Learn to make the drink that inspired the Bomba bartender’s long hospo career.
It’s early on a Monday morning when we meet Cara outside popular Melbourne CBD bar Bomba. Though the weather is crisp, even for Melbourne, Cara is all smiles, and offers the team coffee before we start the day. It’s a small gesture, but it’s immediately clear how natural hospitality is for her.
“I like having more of an immediate impact on someone’s day,” Cara tells us in the breezy surroundings of the bar. “If someone is having a bad day and you go in and have a chat and you make them the exact drink that they feel like drinking, you can immediately see them brighten up. It is just a nice thing to see.”
Cara has been in the industry for just over 10 years, starting, like many of us, in her late teens. “I was still at uni working in various hospo roles until I went did a gap year in Canada after I graduated. I started hostessing at this bar called Pourhouse. The guys behind the bar were high-end bartending and I was pretty blown away by how good they were.”
After her working holiday, she flew back to Glasgow (where she is from originally), found a job in a bar and decided hospitality was the career for her. Since then she’s held numerous bar positions and is now much-revered as the manager of the Spanish-inspired Bomba, where she also leads their popular YouTube cocktail series, Behind the Bar,.
But what happened at Pourhouse in Vancouver all those years ago that made her want to pursue hospitality? Well, it pretty much came down to one drink. THE drink. “The first time that I knocked off and sat down to have a drink at the bar, the bartenders asked me what I’d like to drink,” Cara explains. “I was just coming from being a student, you know, just kind of drinking whatever was in front of me. So, I panicked and the only cocktail I could think of was a French Martini, because that was always on student specials.”
As Cara tells it, Pourhouse was one of the more serious bars in Vancouver, so they didn't stock Chambord (a vital ingredient in the French Martini). So, as bartenders do, they improvised and made her something else. Not quite a French Martini, but something that would equally satisfy her tastebuds. “They made me the Gin Sour,” she recalls. “It was a cocktail with Hendricks Gin, elderflower liqueur and celery bitters. It was so nice and light and floral, and had that fluffy thing that I really like about the French Martini, but a bit more on the savoury side.”
“I hadn’t really had a cocktail before that had that bit of savoury to it. Everything I’d had was always quite sweet, so it was definitely a bit of a lightbulb moment for me,” Cara explains. And that template of taking something pretty simple, like a Gin Sour, and switching out a few little ingredients, carefully curating extra layers of flavour, is how Cara makes drinks to this day. “I’m definitely not one of those crazy bartenders that reinvent the wheel – I just like to be like, this is a delicious template, let's bring in some other cool flavours and see how that works out. That way of bartending definitely had a pretty massive impact on me and the way I tend bar.”
Watch: How to make a Gin Sour with Celery Bitters
Ingredients
50mL Hendrick’s gin 20mL elderflower liqueur 20mL lemon juice 2 dashes celery bitters 1 egg white Garnish: cucumber roll
Method
Add your lemon juice, elderflower liqueur, celery bitters and egg white to a cocktail tin Give the cocktail a thorough shake without ice Add a handful of ice to the tin and shake again Fill a rocks glass with ice and double strain your cocktail into the glass (using both a regular cocktail strainer and a smaller mesh sieve) To create the garnish, use a peeler to create a long strip of cucumber Gently roll it up, then tuck it into the glass
Cara’s top tips
If you’d like to try the Gin Sour at home, the wonderful Cara Devine has some words of wisdom for you. Don’t shy away from ice. “Generally speaking the more ice the better,” Cara explains. Not only does it keep your drink nice and cold, but it also gives the drink the right amount of dilution – an essential factor in making perfect cocktails. Another tidbit of advice for all you cocktail enthusiasts at home: you don’t have to use egg whites. The egg whites are in the drink to add texture, but if the idea of egg in your drink isn’t your cup of tea, you can just as easily sub it out for aquafaba (the gooey liquid in a can of chickpeas) or Wonderfoam. Lastly, what would a cocktail be without the tunes? “At the bar I was working at in Vancouver, they played a lot of bluegrass music, and the Gin Sour is a nice afternoon sipper, so I think the two go together quite well.”
