Brandy Sling

A simple colonial-era refresher combining brandy with sugar and water, served long over ice for easy sipping.

The Brandy Sling is a Colonial American preparation that represents one of the oldest documented templates in the American cocktail tradition — predating the formal cocktail category itself and appearing in American tavern records and household accounts from the 18th century. The Sling format — spirit, sweetener, and water, served either hot or cold — was documented in American sources before Jerry Thomas codified it in his 1862 Bar-Tenders Guide, and its structure is simple enough that it requires no professional skill to prepare, which accounts for both its ubiquity in American home culture and its position as a proto-cocktail. The most famous descendent of the Sling family is the Singapore Sling, created by bartender Ngiam Tong Boon at the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore around 1915. Ngiam's gin-based creation expanded the simple Sling structure with Cherry Heering, Bénédictine, and tropical fruit juices into a far more elaborate drink, demonstrating the Sling format's flexibility across cultures and spirit categories. The brandy version was especially common in colonial New England, where apple brandy and peach brandy were the most widely produced domestic spirits and the Sling was the everyday cold-weather drink of working and middle-class households. Adding lemon juice to the standard Sling structure moved the preparation toward what would later be called the sour format, and the Brandy Sling can be understood as one of the direct ancestors of the modern Brandy Sour.