Gin

Suffering Bartender

Name: Suffering Bartender
Yield: 1 servings

Glass: Collins

A modern-craft riff on the Suffering Bastard, the joke being that the bartender now suffers building it instead of the bastard customer.

gin rum tiki modern-craft pre-tiki shaken lime ginger

Ingredients

fresh lime juice (0.75 oz)
demerara syrup (0.25 oz)
Angostura bitters (2 dashes)
London dry gin (0.75 oz)
cognac (0.75 oz)
aged pot-still Jamaican rum (0.5 oz)
ginger beer (3 oz)
mint sprig (1)
orange slice (1)

The joke is in the name: Joe Scialom's 1942 Suffering Bastard (#12 in this corpus) was a hangover cure for the suffering customer, a quick build of gin, brandy, lime, bitters, and ginger beer in a ceramic head mug.¹ The Suffering Bartender is a modern-craft expansion that adds Jamaican rum and demerara syrup to the original frame and asks the bartender to do more work, fresh lime instead of Rose's, a layered shake, and a build that no longer collapses into a swizzle.² The structural payoff is a longer, drier drink with overproof Jamaican funk under the ginger beer; the cultural payoff is the bartender's eye-roll when it gets ordered on a busy Saturday.

Brand recommendations. Best: Tanqueray or Beefeater for the London dry gin, Pierre Ferrand 1840 cognac, Smith & Cross or Hamilton Pot Still Black for the Jamaican rum, Fever-Tree or Bundaberg ginger beer, BG Reynolds demerara syrup. Economical: Gordon's or Bombay Dry, Paul Masson VSOP, Appleton Estate Signature, Reed's Extra Ginger Beer, homemade demerara syrup (2:1 demerara sugar to water).

Instructions

In a shaker combine fresh lime juice, demerara syrup, Angostura bitters, London dry gin, cognac, and aged pot-still Jamaican rum.
Shake briefly with ice and strain into a collins glass filled with fresh ice.
Top with ginger beer.
Garnish with a mint sprig and an orange slice.

Sources

"Suffering Bastard." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffering_Bastard (accessed 2026-05-03), confirms Joe Scialom created the Suffering Bastard at Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo in 1942 as an Allied-troops hangover cure; the canonical original recipe (per Scialom's daughter's preserved handwritten copy) was brandy plus gin with fresh lime, Angostura, and ginger beer. This corpus, recipe #12 (Suffering Bastard) carries that 1942 original; #119 (this file) is the modern-craft expansion. ↩
Berry, Sippin' Safari (2017 ed.), Suffering Bastard chapter, covers the original Joe Scialom Suffering Bastard but does not document a "Suffering Bartender" variant by name. The expansion as described here is best treated as a corpus-original modern-craft riff rather than a documented Berry-published variant. ↩
PUNCH cocktail recipe archive. https://punchdrink.com (accessed 2026-05-03), modern-craft catalog. A search of PUNCH does not surface a "Suffering Bartender" entry; the variant as named here is best treated as a corpus-original riff rather than a documented modern-craft canonical drink.