Pomada

Menorca's refreshing summer staple combining the island's distinctive juniper-forward gin with cloudy lemonade, served ice-cold during the festive season.

The Pomada is the signature festival drink of Menorca, the easternmost of Spain's Balearic Islands, and its story runs through both the island's gin heritage and a single 20th-century inventor. Menorca's gin tradition dates to the British occupation: Britain took the island from Spain in 1708 during the War of the Spanish Succession (formalized by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht) and made Port Maó one of the Royal Navy's principal Mediterranean bases. To satisfy British sailors' taste for gin, local distillers began producing it using juniper and, distinctively, a base of vinous (wine) alcohol rather than grain - the style that survives today as Xoriguer, the island's emblematic gin, distilled in copper pot stills. Britain's final departure came in 1802, but gin-making had taken permanent root. The Pomada itself is credited to Magí Camps, a Maó native who worked at the bar of the old Maó Maritime Station and, in 1967, began mixing Xoriguer gin with siphon lemonade - by many accounts to disguise how much gin he was drinking. The pressurized siphon lemonade frothed up when it met the gin, and that foam gave the drink its name, "pomada" being the Catalan word for a pomade or ointment. The recipe - roughly one part Xoriguer to two or three parts lemon soda, served very cold and often as a slush - spread across the island and became Menorca's most popular drink. In Ciutadella it is often called simply "gin amb llimonada" or "ginet." It flows freely at the summer patronal festivals, above all Sant Joan on June 23rd and 24th, when Menorca's black horses perform in the crowded streets.