Bourbon Rickey

Bourbon, fresh lime, and soda water — the original Rickey, Colonel Joe Rickey's 1883 Shoomaker's Bar order in Washington D.C., the gin version coming later.

The Rickey was created in Washington, D.C. around 1883 at Shoomaker's bar, a celebrated saloon on Pennsylvania Avenue that served the capital's political and lobbying class. The drink was named for Colonel Joe Rickey, a Missouri grain dealer and Democratic lobbyist who was a regular at Shoomaker's and whose preferred drink was bourbon with lime juice and soda water — a combination he apparently consumed in considerable quantity during the Washington summers. The unsweetened, citrus-forward formula was unusual for the era, when most spirit-and-soda combinations included sugar, and the tartness of lime without sweetening gave the Rickey a distinctly dry, refreshing character suited to the hot, humid Washington climate. The gin Rickey, which substituted London Dry gin for bourbon, became more widely known through the late 19th and early 20th centuries — gin's botanicals interact particularly well with the unsweetened lime structure — but cocktail historians including David Wondrich and Ted Haigh have noted that the bourbon version was the original. F. Scott Fitzgerald mentioned the Rickey in The Great Gatsby (1925), when Tom Buchanan mixes gin Rickeys on a hot New York afternoon — a detail that reinforced the drink's association with summer heat and American social anxiety in the era between the wars. The Bourbon Rickey honors the drink's documented origin, applying the format back to the spirit for which Colonel Rickey actually ordered it.