Alabama Slammer

Southern Comfort, amaretto, sloe gin, and OJ — Southern Comfort from New Orleans in 1874, the combination nationally exposed by the 1988 Tom Cruise film Cocktail.

The Alabama Slammer combines Southern Comfort, amaretto, sloe gin, and orange juice in a format that is deliberately sweet, fruity, and more potent than it presents itself. Southern Comfort was created in New Orleans in 1874 by bartender M.W. (Martin Wilkes) Heron, who developed the formula — originally called Cuffs and Buttons — to make rough frontier whiskey more palatable by infusing it with peaches, fruit, and spices; commercial production under the Southern Comfort name began in 1875. Amaretto reached American bars in meaningful commercial quantities in the 1970s, when Italian liqueur importers recognized that the sweet, almond-flavored spirit from Saronno, Lombardy suited American palates far better than the bitter Italian digestivi — Campari, Fernet-Branca — that dominated the Italian market. Sloe gin, made by macerating sloe berries (the fruit of the blackthorn bush, Prunus spinosa, which grows across Europe) in gin, contributed a dark berry note that deepens the drink's color and adds slight tartness. The combination appeared regularly on college and casual dining menus across the American South through the 1980s and received its most prominent national exposure when it appeared in the 1988 film Cocktail, directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Tom Cruise as a New York bartender — a film that despite its critical reception functioned as a genuine cocktail marketing event, driving orders for every drink depicted on screen.