The Clover Club was a pre-prohibition gentlemen’s club that held their meetings once a month at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia from the 1882 to the 1920s. The cocktail by the same name was probably first shaken up at the turn of the last century and was published in New York Press in 1901. It went from being a favorite among the club’s members to making it big in New York when the hotelier at the Bellevue-Stratford, George Boldt, was recruited as proprietor for the Waldorf Astoria on Manhattan.

After having had a good run the Clover Club fell out of favor. In 1939 it was even listed in Esquire Magazine as of the ten worst drinks of the decade and in the 1950s it started being viewed as a ladies drink. Maybe due to the pink color of the cocktail.

Interestingly pink was originally considered a masculine power color and as thus fitting perfectly at the gentlemen’s club. In The Great Gatsby from 1925, Gatsby himself naturally sported a pink suit. Little girls were dressed in light blue and little boys in pink, a color that was said to be “a more decided and stronger color”. This changed in the 1940s and suddenly macho cocktails like the Clover Club and the Pink Lady were giving way to Manhattans and Martinis. 

It wasn’t until the early 2000s when craft cocktails came back in a big way that the Clover Club started reappearing. As a tribute, American mixologist Julie Reiner, opened the Clover Club in Brooklyn in 2008, complete with wooden paneling, leather couches, velvet curtains and a tin ceiling. 

The motto of the original Clover Club went “Who enters here leaves care behind, leaves sorrow behind, leaves petty envies and jealousies behind.”

The glass called Fylgia was designed by Gerda Strömberg in 1930.

Product information

This is one in a series of illustrations of classic cocktail recipes with a selection of the most beautifully designed glasses.

The size 40x50 cm (approx 16x20”) are signed and printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Bright White 310g archival paper and are sold in a limited edition of 50 prints.

The size 30x40 cm (approx 12x16”) are printed on Hahnemühle Fine Art Studio Enhanced 210g archival paper.