Gin Rickey

Gin, fresh lime, and soda — no sweetener whatsoever, the format Colonel Rickey requested at Shoomaker's D.C. around 1883, Fitzgerald using it in The Great Gatsby.

The Gin Rickey was developed at Shoomaker's bar on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. around 1883, created for or by Colonel Joe Rickey — a Missouri grain dealer and Democratic Party lobbyist who was a regular at the saloon and whose preferred combination of bourbon with lime juice and soda water gave the format its name. The gin version, which applied the same unsweetened citrus-and-soda structure to London Dry gin rather than bourbon, became more widely famous than the original bourbon preparation and eventually superseded it in commercial recognition. The Rickey's defining characteristic is the complete absence of sweetener: where virtually every other spirit-and-citrus combination includes sugar or a sweetening liqueur, the Rickey presents gin and lime juice alongside soda water without any moderation, producing one of the driest long drinks in the cocktail canon. Washington's notoriously hot, humid summers gave the unsweetened, effervescent Rickey its commercial logic: in the days before air conditioning, a dry, cold, effervescent drink was a genuine physical relief. F. Scott Fitzgerald made the Gin Rickey a literary touchstone in The Great Gatsby (1925), in a memorable scene in which Tom Buchanan mixes gin rickeys at a Plaza Hotel suite as the summer heat and moral tension simultaneously reach their peak.