Best cocktails in Glasgow at Gamba
Looking for the best cocktails in Glasgow? Head to Gamba. We don’t just excel at seafood - we also shake a mean cocktail. Our Rose Negroni (pictured), with gin, Campari, Martini Rosso, and Rose adds a gentle sweeter twist to create the perfect summer cocktail.
Gamba cocktail list
With spins on classic recipes and innovative creations, Katie Forrest is Gamba’s go-to cocktail expert, and you can read more about how she helps devise our cocktail list in another blog here. Experimenting with novel techniques and all sorts of ingredients to push the boundaries of flavour and presentation is what Katie does best. This includes Mocktails.
View our cocktail and wine list here.
Let’s look at the history of the cocktail.
Where did cocktails begin?
The history of cocktails is said to have its roots in antiquity and civilisations like Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, and Chinese. They apparently all liked the odd tipple, frequently combining wine with fermented grains, fruits, herbs, spices, and honey.
These early creations were believed to have healing properties. Archaeologists in China even uncovered evidence of a fermented rice, honey, and fruit beverage dating as far back as 7000 B.C.
Islamic alchemists pioneering distillation in the 8th century fuelled the cocktail evolution story too. This process of heating a liquid to create vapour and then cooling it into a purified form gave way to headier spirits like brandy, whisky, and gin - paving the way for modern cocktails.
Did modern cocktails start in America?
Some say cocktails were first inspired by British punches that contained spirits, fruit juices, and spices.
But it’s when America sneezes that the rest of the world usually catches a cold, and it’s believed that in 18th-century USA, cocktails as we know them took shape before becoming global.
Bartenders in colonial America experimented with various spirits, bitters, and mixers to create new drinks. These early concoctions were often touted as medicinal, and purported to cure indigestion, the common cold, and a whole range of other ailments.
This gave way to the golden age of cocktails. They then gained popularity across the United States and Europe, and this is when we see the emergence of the classic cocktails we know today like the Martini, the Old Fashioned, the Manhattan, the Sidecar, the Daiquiri, and the Margarita. After this, cocktail culture moved across the world.
Prohibition and cocktails
But cocktails hit turbulence in the 20th century through America’s Prohibition years, roughly from about 1920 to 1933. This drove the production and consumption of alcohol underground, so secret drinking in speakeasies and clandestine bars flourished. Cocktails then lost ground for a few years.
A cocktail renaissance
Cocktails further lost their way after World War ll because simpler, more convenient drinks like beer and wine seemed to better suit post-war austerity appetites. Mass-produced ready-to-drinks might’ve also had an impact here.
But by the late 20th and early 21st centuries, cocktails were back with a bang.
The 1980s brought a cocktail renaissance, with more people watching people shaking them and drinking them in films and on TV and drinking them in restaurants and bars. The 90s’craft cocktail movement gained further momentum in the 2000s, re-igniting interest in artisan drinks made with fresh, high-quality ingredients, just like every Gamba cocktail.
Where does the word cocktail come from?
Opinion is divided on when we first started using the word cocktail. Was it first seen in a British Newspaper on March 17, 1798?
Some have it that it popped up in a spoof editorial in an American publication, the Farmer’s Cabinet in 1803. It talked of a “lounger” who, while nursing an 11 am. hangover, “Drank a glass of cocktail – excellent for the head…”
This school of thought then has it that the term cocktail then appeared in print in 1806 in a New York newspaper, The Balance and Columbian Repository of Hudson, which distilled it down to a definition more closely matched to today’s: “A stimulating liquor composed of any kind of sugar, water, and bitters.”
Another theory is that the word cocktail is derived from the French word coquetier, meaning egg cup. Early cocktails were often served in small cups that resembled egg cups. Then there’s the tale of a tavern keeper in New York serving cocktails in glasses with feathers from the tail of a cockerel.
By Jason Caddy