Ahead of the Glasgow Cocktail Awards 2025 in February we visited Van Gogh themed speakeasy the Absent Ear to learn what goes into a Roobarb & Custard cocktail.
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00:00Hi, my name's Liam, I'm the General Manager of The Absent Ear.
00:02I'm going to make a cocktail today, I am not going to take credit for it because I did not come up with it.
00:07So we're going to say the Royal We made it.
00:09This is the Rhubarb and Custard drink by Ari Smith, who is our Assistant General Manager here.
00:14To my left we've got the artwork that kind of inspired the drink, which is a little excerpt
00:19from Picture Post magazine, which was a US-based magazine in the 1940s.
00:23And the drink itself is kind of based on like an old kind of candy shop
00:26Rhubarb and Custard boiled sweet, so we tried to kind of break down that recipe and
00:30make a sort of texturally experienced drink with that as well.
00:33And what we have as the base of our cocktail is Hendrick's Grand Cabaret,
00:38which is a nice kind of towards the sweet side of gin.
00:41It's got a lot of kind of stone fruit, passion fruit flavours that combine
00:44really well with everything else in the drink.
00:46I'm going to use a nice healthy 30 mils, because who likes a single measure?
00:52We have a couple of different modifiers in this as well.
00:55The first we have is Rancancan, which is a peach aperitif wine from France.
01:00I'm sure that was a terrible pronunciation of it, but nonetheless.
01:03It's also got quinine in it, which has got a nice kind of bitter kind of tonic-esque
01:08flavour to it.
01:08That's a nice modifier for the drink.
01:10We have Zucca, rhubarb, which is an Italian liqueur, a bitter liqueur with rhubarb as the
01:16base of it, which gives you a nice kind of robust rhubarb flavour as opposed to
01:20all the kind of sweet rhubarb flavours that are also going to be in the drink
01:23and gives it a bit more kind of character to that rhubarb flavour and the texture of
01:27it as well.
01:28And we have Bartender Cellotape, which is a liqueur de Coquelicot.
01:33It's a French liqueur, again, that's meant to taste like kind of poppy seed liqueur,
01:38like these old sweets, I think they're called poppy drops, that were quite a
01:41delicacy in France at some point as well.
01:43So we use that as another sweetening agent.
01:45And we have a stewed rhubarb cordial that we also make with lactic acid, malic acid
01:50and a little bit of Dutch forest rhubarb that's stewed for two days in it as well.
01:54And what we do is we combine all that into a bottle, batch it so all the flavours mellow
01:57together and we add 55 mils of our batch, which is about that much.
02:03We stir it down with ice.
02:11This is from our new menu that we just launched six weeks ago,
02:16which has 14 new art-inspired drinks, which you will find at The Absent Ear.
02:21And this is definitely the most popular drink so far,
02:24because of the accoutrements you will soon see next to the drink.
02:32So we stir this for about 40-ish seconds, make sure it's nice and chilled on the outside.
02:39Make sure the flavours have combined.
02:41Give it a little strain into our old thrifted Sunday glasses.
02:44These are just from our charity shop.
02:47But we really like them and we found quite a lot of them, so they're very useful.
02:53Give it a nice little stripey straw to take you back to the gory days.
02:58And then top it up with our vegan vanilla custard cream foam,
03:01which is an oat cream base, vegan custard and a little bit of nitrogen as the air.
03:11A little bit of sprinkles on top.
03:13Hundreds and thousands.
03:16Can never be too liberal with these.
03:19There we go.
03:19Nice messy ingredient for your bar.
03:22Finally finished with a wee 10p mix-up on the side as well.
03:26Hence why it's so popular.
03:27That's the rhubarb and custard from The Absent Ear.