Alexander's Sister

A minty twist on the creamy Alexander family, combining gin with creme de menthe and fresh cream for a cooling after-dinner treat.

Alexander's Sister is a gin-based variation on the Alexander cocktail family — the cream-spirit-liqueur format documented in American bars from around 1915 — that substitutes gin for brandy and green crème de menthe for the chocolate crème de cacao that defines the Brandy Alexander. The result is a cocktail of pronounced mint and gin character, lighter and more herbal than the richer, warmer chocolate-and-brandy original. The Alexander family's origin has been attributed to Troy Alexander, a Philadelphia bartender who reputedly created a white-on-white drink — gin, white crème de cacao, cream — for an all-white dinner party, though the attribution is disputed and multiple Alexander variants existed by the 1920s. The naming convention of using familial relationships — Sister, Brother, Son — to identify spirit-swap variations was a standard pre-Prohibition American bartending practice that acknowledged the structural relationship between drinks without requiring new naming frameworks. Alexander's Sister appears in mid-20th-century American cocktail guides as an after-dinner drink whose mint character served the same digestive function that the Stinger's crème-de-menthe-and-cognac combination provided, while the cream's richness and the gin's botanical complexity produced something more elaborate than either the Stinger or the Brandy Alexander alone.