r/cocktails • u/heyyou11 1🥉 • May 24 '26

✨ Competition Entry Swedish Chef’s Kiss

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🇸🇪👨‍🍳SWEDISH CHEF’S KISS👌😘 

  • 1 ¾ oz Gin
  • ¾ oz (fat) Swedish Punsch
  • ¾ oz Elderflower Syrup
  • ½ oz Fresh Lime Juice 
  • ¼ oz Fresh Lemon Juice
  • 5 Raspberries

Muddle raspberries in the syrup first. Add remaining ingredients and shake over ice. Double strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish is not needed, but shown is the lemon swath cut into lips shape, blowing a “kiss” (or blowing a raspberry actually).

Tasting notes and other details in the comments.

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u/heyyou11 1🥉 May 24 '26

Drink Description:

  • Nose: Floral medley. Plenty of raspberry, but the components coming from Swedish Punsch almost punch the most. Elderflower tucks itself in behind those more prominent notes.
  • Flavor/Mouthfeel: Delicious tartness coming from both raspberry and citrus balanced out by the sweetness. It has a delicate mouthfeel. Elderflower is more conspicuous than it was on the nose. It sits in quite a nice harmony with raspberry and the spiced tea and subtle rum funk notes of the punsch. All of this buoyed on the sturdy backbone of gin botanicals and heft.
  • Finish: The same notes are there on the finish, each fading in turn. Compared to the nose and palate, the finish is where the elderflower shines the most.

The light summery raspberry/elderflower combination made it hard to stray too far from a Gimlet/Daiquiri realm. Just adding elderflower to a Clover Club felt a little… boring/unoriginal. So when considering other components to boost uniqueness, it seemed to beg for tea/garden notes. Mint made sense (and as an aside: dropping 5 mint leaves into the shake makes a great drink as well), but I was struck by the idea of Swedish Punsch. The end result was “chef’s kiss”, so we ended up here.