The Shura No Hana

An refreshing gin cocktail from San Jose’s cocktail bar, “Paper Plane”

Gin is a wonderful base for refreshing and exciting cocktails. The Shura No Hana cocktail from the San Jose’s “Paper Plane” is similar to a gin sour (without the egg white) with a wonderful mix of asian flavors.

Ingredients

  • A smooth, subtle gin

  • For this recipe, made a 1-to-1 simple syrup with water that I boiled with diced galangal.

  • This provides the color and adds the rest of the sweetness to balance the drink.

  • Enough lemon juice to balance the sweetness by adding some acidity

  • Adds a wonderful evolution to the cocktail, pairing well with the asian flavors already present form the galangal simple syrup.

Equipment

  • A nice tall glass for serving drinks up

  • Your preferred shaker for mixing cocktails

  • A necessity of measuring ingredients by volume

  • A fine strainer for filtering out shards of ice after shaking

 Recipe

  • As this drink is served up, there is no ice to keep it cold, so a chilled glass is preferred

  • Cracked ice or smaller ice cubes helps you chill the drink and get to the desired dilution more quickly

  • I would suggest adding the simple syrup first, and the gin last for two reasons:

    1. It’s good practice to add ingredients from least to most expensive (in case you make a mistake)

    2. Adding other liquids after the thick simple syrup helps you to wash out the remaining simple syrup from the jigger

  • This should be adequate time to chill the drink and get to the right dilution

  • Double filtering the drink will prevent many small shards of ice (which can be unpleasant) from getting into the glass