Income Tax

Gin, dual vermouth, OJ, and Angostura — named for the 1913 income tax amendment, the same Progressive Era politics that produced both the income tax and Prohibition.

The Income Tax Cocktail is a Prohibition-era drink whose sardonic name references two of the most controversial constitutional amendments of the early 20th century — the 16th Amendment of 1913, which established the federal income tax, and the 18th Amendment of 1919, which established Prohibition. Both were products of the Progressive Era's reformist politics, and both were deeply resented by different segments of American society through the 1920s. The income tax had never been permanently implemented in American history before the 16th Amendment, and the imposition of a federal levy on personal income — alongside the simultaneous prohibition of alcohol — created a rich vein of political humor that cocktail naming exploited. The drink's formula — gin, both dry and sweet vermouth, fresh orange juice, and Angostura bitters — places it structurally in the Bronx cocktail family created around 1906 at the Waldorf-Astoria. The dual vermouth structure, combining French dry and Italian sweet vermouth in a single cocktail, was a well-established technique for producing an intermediate flavor register. The drink appears in several 1920s and 1930s American and British bartending guides, its name a small act of cocktail resistance against the era's dual legislative impositions.