Jack Rose

Applejack, grenadine, and lime in a pink American sour documented since 1905 — the cocktail Hemingway's Jake Barnes drinks in Paris in The Sun Also Rises.

The Jack Rose is an American apple brandy sour with documented recipes appearing as early as 1905, making it one of the oldest continuously served American cocktails featuring applejack as its base. The name's etymology is disputed among cocktail historians: leading theories attribute it to Bald Jack Rose, a New York City gambler and police informant named Jacob Rosenzweig whose testimony helped convict Police Lieutenant Charles Becker in a 1912 murder trial that riveted New York; to the Jacquerose apple variety, a pinkish-red apple whose name echoes the drink's own rose-colored appearance from the grenadine; or simply to the combination of its two main flavor elements, jack from applejack and rose from the pink grenadine. Ernest Hemingway included it in The Sun Also Rises (1926), when the protagonist Jake Barnes drinks Jack Roses at the Crillon bar in Paris, one of the novel's earliest and most deliberate cocktail references — the drink's American identity contrasting with the Parisian setting. Applejack itself has been produced continuously by the Laird family in Scobeyville, New Jersey since documented records from 1698, with commercial licensing from 1780 making Laird's the oldest licensed distillery in the United States. The combination of applejack or Calvados with grenadine and fresh citrus — lime in some versions, lemon in others — is a sour of genuine elegance and remains one of the benchmark American brandy cocktails.