Drink responsibly, drink English: Rhubarb, gorse, thyme and corn are the new secret ingredients to a successful cocktail

When one thinks of typical English ingredients, a picture of root vegetables, local catch or native cattle tends to take shape. Apply that same mindset to cocktails and one might think, instead, of elderflower, honey or black treacle.

Today’s mixologists, however, are going off-menu. From east London to Somerset, the modern English cocktail mines from more left-field corners of the terroir. Ingredients such as gorse, Cornish seaweed or even gourmet mushrooms are, increasingly, de rigueur. When did this all happen—and why?

On a rainy February afternoon at Canal, a restaurant in Maida Vale, W9, mixologist Paul Lougrat was asked to serve a low-ABV cocktail to pair with a new bouillabaisse. As the founder of A Bar With Shapes For A Name, E2, an east London institution, Lougrat is used to partnering with restaurants and concocting drinks for special events. This one, however, proved to be an interesting challenge.

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‘We were looking to serve something very crisp and clean,’ he tells me. ‘That was always going to be a martini.’ Without the tang of a vodka, however, how did he plan to give the whole thing a kick? Enter Cornish dulse, a seaweed that boasts a ‘complex and smoky’ flavour, Lougrat explains, ‘counterbalancing the strength of a gin or a vodka’. First, the team combined dulse with an orange wine, ‘to lend the whole thing some tannins’. After leaving the two flavours to combine for 24 hours, they strained the concoction through a coffee filter and added the mixture to the base of Seedlip Grove 42 alcohol-free spirit.

Lougrat notes that such a mixture could work just as well with a proper vodka or gin. One could also serve the cocktail ‘dirty’, adding olive brine to the mix, or use the wine-and-dulce concoction in a separate drink (‘it would pair well with whisky,’ he says). The dulse martini is now served at Club Warehaus, E8, Mr Lougrat’s new outpost down the road from A Bar With Shapes. He and his team are among a growing school of mixologists who are not only mining the terroir, but actively playing around with it.

The Firmdale group — the hotels of which include Ham Yard in London and The Whitby in New York — have found in Kevin Fry a food and beverage manager with a wild imagination. In March, he launched the Nine Regions cocktail menu at London's Soho Hotel, which covers ingredients stretching from the North-East to the South-West. Fry’s personal favourites are the South-East, which blends together Kentish corn whiskey and vermouth, and the South-West, which uses a Cornish rum as a base.

The story of these cocktails is equally a story about the local producers who make their base ingredients. Jon Mills, who crafts award-winning English whiskies at the Foundry in Canterbury, Kent, is one of Fry’s most important partners. ‘A corn whiskey is very unusual for the UK,’ he tells me. ‘What we produce is, effectively, a bourbon, although we can’t call it that because that’s a protected label for those made in the USA.’ His company uses southern English corn and vintage American oak barrels to age the concoction according to traditional methods. This usually lasts for four years; then the results go out to market. ‘We employ about 20 people in total,’ Mills says, ‘and it’s only two people over on brewing and distilling.’

The Foundry’s success belies its size: its very first whiskey, produced as recently as 2023, ended up shortlisted in the World Whisky Finals and a successful restaurant appended to the distillery — seating up to 126 — has cemented the Foundry’s prime position among the Kentish set. Now, the company is growing mushrooms, too, using the spent grain, warm water and residual heat left over from the brewing process. These, Mills tells me, are rich in a highly beneficial compound (I suspect it’s ergothioneine) and can be distilled into drops that can then be added to cocktails, soft drinks or even food. ‘We are looking into how we might be able to grow and licence this at scale,’ he tells me.

The English have been blending drinks together for centuries. Punch became popular in the 17th century as travellers brought spices and citrus home from overseas. The word ‘cocktail’, however, with all its mathematical and alchemical implications, came later. Emerging in the USA in 1806 to describe a mix of spirits, sugar, water and bitters, it evolved to cover a range of more precise concoctions as bartenders across the newly ascendent nation honed their craft and flexed their muscles. Transatlantic travel kickstarted the importation of American culture in the 19th century, accelerating the cocktail’s move to London. The Gin Sling, Mint Julep and John Collins (later Tom Collins) were quick to cement their preferential status among the city’s fashionable elites.

It was 1920s Prohibition, however, that proved the biggest motor. As bartenders fled a hostile environment, Mayfair’s five-star hotels espoused the speakeasy. Cocktail bars gained a mystique that, until then, had eluded them, as presentation and technique improved. Since the Roaring Twenties, cocktail culture has ebbed and flowed. As concerns about provenance have grown in the past decade, so, too, has a cocktail culture rooted in Englishness.

In Cornwall’s Tamar Valley, Sally Harvey (whose great-great-grandfather helped build the Great Western Railway) has found a niche producing cordial from mulled cider apples. ‘The trees they come from have been around for generations,’ she muses, recalling that she began pressing apples in the West Country aged 16. Her cordial ‘works particularly well in the winter months,’ she notes. ‘I use a fairly sharp tannin-based apple juice from the trees, which I then sweeten with spices such as cinnamon, coriander seed, and a bit of orange.’ Today, she supplies both Rick Stein and Fry, who blends her Mulled Apple Cordial together with her Very Berry Cordial and a pineapple and pink grapefruit rum, to make the Soho Hotel’s South-West Cocktail.

Another abundant West Country ingredient is gorse. At The Culpeper, E1, a pub and restaurant in London’s Spitalfields with hotel rooms and an enviable rooftop, the cocktail menu’s pièce-de-résistance is none other than a Gorse Spritz, made with a syrup of the yellow flowers and topped with sparkling wine, sparkling water and an orange-peel twist. Four ice cubes are recommended.

For the most adventurous and original blends, however, one ought to head to Farringdon, EC1. Beside the neighbourhood’s oft-lauded St John, a two-year-old cocktail bar has been making waves ever since it opened. Queues snake down the road as punters vie for a spot and no photographs are permitted inside. What makes Space Talk so special, besides the cultivated mystique, is its cocktail menu. This changes often, founder Ramzi Abou Chalach explains, leaving ample room for experimentation. The bar is also known for serving in-house liquor — in April, it launched its own whiskey.

Yet it’s English ingredients, not Scottish, that they have been exploring recently. Created just in time for Country Life’s English issue, the Rhubarb & Lovage is a thing of alchemical beauty. ‘We started with rhubarb,’ explains Space Talk’s head bartender, José Domínguez, ‘infused in gin for five days, which allowed us to extract its natural acidity and fresh, slightly green character, avoiding heavier, stewed notes. The result was clean, bright and true to the ingredient in its raw form.’

Alongside that, the team used a homemade lovage cordial. ‘This is a classic, but often overlooked English herb,’ Mr Domínguez explains, ‘with a distinctly savoury, almost celery-like profile. We infuse it in water at room temperature to draw out its aromatic qualities and then balance it with sugar and acids to shape it into a bright cordial.’ Bringing everything together are Tio Pepe Fino sherry, ‘for a dry, slightly saline edge’, and a hint of Nonino grappa, which ‘adds body and a soft fruit note in the background’.

Drink responsibly: drink English.

The Rhubarb & Lovage, created for Country Life

(Available until July 10 at Space Talk, Farringdon)

- 35ml Hepple Gin-infused Rhubarb

- 15ml Tapalio Tequila

- 10ml Tio Pepe Fino

- 2.5ml Nonino Grappa

- 15ml Lovage cordial

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.