So George Bednar got to work. Bednar was a savvy marketing wiz employed by McKesson, the 1960s importer that had America’s Galliano account. Galliano needed a new story, a new drink, and a new mascot. What if they were all the same thing?
Bednar hooked up with Antone “Duke” Donato, a short, Runyonesque, career bartender. Duke was born in Brooklyn, the son of Italian immigrants. As a kid, he ran liquor for bootleggers. After serving with valor in World War II, winning several decorations, he opened a bar in Hollywood called the Black Watch. (As to the bar’s odd name, Duke credited the Black Watch Regiment with saving his life during the war. Duke was so grateful that, every year, on the anniversary of his salvation, he would don Black Watch tartan pants.) The Black Watch, which lasted about a decade, became a celebrity haunt. Duke served the likes of Kirk Douglas, Peter Lorre, Red Skelton, Charlton Heston, Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte, and Shelley Winters. He knew Frank Sinatra. He was that kind of bartender.
Duke also ran a bartending school in Hartford, which is probably where Bednar got wind of him. Duke had invented a couple of drinks using Galliano, including a Screwdriver riff he called—what else?—the Duke Screwdriver. (By the account of Antone’s grandson, the drink may have been invented at the Black Watch in the 1950s.) For Bednar, that name wouldn’t do. How about something snappy, something silly, something memorable? How about Harvey Wallbanger?
You can’t come up with a name like that and not create a person to go with it. So Bednar whipped up two, one human and one cartoon. The human Harvey—fictitious, but Bednar wasn’t letting on—was a hard-drinking, wall-banging surfer named Harvey from California on whom Antone had first tested the drink in 1952 and who then lent his name to the cocktail.
For the cartoon “Harvey Wallbanger,” Bednar tapped an illustrator named Bill Young, who sketched out a sad sack beach bum in sandals whose mug would soon be plastered over posters and T-shirts and what have you. (Young, who received a percentage of every case of Galliano sold, went from driving a Volkswagen to a BMW.)
It was a finely honed, carpet-bombing ad campaign and it worked like a charm. Harvey Wallbangers were served hand over fist in fern bars and clubs. Galliano became the best-selling liqueur in America—quite an accomplishment given how little of the product actually went into the cocktail. There were Harvey Wallbanger parties and Harvey Wallbanger cake mixes. There were “Harvey Wallbanger for President” buttons. Antone did brand work with both Galliano and Smirnoff vodka.
But the Harvey Wallbagner was no Martini or Manhattan. It had legs, but they weren’t very long ones, and by the 1980s it was out of vogue. With the turn of the century, and Galliano’s decision to return its juice to the original, more complex recipe, a few young mixologists tried to bring it back—along with other lost 1970s cocktails—with middling success.
Though it will likely never again experience the widespread popularity it did in the 1970s, the drink will never be completely forgotten, any more than eight-track tapes or pet rocks. It has, after all, that unforgettable name going for it.
Harvey Wallbanger
Choice of vodka doesn’t matter much here. Fresh orange juice does.
1½ ounces vodka
3 ounces orange juice
½ ounce Galliano
Orange wheel
Combine the vodka and orange juice in a highball glass filled with ice and stir. Float the Galliano on top and garnish with the orange wheel.
Other Cocktails
MINT JULEP
Not too many years ago, most any cocktail history tome began with the iconic 1806 definition of the cocktail, as “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.” But recent scholarship has shown us that the Julep, not the cocktail (as then rigidly categorized), can lay claim to being America’s first great mixed drink.
The Mint Julep is the not-quite-sole, but staunchest survivor of one of America’s oldest drink genres, one that predates the Revolutionary War and, very likely (sorry, Kentucky), the creation of bourbon. Virginians were compounding Julep-like refreshments with brandy as morning eye-openers in the mid-1700s. Actually, once upon a time, any spirit would do. A quarter of a millennium later, we have, of course, long since settled on bourbon as the requisite spirit.
Southern aristocrats no longer own the libation. Everyone drinks Juleps. Still, it’s impossible to order a Mint Julep without a certain air of hauteur. You may not be wearing a white suit or sporting a Van Dyke, but you might as well be. The name of the drink itself is a kind of verbal flourish. Mint Julep, though, could be the name of a character in a Tennessee Williams play.
Perhaps it’s due to the drink’s association with warm climates, but the Mint Julep drinker lives in the moment. He or she sees no reason to rush; good things take a little time, as do good drinks. As H. I. Williams wrote of the drink in his 1943 book 3 Bottle Bar, a Mint Julep is “the real McCoy only if the ice is very fine, and the gentle stirring is unhurried. Stop all the clocks and let time stand still for julep parties.”
The Mint Julep drinker also sees no reason to suffer unnecessarily. Why be hot when you can be cool? Why bear the bite of whiskey when you can smooth it out with sugar, ice, and mint? Why exert yourself in tipping a glass back when a straw is available?
It’s a self-indulgent attitude. How apt, then, that the Mint Julep is the signature drink of the Kentucky Derby, one of the more hedonistic events on the athletic calendar: two minutes of competition surrounded by several days of partying. It’s the Mardi Gras of sporting events.
The drink can bring out the poetry hidden deep within the heart of even the most hardened characters, among them journalists. Chris McMillan—a New Orleans bartender, and perhaps the most famous Julep builder in the union—recites, when constructing the drink, an entire article written in the 1890s by a Kentucky newspaperman named J. Soule Smith. “The zenith of man’s pleasure,” runs one section. “He who has not tasted one has lived in vain.”
Whereas journalists go soft in the face of a Julep, politicians, it seems, grow foolhardy. While campaigning to be president in 1860, Senator Stephen Douglas once claimed that the Julep—the ownership of which Kentucky and Virginia have fought over for years—was invented in his native Illinois. And he did this while speaking in Virginia…to Virginians!
If the Julep can drive a wedge between a politician and a voter, it, too, can build a bridge between lawman and lawbreaker. An 1893 story in the Brooklyn Eagle tells of Ned Marshall, a Kentuckian who became a prominent California lawyer. Marshall drank Juleps with the “hardest case in San Diego County” simply because the thief was the only man in the area whose land sprouted wild mint.
But bonding disparate souls is nothing to the Julep. Why, it can save lives. In 1900, a Southern physician insisted a Brooklyn woman administer weak Mint Juleps to her puny newborn, who was suffering through a painful teething. The mother protested. Might the tot not develop a premature taste for liquor, his life forever ruined? Nonsense, insisted the doctor, who pressed his case until the parent acquiesced.
The baby improved.
Mint Julep
The bourbon you use here should be the bourbon you like. Get fresh mint with full leaves. A slightly wilted or brown mint tuft makes for a sad garnish. And be sure to use a silver julep cup. The Mint Julep is a majestic drink. It does not make its home in a plastic Solo cup.
2 ounces bourbon
1 bar spoon rich simple syrup (2:1) (this page)
2 large sprigs of mint
Combine the syrup and one sprig of mint, composed of four or five leaves, at the bottom of a metal julep tin. Muddle gently. Add bourbon. Stir briefly and then add a cup of crushed ice. Stir for 15 seconds and add another cup of ice. Stir again until a frost develops on the outside of the tin. Add more ice, enough to form a dome of crushed ice above the cup’s rim. Insert a metal spoon. Garnish with the second sprig of mint, placed near the straw, so that you get a whiff of its fragrance every time you lean in for a sip.
Gra
sshopper
You need a good crème to cacao, as well as a top-notch crème de menthe, for this drink to transcend the mediocre environs in which the Grasshopper typically dwells these days. Tempus Fugit’s products will do you well. The problem with most modern, artisanal crème de menthes, however, is that many of them are clear, which robs the drink of the brilliant green hue that drinkers expect from a Grasshopper—an attribute that is, quite frankly, one of the drink’s great attractions. But if it’s a choice between color and taste, I’m going with taste.
1 ounce crème de menthe
1 ounce crème de cacao
1 ounce heavy cream
Freshly grated nutmeg
Combine all the ingredients except the grated nutmeg with ice in a cocktail shaker and shake vigorously until chilled and well integrated, about 15 seconds. Strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a dusting of grated nutmeg.
CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL
There’s no living down a name like “Champagne Cocktail.” If a drink is called Champagne Cocktail, it’s a fancy drink. That’s all there is to it. There’s Champagne in the glass and Champagne in the name. It’s a high-toned tipple, and no question. Doesn’t matter if it’s composed of just a sugar cube, a few flecks of bitters, and some wine—an almost ridiculously simple recipe. Simplicity doesn’t equal simple. There’s not much to a little black dress, either, after all, but damn if it ain’t sophisticated looking.
The Champagne Cocktail is so sleek and simple and elegant in profile that it almost seems wrong to call it a cocktail at all. But the name is accurate, and a cocktail, in both theory and soul, it is. In formula, it adheres to the old definition of the cocktail (liquor, bitters, sugar) as much as that ur-cocktail, the Old-Fashioned Whiskey Cocktail, but with wine used instead of spirit, and a flute instead of a rocks glass.
Though the drink feels utterly modern, like something F. Scott Fitzgerald might have sipped at in between dips in the Plaza Hotel fountain, the Champagne Cocktail is actually quite an old idea. The drink appeared in a book at its very first opportunity, in bartender Jerry Thomas’s groundbreaking 1862 manual. Thomas kept it simple: wine, sugar, bitters, twist. Some bartenders between that year and the dawn of Prohibition in 1920 did what they could to tart the drink up, throwing mint, pineapple, strawberries, and all sorts of fruit in the glass. (In this way, too, the drink’s history mirrors that of the Old-Fashioned, which got fruitier as it got older. One wonders whether the lobbyists from the American Fruit Company spent a lot of time hanging around bars.) But wisdom returned with Repeal, and the drink is generally served pretty simply in most bars.
And why not? Why reach for gaudy fruit when you’ve got that sugar cube in there, slowing dissolving, releasing a stream of fine bubbles and sweetness into the drink? This is a drink that comes with its own built-in fireworks.
Champagne Cocktail
Use a dry Champagne in this, well chilled.
Champagne, to top
3 to 4 dashes Angostura bitters
1 sugar cube
Lemon twist
Place the sugar cube at the bottom of a Champagne flute and saturate it with bitters. Slowly fill the glass with Champagne. Garnish with the lemon twist—the more ornamental, the better.
BRANDY ALEXANDER
In the early 1970s, John Lennon, on a break from his wife, Yoko Ono, dove head first into an infamous “lost weekend,” bar-hopping with his close buddy, singer and gadabout Harry Nilsson, and generally making a lost-boys spectacle of himself. The spree reached its peak of notoriety in March 1974, when Lennon and Nilsson were thrown out of the Troubadour in Los Angeles, where the Smothers Brothers were performing. That night just happened to be the one when Nilsson, an accomplished drunk, introduced Lennon to the pleasures of the Brandy Alexander.
Lennon eventually returned to Ono, and his reputation rebounded. Nilsson’s never quite did. “It still haunts me,” Nilsson said in his final interview, before he died in 1994. “People think I’m an asshole and a mean guy. They still think I’m a rowdy bum from the 1970s who happened to get drunk with John Lennon, that’s all. I drank because they did. I just introduced John and Ringo to Brandy Alexanders, that was my problem.”
That was pretty much the last the world heard from the Brandy Alexander. It was hardly a handsome send-off for a drink that had once been both popular and respectable. Even as the twenty-first century dawned, and old cocktails were being regularly rescued from obscurity by missionary mixologists, it was difficult to find a Brandy Alexander on the menu at any upstanding cocktail den. Bartenders had bravely charged into the fast-collapsing, burning house that was the pre-Prohibition cocktail catalog to save the Aviation, the Last Word, the Brandy Crusta, the Martinez, and many more before they were lost forever. But when it came time to rescue the Brandy Alexander from that attic bedroom in the back and to the right, the bartenders collectively shrugged, muttered, “Screw it,” and walked away. It wasn’t worth it.
The Brandy Alexander wasn’t alone. Most cream cocktails were judged as being beyond reclamation, including some rather good ones, like the Grasshopper. It was the one old category of cocktails that bartenders and drinkers just couldn’t get excited about. Americans’ habits had changed since the mid-twentieth century, when such after-dinner drinks still enjoyed a place at the table. People were eating and drinking lighter, or were trying to, anyway. And they avoided sweet drinks like the plague. The name Brandy Alexander telegraphed both “heavy” and “sweet” to most ears.
Though it’s the brandy version we know best today, the Alexander cocktail began as a gin drink, making its first appearances in books in the years before Prohibition hit.
The drink had a fair amount of cred among the cultured classes once upon a time. Evelyn Waugh saw fit to have Anthony Blanch, the 1920s aesthete in his novel Brideshead Revisited, drink them—a fact fellow English author and drinking expert Kingsley Amis knew. Amis wrote that the drink was deceptively strong. But, then, he was accustomed to quadrupling the amount of brandy. The vain and imperious critic and columnist Alexander Woollcott reportedly thought enough of the drink to insist it had been named after him. Tennessee Williams, while writing A Streetcar Named Desire in New Orleans, would drink one daily and then swim fifteen lengths in the pool at the New Orleans Athletic Club—a practice I would not recommend for anyone other than a self-destructive genius.
The original gin drink is very good but lacks the fullness of flavor of the brandy version. In a Gin Alexander, it’s the cream you taste, not the liquor. That’s not the case with the brandy version. If you use a good, dry cognac, and a good crème de cacao, the Brandy Alexander is a very satisfying after-dinner quaff with a distinct spiritous edge. It is, as Stanley Clisby Arthur wrote in his Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ’Em, “Smooth as cream, delicate as dew and easily prepared.”
Actually, Arthur wrote that about the gin version. Imagine what he would have written about the Brandy Alexander.
Brandy Alexander
There aren’t many good crème de cacaos on the market; find the one made by Tempus Fugit, a distiller in California.
2 ounces cognac
1 ounce crème de cacao
1 ounce cream
Freshly grated nutmeg
Combine all the ingredients except the grated nutmeg with ice in a cocktail shaker and shake vigorously until chilled and well integrated, about 15 seconds. Strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a dusting of grated nutmeg.
White Russian
This rather unsubtle, postwar favorite was restored to relevancy by the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski, in which Jeff Bridges’s sublimely unfazed Dude drinks them religiously. It’s a good drink if you’re not inclined toward a lot of thinking at the moment (which was just about any moment for the Dude). The vodka ensures it doesn’t approach the flavor complexity of a Brandy Alexander. But if both vodka and cream and coffee are among your favorite things, this may be your jam.
1½ ounces vodka
¾ ounce Kahl�
�a
¾ ounce heavy cream
Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake until chilled and well integrated, about 15 seconds. Strain into a chilled Old-Fashioned glass.
Acknowledgments
For their help and contributions, both big and small, I’d like to thank Talia Baiocchi, Deborah Berke, Julio Bermejo, Adam Bernbach, Jeff Berry, Greg Boehm, Jacob Briars, Jackson Cannon, Toby Cecchini, Meaghan Dorman, John Dye, Eben Freeman, Dan Greenbaum, Paul Harrington, Jason Kosmas, Brad Thomas Parsons, Del Pedro, Debbie Rizzo, Joaquín Simó, Nick Strangeway, Alan Sytsma, Sother Teague, David Wondrich, and Dushan Zaric. Special thanks to my agent David Black, for his constant help and guidance, and my smart and sane editor Emily Timberlake, who is ever a joy to work with and always “gets it.” Greatest thanks, as always, to my teenage son, Asher. In not too many years, Asher, you’ll be 21, and we’ll finally be able to walk into a bar and laugh together over a drink about the weird way Dad makes a living. This will all make more sense in retrospect. I promise you.
About the Author
ROBERT SIMONSON writes about cocktails, spirits, bars, and bartenders for the New York Times, to which he has contributed since 2000. He is the author of A Proper Drink and The Old-Fashioned, and a contributor to The Essential New York Times Book of Cocktails and Savoring Gotham. His writings have appeared in Saveur, Food & Wine, GQ, Lucky Peach, Whisky Advocate, Imbibe, Milwaukee Magazine, and Punch, where he is a contributing editor. He is also coauthor of the cocktail app Modern Classics of the Cocktail Renaissance. A native of Wisconsin, he has lived in New York City since 1988.
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