Punch Isn’t a Messy House Party Drink Anymore

What's the go-to drink when Wimbledon's on the TV, strawberries are in the shops, and you still have a remnant of optimism that maybe, just maybe, this particular British summer will be sunny?

Your answer should be punch. Yes, I'm serious.

Not the sickly-sweet-fruit-juice-plus-a-bottle-of-ancient-booze-left-in-the-cupboard-under-the-stairs stuff you made at your mates' adolescent parties, but a five ingredient, pre-batched beverage that's older than the American cocktail industry itself.

Intrigued? Here are some more clues. Sometimes punch is called a "cup," as Sipsmith master distiller Jared Brown explained to me on one of the first properly hot days of a London summer.

On a day very similar to this, he, Sam Galsworthy, and Fairfax Hall, co-founders of the London distillery were enjoying a drink in the warmth. Hall had pulled out a bottle of Pimm's (the sub-head on the label reads: "The original no.1 cup"—see where this is going?) and offered to make up drinks with it. Could there be anything more appropriate for a sunny English afternoon?

"I don't need premix," Brown had said to him, slightly aghast, before setting about making his own version, what he considered a perfect punch: the Sipsmith London Cup.

You see, at one time in London, in the middle of the gin craze, punch wasn't the province only of Mr Pimm's. He was one maker of many.

"The word 'punch' comes from the Sanskrit for 'five,'" Brown explains, "alluding to the original ingredients that form the backbone of any cup or punch: strong, weak, sour, sweet, spice. Bottle-aged drinks were incredibly common at the time, but they were lost. Somehow Pimm's was the only one to endure."

But thanks to a punch revival fueled by our recent rediscovery of gin, the drink formerly associated with hazy days at the races or getting dressed up for the village gala, has competition.

"Imagine if the 20 nearest Italian restaurants all used the same carbonara recipe," says Brown by way of illustration. "Why would we go to one over the other?" He has a fair point.

So Sipsmith made a cup of their own, which can be drunk neat with ice, or diluted down with lemonade, or even made up into a cocktail. Just don't pour it into a big Tupperware bowl and add cheap fizzy pop.

"Punch was the drink of the higher echelons of society," says Brown. While the artist William Hogarth's drawings of the time show drunken gin-crazed depravity on the streets, his punch house illustrations always feature a punch bowl and the peel of an entire orange. "Citrus was exorbitantly expensive. It was a remarkable luxury, and punch always came with it."

Somewhere between the 18th century and your teenage house party, the definition of punch got lost. Not any longer. And Sipsmith aren't the first to get started on reinventing, or rather re-appropriating, the communal cocktail from its slightly tarnished reputation as the drink of debauched gatherings.

Arguably Nick Strangeway, once the head bartender at Hawksmoor, a restaurant committed to British beef, resurrected the drink from its slightly dubious reputation. After all, punch was a drink associated with Brits (even if they did steal the recipe from the Indian sub-continent), not Americans, and it fitted perfectly with the rise of "sharing" culture.

"After he created a punch menu," says Brown, "other places followed and put punch on their menus too. Places like Hix restaurant and the Criterion. Bartenders across the capital reached back and reconnected the broken chain of what punch could be, rediscovering old recipes to bring the drink back."

Tom Coates, one of the directors at Portobello Gin is part of this movement.

"There's been a rise in social and sharing food and drinks and punch fits perfectly into that," he says.

Portobello Gin make their gin in a 19th century pub that is also home to London's second smallest museum, the Ginstitute. And they do some great punches.

"We're experiencing a renaissance in bartending, where people are going back to the golden age of drinks making for inspiration," says Coates. "What have they seen? Lots of gin and punch. So we're returning to it."

But bartenders haven't left it at resurrection.

"We wanted to connect to the history of punch and then take it further," says Davide Segat, bar manager at the London EDITION hotel, home to what is currently London's only dedicated punch room. "We scoured the books to see what the similarities are across them all, because some recipes are a hundred years apart. The number five is important for punch, but then again we found that very few people actually follow this rule. We found a recipe from 1750 with over 14 ingredients."

The Punch Room's menu is split 50:50 with classic punches taken from recipes hundreds of years old—like a milk punch, in which the spirit, citrus, spice, and sugar are fat washed in milk, which splits and is strained off to give the drink a creamy texture without actually being milky—and more 21st century interpretations of the drink.

"The base is the same. The five core ingredients of citrus, water, sugar, spice, and alcohol," says Segat. "But the punchmakers of the 1700s didn't have what we have today. The tea was chai. The spirit was always gin. Now we have hundreds of kinds of tea, and all the spirits you can think of—tequila, mezcal—as well as fruits like yuzu, grapefruit, different kinds of orange. We like to think we're making the punches they'd have made, had they had our ingredients. The punch base stays the same, but the ingredients are more exciting."

True to their own roots, and London's history, Sipsmith's London Cup is gin-based, and in honour of this heritage, the distillery has recreated a punch house in Soho Square, round the corner from one that Dickens is thought to have frequented.

Perhaps this is why the idea of sipping a punch or cup appeals to us as a genteel activity, to be enjoyed in polite society at the summer races, or while watching an aristocratic sport like tennis. It's not just the recipe that's been rescued from ignominy, but the sense of luxury that was in the mix too. I'll never be tempted to drink some concoction from a plastic cup and call it "punch" again.