Mysterious London: Midnight Apothecary

Last year Kerry Hammond traveled to Ireland and she blogged about her adventures on Mystery Playground. You can revisit her travels, which included a trip to the Trinity College Library and a walk through James Joyce’s Dublin HERE. This year Kerry visited London and would like to tell us about all of the literary, and sometimes non-literary, things she experienced. Join us each Wednesday, until she runs out of stories, for a recap of her trip.

At Mystery Playground, we love cocktails. We pair books with them (see Drinks with Reads every Friday) and we visit speakeasies to experience these wonderful concoctions as people did during Prohibition. While in London, I took advantage of my impeccable timing to attend this year’s opening day of Midnight Apothecary, a pop-up cocktail bar located on the Brunel Museum’s rooftop garden.

We spent a wonderful night with other cocktail lovers in the garden, next to a fire pit, roasting marshmallows. Since the bar opened in 2012 it has been serving handcrafted cocktails on weekends in this beautiful, fairytale location. Their website says it all:

“Imbibe exquisite alcoholic prescriptions infused with herbs and flowers from the garden or foraged nearby.”

We were prescribed A Bloody Rosemary and Dare to Pear. Both were delicious.

To top off our night, we were treated to a private visit to the Brunel Museum’s underground chamber, which is the actual Rotherhithe Shaft, a circular shaft that was created to help build a tunnel under the River Thames. It was so heavy that its own weight was all that was needed to allow the shaft to sink to the bottom, omitting the need to dig down and remove sand and silt as they used to in order to build a tunnel. The shaft is now fitted with a staircase to allow visitors access to this marvel of engineering.

The best part, other than the tasty cocktails? There was a book involved. Yes, Midnight Apothecary owner, Lottie Muir, has written a book. The book is called Wild Cocktails from the Midnight Apothecary: 100 Recipes Using Home-grown and Foraged Fruits, Herbs, and Edible Flowers. She even autographed a copy for me. I think it will come in very handy for my future cocktail creations.

Check out Kerry's last London post. You can also follow her on Twitter @kerryhammond88. You can find Mystery Playground @mysteryplayground.