Giffard: A Pharmacist in Angers, and Three Liqueurs on Our Shelf

Three of the bottles behind our bar come from the same French family house, and they are the sort of thing that gets used constantly and discussed never.

Angers, 1885

Emile Giffard was a pharmacist in Angers, in the Loire Valley.

During a scorching summer he was studying the digestive and cooling properties of mint. The research produced a clear mint liqueur, steam-distilled from the Mitcham variety of peppermint, and he named it Menthe Pastille after the mint candies that were popular at the time.

Angers received it enthusiastically enough that Giffard turned the pharmacy into a distillery. The company has been family-owned since.

The pharmacy origin is not a footnote. Most European liqueur houses started the same way, because pharmacists were the people who understood extraction, maceration and distillation. Amaro, chartreuse, vermouth and fruit liqueurs all come out of that same medical tradition.

Angers also sits on the Loire, which meant Giffard could work with local fruit and botanicals and with exotic spices arriving by ship from ports worldwide.

Lichi-Li

Lychee liqueur, and the reason to specify Giffard's is that most lychee flavoring in drinks is synthetic.

Lychee is a difficult fruit to work with. Its aroma is largely made of volatile compounds that degrade fast, which is why fresh lychee and canned lychee taste like different fruits. Capturing the real thing rather than approximating it with a rose-and-grape note is genuinely hard.

Giffard's is made to hold the fresh fruit's perfumed, floral character. Intensely aromatic, sweet, with a delicate lingering finish.

Triple Sec

The workhorse, and the one people assume needs no explanation.

Triple sec is an orange liqueur made by distilling with the dried peel of both sweet and bitter oranges. The bitter orange, usually Curaçao or Seville type, is essential: sweet orange peel alone gives a flat, candied result, and the bitterness is what gives the category its structure.

Giffard's is a proper distilled version rather than a sweetened orange essence, and the difference shows in a drink. Bright, zesty, with sweet and bitter citrus balanced against each other and a clean crisp finish.

Wild Elderflower

Elderflower has become ubiquitous on cocktail menus, and it is worth knowing what it actually is.

Elder is a shrub that flowers in early summer with dense heads of tiny cream-colored blossoms. The flowers are intensely aromatic and the aroma is unusual: it reads as honey, muscat grape, rose, lychee and even saffron all at once, which is why elderflower is difficult to describe and easy to recognize.

Giffard naturally dries the blossoms and macerates them in small batches to extract that fragrance. The result is delicate, honeyed and floral with a sweet lingering finish.

Fresh elderflower has a very short season and does not travel, so almost every commercial use starts from dried or preserved flowers.

How to Drink Them

All three are modifiers rather than sipping bottles, though the elderflower is pleasant chilled on its own as a digestif and the Lichi-Li works in a cordial glass over ice.

Their real job is in a mixed drink, where each one supplies something the base spirit does not: fruit, citrus structure, or floral lift.

Try It at Juraku

The Giffard bottles are behind the bar at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. Check the current menu for what we are using them in.