The Story Behind Berkley’s Ultimate Seasonal Cocktails

A bartender who helped open one of the most influential bars of her generation. A gin created by the residents who drink it. And two cocktails built from the smell of warm grass, childhood summers and the first blackberries of autumn. Not, perhaps, what you might think of when you think of care.

At the bar in Leycester House, Warwick, Irina Miroff is being exact about salt. A few drops of saline from a pipette, then she stops. “A little bit of salt with the sugar makes everything better,” she says. “It makes all the other flavours pop.” This is the last touch before the shake in the cocktail mixer. The glass is already chilling, because the drink she is making is served straight up and she wants it cold for as long as possible on a hot day.

The drink is called The Meadow. There is a second, The Berkley Bramble, for the other hinge point of the year, autumn. Both are being created for Berkley using Golden Hour, the gin that residents developed with the award-winning Sky Wave distillery last year. And both began with a brief most bartenders never get: create two special cocktails for a care group that has its own bars, its own gin and a clear idea that an evening drink should be as considered as everything else.

But Irina did not make them alone. The cocktails were created with the hospitality team at Leycester House, a true collaboration between the bar and the home.

Why a luxury care home commissioned its own cocktails

When Berkley approached, the first thing Irina noticed was the ambition of the request. “I thought it was really cool that they wanted to have cocktails for a care group,” she says. “That they had a bar is not the most common association you have with a care group. And that they wanted to do something different. Not just a basic offering of beer, wine and spirit mixers, which is great, but to actually elevate it and go above and beyond. To create a cocktail that would be a signature one.”

What sealed it was the gin. “I loved that they had their own gin, and that the residents had been part of picking it out and creating it,” she says. “They’d done a test group. Somebody didn’t just decide this was the gin they were going to make. They actually took the care to try it out and see what the residents wanted. It feels like a very nice way of doing things.”

There was something else too. “It’s not that often you get a clientele of people over sixty,” she says. “It made me think of my parents, and what drinks they like. And I love how being ‘elderly’ now has changed so much. It used to be that life sort of slowed down. Now people don’t need to. They have time to really enjoy it. I love that.”

Meet the mixologist: Irina Miroff

Irina has been making cocktails for around eighteen years, and her career reads like a short history of the modern drink. She was invited onto the opening team of Milk & Honey, the members’ bar that brought the New York speakeasy to London, and worked alongside its founder Sasha Petraske in those early months. “An extremely talented, visionary, inspirational human being on every level,” she says. “I learned so much.”

Milk & Honey was where the craft was codified: the big clear ice cubes, the precision about how a drink was built, the insistence on getting it right. And one of its rules has stayed with her. “No name-dropping. Everybody was treated the same.”

A gin made by the residents who drink it

Before a single cocktail, there was the gin. Golden Hour is the house spirit residents created with Sky Wave, tasting and debating botanicals at the distillery until it was theirs. For a mixologist, it turned out to be a gift. “It’s a very easy gin to work with,” Irina says. “Very smooth, well-rounded, classically built. It’s got a really lovely silky mouth feel. Gins that are stronger on the juniper, or that have elements standing out more, can be harder, because you have to build the cocktail around them or they jar. This one you can work around.”

She experiences flavour physically, the way some people experience colour. “When I buy clothes, the actual feeling of the fabric on my skin matters as much as how they look,” she says. “It’s the same with drinks. I see flavours as textures, streams, flows.” With the gin’s softness as her starting point, she set out to build two drinks that were harmonious and gentle, and at the same time fresh and full.

The Meadow: a summer remembered

Irina’s brief was two seasons. For summer, she went looking in her own past. “I’m quite nostalgic, a little romantic about the past,” she says. “When you think of summer, the first thing that pops into my head is my childhood summers. Running around in fields. Going on holiday with my parents. I wanted to bring that feeling, the smell, the sense of those memories, into the present.”

So, The Meadow is built around the scent of a summer. Wildflower honey for sweetness. Orange blossom water, added a few drops at a time, for a sense of warm grass, honeysuckle and meadow flowers. Wild nettle cordial for something green and hedgerow-ish. And, in place of tonic, a measure of Suze.

“I read that the residents’ favourite drink was a gin and tonic,” Irina says. “So I wanted to bring a slightly bitter element. But I didn’t want to use tonic. Everybody knows what tonic tastes like. I wanted to bring something else, while staying true to the flavours they already love.” Suze, the French gentian aperitif, does that work for the drink.

Shaken hard, served straight up in a chilled glass and finished with a single yellow flower, The Meadow is summer the way you remember it.

The Berkley Bramble: an autumn harvest

For autumn, Irina turned from the meadow to the hedgerow, and to the things that come good at the end of the year. “I wanted to capture the bounty,” she says. “The harvest, all the fruit, everything that comes to fruition.” She works with local ingredients wherever she can, “with a little bit of flair, because we all like a little exotic in there.” The drink leans on rosehip, another childhood memory. “We used to pick rosehips. Very sour. My mum made a syrup from them that was supposed to keep you healthy all winter. And the rosehip flower is one of the most fragrant in the world.”

So there is rosehip syrup, lifted with a few drops of rose water. There are blackberries, crushed for their juice and their deep colour. And there is a little vanilla, because, as Irina puts it, vanilla belongs with blackberries the way it does in a blackberry pie. Lengthened with soda and served tall, The Berkley Bramble is the longer, deeper drink, a refresher with full flavour for a cooler evening.

A meeting of minds: introducing Emilia

Irina did not work alone. The cocktails were created hand in hand with the team at Leycester House, led by hospitality manager Emilia Williams. If Irina came from the world of the world-class cocktail bar, Emilia arrived from the other end of fine hospitality: twenty years in fine dining and Michelin-starred restaurants, before she chose to change direction.

What she found at Berkley was a version of the world she already knew. “Berkley combines care with a luxury environment, which felt very familiar to me coming from that background,” she says. The home, the residents, the kindness, the way the managers stay involved, the teamwork: these are the things Emilia talks about when she explains why she made the move.

It meant the collaboration started on common ground. Two people who had spent their careers at the top of hospitality, sitting down over Golden Hour gin and a notebook, working out what a Berkley cocktail should be. “Working with Irina felt very easy and natural from the beginning,” Emilia says. “We worked so well together that we even exchanged numbers afterwards.”

For Emilia, much of the pleasure was in watching the drinks take shape. The best part, she says, was seeing Irina’s passion and creativity throughout. And it was the thinking behind the cocktails, as much as the cocktails themselves, that stayed with her. “What stood out to me most was how thoughtful and complex they were,” she says. “I loved the ingredients Irina used, and the stories behind them.”

Then came the test that mattered. The residents. “They really enjoyed them,” Emilia says. “They love being included in activities and experiences like this. And of course, they do appreciate a good cocktail.”

That, in the end, was the whole point: drinks made by people who care, for people who know exactly what they like.

Care reimagined, in a cocktail glass

What was powerful for Emilia was to see was the change in perception from someone not used to working in care. Irina arrived expecting a care home and found something she had no real category for. “It didn’t feel like what I’d normally associate with care at all,” she says. “Everything was clean and beautiful. Lovely areas outside, the bar. It almost felt like a lovely hotel. A cosy one. Just a really nice space to be in.” She has been telling friends about it since.

What moved her most was a detail that had nothing to do with cocktails. “I loved that Berkley homes have a hairdresser,” she says. “Little things like that get tricky as you get older. Even in a care home, normally you need a relative to do it, or to book someone, or to go somewhere. To just have it there at any time is amazing. You have that elevated option.”

There is the thread running from the gin to the glass. A house spirit the residents made themselves. A mixologist who has worked in some of the best bars in the world, here to make something the residents would return to. The thread goes further too: a hospitality team with a Michelin-starred background to help create these cocktails and ensure all Berkley homes serve it perfectly. But the point was never the cocktails on their own. The point is what these cocktails also represent – a later life about exciting experiences, discovery and pleasure. That care is taken to make sure every element of the day delights and engages on a different level.

The old idea that later life is when everything slows down is out of date. At Berkley, the simple evening drink proves it. This is care reimagined, served straight up.

The Berkley Cocktail Menu

Shake hard, strain and serve straight up in a chilled glass. Finish with a single yellow summer flower.

Shake, strain over fresh ice into a highball and top with soda. Garnish with flowers.

Top tips: how to make the best cocktails

You do not need eighteen years behind a bar to borrow Irina’s thinking. A handful of principles run through both drinks, and through almost everything she makes.

Start with a generous measure. “At least a double shot in every cocktail,” she says. A drink that tastes thin and watery is usually one that was undercharged on the gin.

Then reach for salt. It is the step most people skip at home, and the one Irina calls the magic ingredient. Three or four drops of saline, no more. “A little bit of salt with the sugar makes everything better,” she says. “It just makes all the other flavours pop.”

Be gentle with the powerful aromatics. Orange blossom water and rose water can carry a drink or ruin it, so Irina measures them with a pipette, a drop at a time. “It’s a lovely ingredient, but it’s easy for it to overpower,” she says of the orange blossom. “You want it in the background, marrying with the flavours, without taking over.” Five or six small drops is plenty.

Balance the sweetness with lemon. “You’ve always got to have some lemon juice,” she says. “To balance out all the sweetness.” Honey, syrup and fruit all pull a drink one way. Fresh lemon pulls it back.

Then think about the season, and about memory. The best seasonal drinks taste of a time and a place. For summer, Irina reaches for the bright and the floral: wildflower honey, orange blossom, a fresh aromatic that brings back warm grass and meadow flowers. She keeps it short, shakes it hard and serves it straight up in a chilled glass, because a straight-up drink should be cold and stay cold. Fine strain it on the way in, so no shards of ice thin it out in the glass.

For autumn, she builds longer and deeper. Hedgerow fruit, rosehip, a little vanilla to round it off. Pair flavours the way you would in a kitchen: “If you think of blackberry pie, I always think vanilla with blackberries.” Lengthen it with a splash of soda, which opens the flavours and makes it the kind of drink you can sit with as the evenings draw in. And always more gin than soda, Irina jokes with a grin.

To try a signature cocktail, drop in to a Berkley Care Home and ask at our bars.
Or book a tour with us today.