Way back in 1900, there was a hot new musical playing on Broadway: Florodora. The production had been such a hit in London the year before that it made its way to Broadway. The show became known for its attractive cast, particularly the “Florodora Sextette,” a rotating group of six actresses that figured heavily in the show. In 1901, The New York Evening World reported on how to make a drink—a gin buck with lime and raspberry—that was supposedly invented for one of the Sextette who requested “something brand new.”
Alba Huerta has had the cocktail on the menu at Julep in Houston for years. She first encountered it about 15 years ago somewhere in New York—likely Death & Co. or Milk & Honey—and decided to bring it home. At the time, she was the general manager at Grand Prize Bar, which had a frozen drinks program centered around a vintage machine called “Old Shaky,” which “was probably manufactured in the late ’70s, and she was still cranking out frozen drinks in the early 2010s,” says Huerta. “She could freeze anything.” The recipe Huerta developed called on ginger juice in place of ginger beer, because carbonation doesn’t translate well in a frozen drink, and the resulting frozen version of the Floradora was just the thing for Houston’s hot climate, fruity and refreshing.
When Huerta was getting Julep off the ground, she knew that, in addition to a menu of original drinks, she wanted to offer a sizable selection of classics to her customers. On the list of nearly 100 cocktails is a classical (i.e., not frozen) recipe—and it’s always a hit with customers.
The recipe that had been published in The New York Evening World called for Plymouth gin, but the Floradora Cooler (somewhere along the way, the second “o” became an “a”) published in Jacques Straub’s 1913 book Manual of Mixed Drinks—the source from which the cocktail revivalists of the aughts took the drink—calls simply for dry gin. Huerta’s favorite to use in this cocktail is Condesa, which is produced in Mexico City with a selection of botanicals that evoke Mexican terroir, from jasmine and lavender to palo santo, sage and citrus.
Lime and raspberry are a classic combination, perhaps best known from the soda fountain classic the raspberry-lime rickey, which was adopted from the rickey, an austere, unsweetened gin (or, originally, rye) highball. In Huerta’s Floradora, she opts to pair fresh lime juice with a raspberry syrup from European brand Zergut, which she’d used in the frozen version at Grand Prize. “It’s not super big and thick and clunky,” she says of the syrup, adding that the sugar doesn’t overpower its bright raspberry flavor.
Given that Huerta had been using fresh ginger juice in the frozen version, a big part of adapting the Floradora back to a more classic recipe was choosing the ginger beer. She uses Q Mixers ginger beer, which she says delivers solid ginger flavor with a touch of spice from the chile pepper that’s part of its formula.
Houston is quite hot for most of the year, and the clientele at Julep gravitates toward refreshing coolers, which makes the Floradora a perennial favorite. “If I’ve been driving in the hot weather all day and if I sit down to have a cocktail, do I like this cocktail that’s this bright, fruit-forward, ginger buck?” she asks. “I mean, the answer is yes.”
