A summer highball built the way a bar should build drinks in 2026: three components made in one prep shift, batched, force-carbonated, poured in 15 seconds. Fig leaf does the aromatic work gin botanicals usually do — coconut, tonka, cut grass. Peach, skins and all, does the fruit. Verjus keeps it dry.
The drink
Fig leaf gin, whole-fruit peach cordial, verjus blanc, water, CO2. Fruit up front, green coconut aroma on the nose, dry finish. No citrus in the build, so nothing oxidizes and the batch holds. Same architecture as a draft cocktail: pre-diluted, carbonated, served without ice in a chilled glass.
Finished-drink targets
ABV: 10%
Sugar: ~55 g/L
Acid: ~5 g/L
Carbonation: ~3 volumes (6 g CO2 per liter)
Clarity: transparent — coffee-filter the batch
Serve: 150 ml, chilled fizz or small highball, no ice
Prep 1 — Fig leaf gin
Fig leaf reads as coconut, tonka bean, and cut grass. Use unsprayed leaves.
Spec — per 750 ml London dry gin (40%)
6 fresh fig leaves (~15 g)
1. Rinse the leaves, tear, combine with the gin.
2. Sous vide 45°C, 45 minutes — or 4 hours in a sealed jar at
room temperature, tasting at 3.
3. Strain through a coffee filter. Rebottle, label, date.
Keeps like gin. Log: date, leaf weight, time.
Prep 2 — Peach cordial
Skins on — they carry most of the aroma and all of the color. Pits out. Cold process; heat cooks the peach and you lose the top notes.
Spec — per 1,000 g strained juice
600 g white sugar
25 g citric acid
10 g malic acid
3 g ascorbic acid
2 g fine salt
1. Halve and pit ripe yellow peaches. Juice, skins on.
Yield runs ~60% — about 1.7 kg fruit per 1,000 g juice.
Weigh the juice, not the fruit.
2. Whisk in the dry ingredients cold until dissolved.
Do not heat.
3. Fine-strain.
Yield ~1.6 L. Two weeks refrigerated; freeze what week one
doesn’t use.
Malic reads as fresh peach, citric as brightness, ascorbic stops the browning. If the peaches are underripe, hold them at room temperature for two days — don’t compensate with sugar.
The batch
Spec — per liter of finished drink
250 ml fig leaf gin
150 ml peach cordial
75 ml verjus blanc
525 ml filtered water
1. Combine. Scale linearly: a 5 L keg is 1.25 L gin /
750 ml cordial / 375 ml verjus / 2.6 L water.
2. Filter the full batch through a coffee filter.
Carbonated drinks must pour transparent.
3. Label, refrigerate. Carbonate the day you serve.
The water is the dilution stirring would have added — measured instead of guessed. Pre-diluted and pre-chilled is what makes ice-less service work.
The filtration is not cosmetic. Suspended fruit particles are nucleation sites: CO2 collects on them and leaves the drink as foam and oversized bubbles instead of staying dissolved. A hazy batch foams at the pour, goes flat faster, and looks dull in the glass. Clear liquid holds its gas and shows the bead.
Carbonation
Target: ~3 volumes of CO2, which is 6 g of dissolved gas per liter. Reference points: draft beer runs 2.2–2.6 volumes, Champagne and seltzer 3.5–4.
Method
1. Chill the batch to 0–2°C. Cold liquid holds gas;
a warm batch foams and under-carbonates.
2. Keg: gas at 30–35 psi, rock for 2 minutes, rest 20 minutes.
Drop the regulator to 12–15 psi for storage and service.
Bottles: carbonator cap, three passes,
venting headspace between passes.
3. Verify by weight: tare the bottle before gassing, vent,
weigh again. Target +6 g per liter of batch.
Two notes on measurement. Pressure is not the spec — the same drink at 3 volumes reads ~14 psi at 0°C and over 20 psi at 8°C, so a psi number is only meaningful next to a temperature. Grams per liter travel with the recipe. The weight check works on bottles with a 1 g kitchen scale; a 5 L keg wants ~30 g of gas, which most keg-capacity scales can’t resolve — for kegs, set 12–15 psi at 0–2°C and let it equilibrate overnight instead.
Service
150 ml into a chilled fizz or small highball. No ice — the drink is already at dilution and temperature, and ice kills the carbonation. Garnish: nothing, or a thin peach crescent on the rim.
The operator math
Ingredients run about $2.00 a serve — 37.5 ml of gin, the cordial, the verjus. At $15–17 on the menu that is a 12–13% pour cost, on a drink where the entire service build is pour and garnish. All three components come out of one prep shift, and the drink scales from a single bottle to a draft line without the spec changing. This is the recipe version of the argument in the prep-systems note: the work happens once, off-peak, measured.
Seasonal builds like this — specs, batch sheets, carbonation SOPs, and the menu they belong on — are what a menu refresh engagement produces. If your summer list still shakes everything to order, fifteen minutes will tell you what it needs.