This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to London
Sinking cocktails with your pre-teen children on a Saturday afternoon in a country house hotel may sound a little irresponsible. But we have signed up to a family cocktail masterclass, and we are just following instructions. Propping up the blue ceramic curved bar at Cowley Manor Experimental, my children (11 and nine) are getting stuck into a herbaceous warming take on an Old Fashioned made by the hotel’s head bartender, Simon Rouse.
In place of spirits, he used a mix of Everleaf Forest, a non-alcoholic aperitif made from saffron, vanilla and orange blossom, with some chai tea for warmth and a slug of a punchy homemade rose geranium syrup. It’s a leap for the children’s taste buds from the usual overly sweet tween soft drink fare — and they are still processing.
Meanwhile, Rouse is spritzing our wintry twist on a French 75 with a “mushroom mist”, diffusing the air with a mulchy umami odour. Coined “Shrooms and Sherry”, our grown-up drink is a heady savoury combination of fig liqueur, a porcino amontillado sherry and Hine, a cognac. It is the perfect earthy aperitif ahead of a mini foraging mission in the hotel grounds, in search of edibles in the undergrowth for our next concoction.
This afternoon activity is taking place at Cowley Manor Experimental hotel on a rainy late-winter afternoon. In 2022, the Paris-based Experimental Group took over Cowley, a long-established luxury spa hotel near Cheltenham, just under two hours from London by train.
Cocktails are core to the group’s offering. Indeed, it all began with drinks rather than hotels — it opened its first cocktail bar in a side street in Paris in 2007 and a speakeasy above a mini-market in London’s Chinatown that same year. I visited the latter shortly after it opened and it felt aloofly cool and threateningly chic compared to anything else in London at the time.
“Cocktail masterclasses are something we’ve done over the years,” says Xavier Padovani, partner and director at Experimental Group, “and foraging was a natural extension allowing us to share the beautiful wealth of ingredients outside alongside our bartender’s expertise.” Foraging has also, of course, become trendy — de rigueur, even — as an experience for urbanites hoping to connect with nature without getting too muddy. Cowley Manor Experimental is not alone in seizing the moment — a bunch of other luxury hotels throughout the English countryside are offering similar experiences too (see below).
At Cowley, foraging is also a way to appreciate the house’s extraordinary grounds up close. Known for its stunning facade, splendidly Italianate landscaped gardens with playful vistas and cascading waterfall spurting from the mouths of gargoyles, it is also thought to have inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (the writer apparently stayed frequently at the manor).
Walking around in the late-afternoon mizzle, it isn’t hard to see why. The sheer scale of its mature trees — from ginkgo biloba to giant sequoias — makes one feel Lilliputian, even from far off. Our eyes however were trained to the ground. Mushrooms, Rouse told us, would be hard to spot under the carpet of leaves and moss; thank goodness for that, I thought — I was definitely ready to move on to something a little sweeter. Instead, we headed to the manor’s herb patch to pull up leaves of sage, bay, mint, thyme and lemon balm, as well as flame-coloured nasturtium flowers for garnish. Rooting around in the mulchy undergrowth, we filled up our paniers with fragrant leaves, and headed back to the house before the skies opened.
While the gardens are magisterial in winter, we had definitely come at the wrong time of year for edibles. In the coming months, foragers can look forward to elderberries, ground elder, nettles, sweet woodruff and blackberries — all of which can be muddled and distilled into exciting brews.
Back at the bar, we were swiftly served up warming Tom & Jerrys, an airier take on an eggnog, created originally by bartender Jerry Thomas, known as the father of American mixology, whose 1862 Bar-Tender’s Guide was probably the first book in the US to lay down recipes for many of today’s classic cocktails. A mugful of egg yolks and vanilla sugar, mixed with fluffy egg white, steamed milk and nutmeg — and a good measure of cognac and Jamaica rum for the over-18s — seemed more of a knockout nightcap rather than a pre-dinner tipple. The children glugged theirs down in one go, surfacing with milk moustaches, while we proceeded with more caution, knowing that a final creation awaited.
The Experimental group branched out into hotels in 2015 with a property in Pigalle, partnering with interior designer Dorothée Meilichzon, who created a distinct visual language for most of its properties — a dose of Parisian cool that is playful and sexy in its commitment to curved surfaces, surprising colour combinations and highly tactile furnishings.
When I heard about the group’s takeover of Cowley Manor, I wondered how this bold aesthetic would translate in the heart of the chintzy Cotswolds and how Cowley would fit into its snazzy portfolio of cool locations from Biarritz to Ibiza. It is, I thought, all a bit . . . experimental. That said, approaching the honeyed Grade II-listed facade, along the crunchy gravel drive, there was nothing to suggest it had even changed hands — except, my daughter noticed, a minuscule door had been fitted into the bottom one of the topiary bushes in front of the house. Under its new ownership, a nod to Alice runs subtly throughout, from the ceramic head of a March hare used to serve crudités at afternoon tea to a mouse-sized door in the skirting board of our room, and other delightful details at eye level for younger guests.
While the beautiful bones of this historic building have been duly respected, Meilichzon has created a striking retro-future feel with custom-made furniture, furnishings and lighting that makes one feel as if you are in the château of a groovy French pop star, rather than in the heart of wellies-and-walkies land.
The hotel’s bar is the funkiest room of all, a centrifugal pull for guests on a wet, wintry evening. Cosy yet cool, with wood panelling and mirrors, it has a strong 1960-70s feel. We were invited to venture behind the bar-top — this was the moment when the family was to be let loose. For mocktail No. 3, the children chose a mix of syrups and soda and were given a chance to shake it all up themselves. Other guests didn’t seem particularly bothered to see two diminutive mixologists on the wrong side of the bar, jiggling their creations as vigorously as they could until their fingers began to stick to the shaker with cold.
For our third drink, my husband and I went in hard with the botanicals — sage, bay leaf and lemon verbena syrups, with a good measure of gin and a splash of thyme-infused vermouth. The result was an eye-wateringly herbaceous zinger of a martini, which neither of us could finish. “It can take a day or so to get a new cocktail right,” reassured Rouse.
After this third potent concoction, we staggered from the bar to the excellent restaurant, overseen by chef Jackson Boxer. “Would you like a cocktail to begin with?” said our waiter when we sat down. “We’ll just see the wine list, please,” I said weakly.
At a glance:
‘Foraging a Drinkable Feast’ at Cowley Manor Experimental
Rebecca Rose was a guest of Cowley Manor Experimental
Have you been on a cocktail masterclass — and if so, what were the results like? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
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