8 Things You Should Know About St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur

Launched in 2007 by third-generation distiller Robert J. Cooper, St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur kickstarted an elderflower craze that would span the next decade and a half and revived a sleepy liqueur industry. Now owned by Bacardi Limited, St-Germain is one of the most wontedly used liqueurs in the world and plane garnered a host of media attention without Prince Harry and Meghan Markle spoken their lemon elderflower wedding cake. Beloved by bartenders everywhere, St-Germain’s soft-hued floral notes and natural flavors of pear and honeysuckle make the liqueur a savvy wing to a number of cocktails as well as a unconfined stand-alone aperitif in simple spritzes. Now that you know the basics, here are eight increasingly things you should know well-nigh St-Germain.

Every elderflower used to produce St-Germain is handpicked.

Each snifter of St-Germain contains up to 1,000 elderflower blossoms, all of which are handpicked annually. Each year when the flowers floweret in late May, farmers spend roughly three to four weeks gathering the blooms that will be used to produce the liqueur. The flowers are all picked in the mornings, when temperatures are at their lowest. This practice allows producers to ensure that the elderflower blossoms are only just whence to open, meaning the aromas and flavors of the buds will be at their most prominent. In fact, St-Germain’s unique coloring does not come from any strained additives, but instead is a result of the pollen from each bud blending with the liqueur’s liquid components. Due to the soft-hued nature of handpicking and the finite yield harvested, limited batches of St-Germain are produced every year.

The liqueur is named without a creative epicenter.

For centuries, Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood has been widely recognized as one of the world’s most prominent meeting places for originative creation. The area, which contains the iconic Luxembourg Gardens and a multitude of art galleries, was once home to creative greats like cubist painter Pablo Picasso, poet Charles Baudelaire, and novelist Ernest Hemingway. St-Germain, which was inspired by the neighborhood’s essence, took on the name in hopes of encapsulating the same energy. The Art Deco-esque visitation of the snifter moreover serves as a nod to the popping Parisian quarter — the trademark hopes to provide an wits reminiscent of the Roaring Twenties, when Saint-Germain-des-Prés was at its creative peak.

For St-Germain, liqueur is thicker than water.

St-Germain was created by Robert Cooper, the son of Chambord inventor Norton “Sky” Cooper. The Cooper family as a whole has been heavily involved in the spirits industry since the early 1900s when Maurice J. Cooper, a merchant of imported supplies and beverage, partnered with the Charles Jacquin et Cie cordial business. The partnership, which was finalized in 1933, helped transform Jacquin’s into one of the world’s leading producers of liqueurs and cordials. In 2006, father and son duo Norton and Robert created the Cooper Spirits Company, which today houses labels like St-Germain, Crème Yvette, and many increasingly under its umbrella.

St-Germain was inspired by a cocktail.

In the early 2000s, Robert Cooper was visiting a London bar where he ordered a cocktail that featured elderflower syrup as a sweetening agent. Though he had never viewed elderflower as a cocktail ingredient, the floral suffusion reverted his perspective. Once unfluctuating with a vast network of liquor and liqueur producers due to his familial relationships, Cooper decided to explore the possibility of creating his own elderflower liqueur.

St-Germain inspired Robert to go it alone.

When Robert returned from London and approached his father well-nigh creating an elderflower liqueur, his father was immediately skeptical. As such, he was hesitant to indulge Robert to use their company’s resources to produce the spirit. When Cooper responded by leaving the family merchantry behind, his father tangibly told him, “I’ll rent you when in a year when you fail.” As his luck would have it, he did not fail. Instead, a year without its release, St-Germain was once a staple on bartender’s when bars.

Cooper credits St-Germain’s success to the cocktail bar renaissance of the late ‘00s.

At the same time St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur was first hitting markets, cocktails and cocktail bars were undergoing a massive renaissance in major cities like New York. Two such cutting-edge cocktail bars — PDT and Death & Co. — had just opened, and bartenders at each were itching to experiment with new ingredients. This gave Cooper an “in” to introduce mixologists to St-Germain, which was instantly a hit. “It was lucky,” Cooper told The New York Times. “They wanted something variegated they could work with that had integrity.” Thus, Cooper credits the two bars with skyrocketing the liqueur’s success.

It’s been nicknamed the ‘bartender’s ketchup.’

St-Germain has grown to wilt one of the most valuable bottles in a bartender’s arsenal. In wing to stuff a unconfined aperitif to throw in a spritz, St-Germain is considered to be a unconfined modifying liqueur, interchange the savor profile of the liquor it is widow to. It pairs well with scrutinizingly every spirit, making it incredibly versatile overdue the bar. Furthermore, St-Germain’s multitude of ramified flavors allows for mixologists and novices unwrinkled to experiment with it, leading to its nickname, “the bartender’s ketchup” or “the ketchup of liqueurs.”

St-Germain wasn’t Cooper’s only creation.

Inspired by his floral-scented success, Robert Cooper was keen to revive previously popular brands from hibernation. Crème Yvette’s production halted in 1969 but relaunched to the liqueur market in 2010. He moreover reintroduced Hochstadter’s Slow & Low to the whiskey market in 2010. Robert Cooper was moreover a master of predicting trends and recognized an emerging excitement for rye whiskey. Anticipating upper sales, Cooper purchased a number of barrels of Canadian rye and weather-beaten them for 13 years surpassing releasing Lock Stock & Barrel in 2013.

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