The Friday Photo: On the Trail of the Singapore Sling

The Singapore Sling is not only a quintessential Singapore experience. It’s arguably the world’s girliest classic cocktail.

It’s pink, it’s frothy, it comes in its own special glass — and, best of all, it’s garnished with a slice of pineapple, a sticky cherry, and a bright pink umbrella on the top.

Now, it’s pretty much sacrilege for any bar person — let alone a fully fledged cocktail geek like me — to go to Singapore without trying the Singapore Sling.

It’s the national drink of Singapore. The only cocktail created by Asians to make it into the classic cocktail books.

It is also a source of intense angst among many serious bartenders today, most of whom simply *cannot* believe that the drink is supposed to be, as a Singaporean friend put it,

“Pink, sweet and fruity, but drink three of them and you’re on the floor.”

One’s first stop for a Singapore Sling in Singapore?

The Long Bar at Raffles Hotel, a slice of colonial grandeur — Singapore’s last tiger was killed underneath its billiard room in the 1920s — that played host to Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, Noel Coward and more.

I’m accompanied by Barbara of The Dropout Diaries, whose pragmatic — and very Australian — take on Singapore’s signature drink is:

“It’s alright. It’s pink, it’s sticky, it slips down easily and a couple could really f*ck you up.”

We crunch over discarded peanut shells and under rows of punkah fans driven not by peons but by a ceiling piston into a room filled with depressed-looking tourists.

Mind you, if I’d just spent a slice of my Singapore holidays paying $26 PLUS tax PLUS service for a premixed cocktail in a five-star hotel bar, I’d be pretty down in the mouth too…

Oh wait!… I just did!

To be honest, it slips down easily enough. A little on the tooth-hurty side. No taste of any of its fruit ingredients but a generic grenadine pinkness. But, still, a much less unpleasant drink than I’d been anticipating.
“Do you make them here?” I ask the bartender, who’s busily disgorging pink gloop from a slurpee type machine behind the bar, while another hand makes one of their multifarious other-flavoured Slings.

“No,” he says. “We buy it in.”

“What’s the recipe?” I ask.

He hands me a little card.

You see, as every cocktail geek knows, the Singapore Sling was invented by a bartender named Ngiam Tong Boon some time around 1910, in the Raffles Hotel bar.

Most stories include a mysterious lady, perhaps a colonel’s wife, who didn’t like the taste of alcohol — a narrative, which, frankly, explains a lot.

The card, allegedly, contains his original recipe. Which is, allegedly, still held in the hotel records.

It, allegedly, goes like this:

30ml Gin
15ml Heering Cherry Liqueur
120ml Pineapple juice
15ml Lime juice
7.5ml Cointreau
7.5ml Benedictine
10ml Grenadine
Dash Angostura Bitters

And, no, for the anoraks among you, turn of the century bartenders in colonial Singapore, or the Straits Settlement more generally, did NOT measure out their ingredients let alone record their recipes in millilitres and decimal points.

I stop off at Orgo, a rooftop bar with views over the spiky pair of durian-shaped buildings that look, in conjunction with a phallic tower, distinctly… well, you get the picture…

They make their Singapore Sling using only fresh fruits, with ginger substituting for the liqueurs.

I’m enough of a purist to eschew this recipe, in favour of a passion fruit Margarita rimmed with coffee salt, served frozen, delicious and piled high.

But it’s in the rather plastinated surrounds of Clarke Quay that I stumble on the ne plus ultra of pink drinks, the Singapore Sling Boutique, a shrine to a previously unsung pioneer of the Singapore Sling.

Not Ngiam Tong Boon. No sirree.

But Mr. Chow Hoo Siong.

The red sticky stuff is Mr Chow Hoo Siong’s contribution to the art of the Singapore Sling — The Singapore Sling Original Mix.

The Singapore Sling Original Mix comes in bottles.

It comes in chocolates.

It comes alcopop style, complete with pineapple juice.

And, of course, it slides over the bar with a hot pink umbrella.

It’s a rather fabulous little place, in fact, the Singapore Sling Boutique, and if your taste runs to the kitsch, I highly recommend you stop by. There’s a chandelier of little red bottles. A glitter mosaic behind the bar. More gewgaws that one can shake a stick at.

And the cocktail they produce is rather less tooth-hurty, if hardly an array of fresh fruits, than the Singapore Slings served at Raffles Hotel. It also goes quite beautifully with the decor.

“Do you make the premix for Raffles?” I ask.

“We did,” says the chap. “We stop two years ago.” (Today Raffles imports its sling mix from — wait for it! — Australia!)

I spend $4 on a Singapore Sling chocolate wrapped in — of course — pink foil, an experience more likely to produce hyperglycaemia than inebriation.

The Post Bar in the Fullerton Hotel, a space that was once Singapore’s main post office and still has a scarlet pillar box in the centre, offers a quite dizzying range of Sling flavours.

“So how does your Singapore Sling recipe differ from the Raffles one?” I ask.

“Well,” the guy begins. “It’s just a better balanced drink.”

“We leave out the soda. Cut back on the sugars. Just get the balance right. And, of course, we use Cherry Heering not just any cherry brandy.”

The drink emerges a notably paler pink — indicating a general lessening of highly sugared grenadine and cherry brandy.

The taste? Well, it’s surprisingly palatable.

It’s the first Singapore Sling in which I can identify the gin, the first in which I can taste pineapple over the red fruit — and it’s sweet, but not tooth-hurtingly sweet.

High up above Singapore, at City Space at the Swissôtel Stamford, I sit sipping a tea-infused cocktail that bubbles with dry ice.

I’m the guest of a London friend named Richard, who runs this joint and several others, and is an award-winning bartender in his own right.

A far more authoritative cocktail geek than I, Richard is one of few people to have gone into the Raffles Hotel’s archives in search of that elusive original recipe.

The earliest record he can find is a version scribbled on the back of a bar receipt during the 1930s, and returned some time thereafter.

The drinks found in 1930s cocktails books, known as either Straits Slings or Singapore Slings, have very little in common with today’s drink, and are probably closer to the “gin sling” Noel Coward drank on the balcony of Raffles.

According to Richard, the whole drink may be a mistranslation of an original drink based on kirsch, or a similar dry cherry spirit, into a drink based on sticky cherry brandy, with ingredients frantically added to restore the balance of the drink.

Add to this the fact that Raffles closed during the Japanese Occupation — in the manner of the Paris Ritz, Japanese officers based themselves there — and that the Singapore Sling was first promoted heavily by an ambitious manager who came in in 1950, and sent recipes to hotels around the world, and you have to wonder whether there’s any authenticity at all.

Does it matter?

IMHO? No.

Whatever its heritage, it’s pink, it’s sticky and it’s a Singaporean icon. Richard’s versions taste better, though.

I’m participating in Photo Friday. Pop on over for more great travel shots.

Also, if you’re into photography yourself, have got a DSLR and want to learn how to use it, I’m working on my photography with an ebook called Getting Out of Auto.

I used some of Bethany’s explanations in the cocktail pictures here: turning down the f-stop as low as it would go so that the cocktails are in sharp focus and the background’s really blurred.

It’s a great little book, makes stuff that has seemed complicated elsewhere incredibly simple, and if you buy it here you’ve just bought me a beer. NOT, you’ll notice, a Singapore Sling.