The Fresh, Funky, Neon-Red Drink That Started It All

The Gunshop Fizz.

I was wandering around the European deli in my old neighborhood¹ a few weeks ago, perusing pickles and obscure liqueurs, when I stopped in my tracks. There was the six-pack of tiny red bottles that I’d spent months searching the city for. It was Stappi: a nonalcoholic Italian soda usually drunk as an aperitif (that is, before a meal) that tastes like a slightly sweeter Campari and soda, somewhere between bitter orange and bubblegum. And it was the key ingredient in a drink I’d been wanting to make ever since I heard about it, the Gunshop Fizz.

The Gunshop Fizz was sort of the driving force behind the original Rogue Cocktails book. It’s, according to Robert Simonson’s retrospective for VinePair, the drink that Kirk Estopinal and Maks Pazuniak sent to other bartenders as a guideline when they were first soliciting rule-breaking recipes. And it became the face of the book because of just how bizarre it is.

The special Italian soda might be the most normal thing about the Gunshop Fizz. Its base is a full two ounces of Peychaud’s bitters, a Creole bitters that’s key to most New Orleans classics, like the Sazerac. On its own, Peychaud’s tastes like licorice candy, lightly medicinal with some herbal undertones I can’t quite pick out individually. Most drinks only call for 1-3 dashes as an accent, usually to rye or cognac. (A dash is about 1/32 ounce, or a little under 1/4 teaspoon.) But Peychaud’s is 35% alcohol, so there’s really no reason why it can’t be the base of a drink, other than common practice. Beta Cocktails is here to break common practice.

The Gunshop Fizz also requires a whole produce aisle of ingredients: whole strawberries, slices of cucumber, and twists of orange and grapefruit, all muddled in with the rest of the drink — and then left to steep for a few minutes. It looks pretty gross.

Before and after.

The fruit comes in because the Gunshop Fizz is a riff on a Pimm’s Cup,² a drink made with strawberries, cucumber, mint and an English gin liqueur called Pimm’s No. 1. Kirk and Maks specifically took after the Pimm’s Cup at the Violet Hour, a Chicago bar where Kirk had worked before the pair met at Cure. I can’t find much about that Pimm’s Cup, other than that it may have featured orange and been topped with 7-Up, not the usual ginger ale. Remember the Violet Hour, though, because it’s going to come up throughout this journey.

The Gunshop Fizz feels like a great drink to start with, not only because it was the start of the whole Rogue/Beta Cocktails thing, but because it’s a good illustration of who Kirk and Maks are. Past the Violet Hour history, it’s also a tribute to their New Orleans roots — it’s named after the gun and sword store that currently stands at the apothecary where Antoine Peychaud first made his bitters. Anyway, the drink:

Gunshop Fizz³

• 2 ounces Peychaud's bitters

• 1 ounce lemon juice

• 1 ounce simple syrup

• 2 strawberries

• 3 cucumber slices⁴

• 3 swaths of grapefruit peel

• 3 swaths of orange peel

• Sanbitter (another Italian red bitter soda that’s very similar to Stappi)

Add all the ingredients except Sanbitter into a mixing tin. Muddle and set aside for two minutes to allow the flavors to blend.

Add ice, shake and strain over fresh ice in a collins glass; top with Sanbitter. Garnish with a cucumber slice.

By Kirk Estopinal & Maks Pazuniak

I promise I’ll try new backgrounds soon!

The first thing that hits me is the grapefruit freshness of the drink — using only the peels instead of the juice makes it taste light and fruity, more like how a grapefruit smells. The grapefruit also works nicely against the bitterness of the Stappi, and I assume the orange blends in there too, since I really don’t taste it on its own. The cucumber gives the whole drink a super-fresh lift, the same way mint would. I oddly don’t really taste anise or anything that reminds me of Peychaud’s, but there is a mild herbal candy quality to the whole thing.

A Gunshop Fizz feels tailor-made for brunch or an afternoon on your porch, but it’s sweet enough that I’d only want to have one. (I first made one of these when I found the Stappi a few weeks ago, and I didn’t add enough soda, which made it taste too cloying and sticky after a while. I didn’t measure this time, but I’d guess it was around 2.5 ounces — just enough for two sips of Stappi⁵ leftover.) It definitely seems like one of the most crowd-pleasing drinks in the book. I don’t see myself drinking Gunshop Fizzes often just because of how many ingredients I’d have to source, but I think it’d be a fun drink to serve to friends.

I’ll be back next week with something much more bitter.

1. Gene’s Sausage Shop, if you live in Chicago and want to get your hands on some Stappi.

2. It’s best known as the official drink of Wimbledon, a coincidence I promise I didn’t plan.

3. From Beta Cocktails by Makysm Pazuniak and Kirk Estopinal, 2011.

4. I ended up with most of a cucumber left over and put it in this zippy cold peanut noodle salad from Hetty Lui McKinnon.

5. Stappi is extremely yummy on its own.