Sazerac

Rye, Peychaud's bitters, and an absinthe-rinsed glass — the iconic New Orleans cocktail that began on cognac in the 1850s before rye became its signature base.

The Sazerac ranks among the oldest American cocktails still in regular production, with a New Orleans lineage reaching back to the mid-1800s. Its name traces to Sazerac-de-Forge et Fils, a French cognac that importer Sewell T. Taylor sold exclusively after giving up his Merchants Exchange Coffee House around 1850. The bar itself passed to Aaron Bird, who rechristened it the Sazerac Coffee House after that very cognac and built the house drink around it — cognac lightly sweetened and seasoned with the aromatic bitters of Antoine Amédée Peychaud, a Creole apothecary who had emigrated from the West Indies and was dispensing his family-recipe bitters in the French Quarter by the 1830s. After Bird's death the establishment passed to liquor importer J. B. Schiller and later to Thomas H. Handy, credited with recording the recipe that first reached print in 1908. Two substitutions reshaped the drink over time: the phylloxera blight that ravaged French vineyards from the 1870s made cognac scarce, so bartenders turned to spicier American rye, which New Orleans drinkers came to regard as definitive. Then the 1912 federal ban on absinthe forced the glass rinse to be made with other anise spirits such as Pernod; the locally distilled Herbsaint, introduced in 1934, eventually became the city's substitute of choice. In 2008 the Louisiana legislature named the Sazerac the official cocktail of New Orleans.