Cocktail recipe
Fitzgerald
A gin sour sharpened with aromatic bitters, bringing warm spice to bright lemon.
Ingredients
- 60 ml (2 oz) London dry gin
- 22.5 ml (¾ oz) fresh lemon juice
- 15 ml (½ oz) rich sugar syrup (2:1)
- 3 dashes aromatic bitters
- Garnish: 1 thin lemon wheel
Preparation
Shake gin, lemon, syrup and bitters firmly with ice. Strain over fresh cubes in a chilled rocks glass and lay a lemon wheel across the ice.
Glassware
Rocks glass
History
Dale DeGroff created the Fitzgerald at the Rainbow Room's Promenade Bar in New York in the early 1990s. In notes he submitted with his *Craft of the Cocktail* manuscript in 2001, DeGroff recalled making a Gin Sour with Angostura bitters for a customer tired of gin and tonic, initially calling it the *Gin Thing*. He named the guest who proposed its literary rebranding as Valerie, a fiction reader for *The New Yorker*, who suggested F. Scott Fitzgerald because a Hemingway Daiquiri was already on the menu. This is a first-person creator account, not independently witnessed documentation of the conversation. The recipe appeared in his 2002 book. **Attribution confidence:** See sourced account and qualifications above.
Mixology View
DeGroff's own detailed manuscript notes materially strengthen the naming story, though the conversation remains a recollection. Bitters make the Gin Sour distinctive, while the author's name adds character rather than provenance.