Lemongrass Collins

A Southeast Asian-inspired twist on the classic Tom Collins, featuring aromatic lemongrass syrup that brings Thai and Vietnamese flavors to a refreshing gin highball.

The Lemongrass Collins is a modern craft variation on the Tom Collins that draws on Southeast Asian culinary tradition to add a distinctly aromatic dimension to one of the most durable long-drink templates in cocktail history. The Tom Collins — gin, lemon juice, sugar, soda water — was codified in the American bar canon by Jerry Thomas's 1876 revised edition of his Bar-Tenders Guide, after the name became attached to the format through a widespread New York City social hoax in 1874. Lemongrass — Cymbopogon citratus, a perennial grass native to tropical and subtropical Asia — has been central to the cuisines of Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, and Indonesia for thousands of years, prized for its essential-oil-rich stalks whose primary aromatic compound, citral, produces an intense lemon-verbena-like fragrance quite different from actual citrus. Its entry into Western cocktail culture accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s as the farm-to-bar movement encouraged bartenders to draw on global culinary traditions, and as the growing presence of Southeast Asian restaurants in American and European cities made lemongrass familiar to consumers outside its traditional cultural context. Lemongrass is typically incorporated into cocktails as a syrup — simmered with sugar and water to extract the oils from the stalk — or as a direct infusion into the spirit, the volatile oils transferring rapidly into alcohol in ways they do not into plain water.