Sir Walter Cocktail

A beautifully balanced blend of brandy and rum with orange curacao, grenadine, and lemon - smooth despite its potency.

The Sir Walter Cocktail — commonly known as the Swalter — is a pre-Prohibition split-base drink that combines cognac and rum in the colonial punch tradition, enriched with grenadine, orange curaçao, and lemon juice. It first appears in Harry MacElhone's 1927 Barflies and Cocktails and is repeated in Harry Craddock's 1930 The Savoy Cocktail Book. The Sir Walter name places the drink in the tradition of British honorific-themed cocktail naming that was fashionable in American and European bar culture through the 1920s and 1930s, when British titles carried commercial appeal for presentations aimed at aspirational consumers. Whether the name honors Sir Walter Raleigh — the Elizabethan courtier and explorer executed in 1618 — or the novelist Sir Walter Scott is a matter of conjecture; because MacElhone, the likely creator, hailed from Dundee, Scotland, many favor Scott. The drink's two-spirit base of cognac and rum echoes the colonial punch tradition directly: the same pairing of French grape brandy and Caribbean cane spirit that appeared in Fish House Punch (1732) and numerous other 18th-century American punches, here condensed into a single-serve cocktail. The orange curaçao's orange peel and grenadine's pomegranate supply the liqueur sweetness, while a small measure of lemon juice sharpens the balance.