Harvard Cocktail

Brandy, sweet vermouth, grenadine, and bitters — a brandy Manhattan in Harvard's crimson (the university, 1636) with Carpano's 1786 Turin vermouth.

The Harvard Cocktail is a pre-Prohibition American drink that belongs to the tradition of Ivy League-named cocktails and university-themed drinks that circulated in American bar culture around the turn of the 20th century — a fashion that also produced the Yale Cocktail, the Princeton Cocktail, and the Clover Club (associated with the Philadelphia dining club of that name). The Harvard Cocktail's formula — brandy with sweet vermouth, grenadine, and bitters — is essentially a brandy Manhattan with the addition of grenadine for a slight extra sweetness and a crimson hue that references Harvard's own color. The drink appears in early American bartending guides and was particularly associated with bars in Boston and Cambridge, the city and university town where Harvard was founded in 1636 as the Massachusetts Bay Colony's first institution of higher education and the oldest university in the United States. Sweet vermouth, the Italian aromatized wine established commercially by Antonio Benedetto Carpano in Turin in 1786, had become the essential cocktail modifier of the late 19th century alongside Angostura bitters, appearing in the Manhattan, the Rob Roy, and numerous other stirred preparations. The Harvard's use of grenadine — pomegranate syrup used in cocktails since the late 19th century — was a common technique for adding both sweetness and color without changing a drink's spirit character.