Gloom Chaser

A cheerful citrus-forward cocktail from the Savoy designed to lift spirits with curacao and grenadine.

The Gloom Chaser appeared in Harry Craddock's The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), one of the most comprehensive cocktail references of the inter-war period, with a formula that is unusual in the cocktail canon for combining two orange liqueurs — Cointreau and Grand Marnier — alongside grenadine and fresh lemon juice without any distilled spirit base. Cointreau, the triple-distilled clear orange liqueur produced in Saint-Barthélemy-d'Anjou, Maine-et-Loire since the Cointreau brothers established their distillery in 1875, provides clean, precise orange peel aromatics. Grand Marnier, the cognac-based orange liqueur created by Louis-Alexandre Marnier Lapostolle in 1880, contributes both orange character and the secondary warmth of its Cognac base. The combination of two different orange liqueur styles — one clean and spirit-neutral, one cognac-enriched — alongside grenadine's pomegranate sweetness and lemon juice's citric acid produces a drink of considerable citrus complexity without the anchoring presence of a base spirit. The name Gloom Chaser belongs to the optimistic, mood-lifting cocktail naming convention of the Jazz Age, when drinks were given cheerful identities as antidotes to the economic and social anxieties of the inter-war period.