather than long-life, because that is what makes the foam — and on cutting the grenadine when the juice is tinned and therefore already sweetened.

Sources and credit

The Ngiam Tong Boon attribution is Raffles' own and is universally repeated. The recipe here follows the widely published modern reconstruction rather than any single claimed original.

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