Gin Gin Mule

Gin, mint, lime, and ginger beer — Audrey Saunders created this (c. 2000) to convert vodka drinkers, the New York Times naming it cocktail of the decade in 2009.

The Gin Gin Mule was created by Audrey Saunders around 2000 while she was working as lead bartender at Beacon Restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. Saunders had come up through the New York bar scene under the mentorship of Dale DeGroff, and she was already applying a rigorous craft approach to her cocktails at a time when American bars were almost universally dominated by flavored vodka and convenience products. The drink emerged from her efforts to build a gin cocktail that would appeal to vodka drinkers who claimed not to like gin. It is structurally a hybrid of two existing drinks — the Mojito's fresh mint, lime, and sugar, and the Moscow Mule's ginger beer — but Saunders made her own ginger beer from scratch, a practice almost unheard of in commercial bars at the time, and the resulting freshness and precision transformed both templates into something entirely new. When Saunders opened Pegu Club in 2005 on West Houston Street in Manhattan, the Gin Gin Mule was a cornerstone of the opening menu. The bar became the most influential cocktail establishment of the decade, and the drink traveled with its reputation, appearing on menus across the country as bartenders trained at Pegu fanned out to open their own bars. In 2009 the New York Times named the Gin Gin Mule the most significant cocktail of the decade, crediting it with helping rehabilitate gin as a category in American drinking culture at a moment when the spirit had been largely abandoned in favor of vodka.