How to Make a Saturn, the Tiki Cocktail for Gin Lovers

Jason O'Bryan
·5 min read

Tiki people tend to be a welcoming sort. It’s the culture’s best characteristic.

Nothing is too weird for tiki, no expression too garish, no outfit too polyester. Everyone’s welcome just as they are, and in a way, the weirder, the better; it’s like Burning Man if you traded hallucinations in the desert for cocktails by the pool. And while those cocktails usually have rum, how perfectly tiki for a gin cocktail to show up wearing a rum cocktail’s clothes, and to be instantly accepted by the community, and raised as one of their own.

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The Saturn seems unusual, but it really isn’t. While it’s one of only two gin-based tiki classics anyone can think of (and the other, the Singapore Sling, isn’t even a real tiki drink), once you get past the base spirit, it’s just a dance card full of old tiki flames: lemon juice, passion fruit, falernum, and orgeat. Honestly the most impressive thing about the Saturn isn’t its novelty (though it’s the first thing everyone always mentions) but rather its precision, balance, and shocking clarity of flavor.

The Saturn is the creation of Joseph “Popo” Galsini, a mid-century bartender extraordinaire who was born in the Philippines in the early 1900s and immigrated to the U.S. in 1928. It’s unclear when he started tending bar (the profession would be illegal until December 5, 1933, when the national bummer of Prohibition was officially repealed), but records find him already a pro in 1941 in Los Angeles, working at a tiki place called Tropics. He’d work all over Southern California for the next 40 years, restlessly bouncing from one tiki joint to another “as if he were on a personal odyssey through every palm-thatched bar in Orange County,” according to an excellent biography by David Wondrich. Prohibition dealt a near-fatal blow to the craft of tending bar, but some of the last holdouts of quality, reverence, and professionalism were, strangely enough, in the baroquely festooned world of Tiki. Among those pros, Galsini was revered.

The Saturn came to him somewhere around late 1966. The cocktail was, actually, first called the X-15, named for the rocket-powered hypersonic plane made by North American Aviation, a source of national pride in the burning years of the Space Race. However, after three astronauts died in a calamitous fire aboard the Apollo 1—a fire for which North American Aviation was largely blamed—Galsini deftly changed the name to the Saturn, for the Saturn Rocket, which had yet to kill anyone and which would later be the first (and still only) rocket to take humans beyond low earth orbit. The cocktail won him the annual California Guild Competition and earned him a ticket to Spain, where he led the other three American bartenders to win the Team Competition, the first such win for his adopted country. He would’ve been around 67 years old.

Galsini remained a fixture at Southern California bars for years. He celebrated his 81st birthday from behind a bar and died at 82. His legacy would’ve been lost to time but for the diligence of historians like Wondrich and the eager embrace of tiki people like Jeff “Beach Bum” Berry, who rediscovered The Saturn and the name Galsini in the mid ‘90s, and here we have it today: A long, fractured story of an 5’4” Filipino immigrant with an unusual and notable talent, a gin cocktail in a land of rum cocktails, and all of it kept alive by a community who treasured them both.

Saturn

  • 1.5 oz. gin

  • 0.5 oz. lemon

  • 0.5 oz. orgeat

  • 0.25 oz. passion fruit

  • 0.25 oz. falernum

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain off ice into a cocktail glass or coupe, and if you’re game for it, garnish with a maraschino cherry around which you’ve wrapped some form of citrus peel to make it look like Saturn and its rings.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Beefeater London Dry Gin
Beefeater London Dry Gin

Recipe: Lots of people blend this drink, or serve it on the rocks, and that’s not wrong, but I personally prefer it up. It can absolutely handle extra dilution from more ice and does taste good that way, but for me, the balance is so cool, the notes so expressive and precise, that I prefer it up just so I can experience that balance every sip without extra dilution putting unnecessary space between the flavors.

Gin: Pretty much everyone advises you to use a London Dry Gin (like Beefeater, Tanqueray, Bombay, etc) and that’s good advice. You want something with a distinct prickly character from the gin, or else you might as well use rum. Indeed—it’s good with rum, just as it’s good with a soft, floral gin like Hendrick’s or Monkey 47, but both make a cocktail that’s a little unspecial. The juniper needles poking through the intense tropical canvas is what makes this drink so great.

Passion Fruit: This is where different recipes diverge. Some people use passion fruit puree, from a company like Perfect Puree, Funkin, or Boiron, which is very tart with no sweetness, and that’s what this recipe above calls for. If all you have access to is a passion fruit syrup, this will have acidity but will also come with sweetness, so you’ll have to adjust (I’d bump the measure of passion syrup to 0.5 oz. and reduce the orgeat to 0.25 oz. and see where your balance falls, tasting to adjust).

Orgeat: Orgeat is an almond syrup common to tiki drinks. Its role here is not only to provide sweetness and almond flavor but also depth, so a real nutty, natural orgeat helps. Brands like Small Hands Foods, Liber & Co., and Liquid Alchemist are most available in my corner of the world, but there’s lots of good brands (Berry himself has Latitude 29 Orgeat that’s well worth picking up, if you see it).

Falernum: Falernum is a lime, almond, and clove syrup that ranges wildly in clove intensity, composite ingredients, and alcohol strength. There are lots of different types of falernum. Happily, I didn’t find one I didn’t like here, as one of the Saturn’s great strengths is its ability to be delicious no matter what kind you use. That being said, I had favorites—the John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum is cheap, relatively easy to find, and gives sumptuous tropical flesh to the passion fruit’s electric acidity.

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