Wild Irish Rose

A refreshing Irish whiskey sour enlivened with pomegranate sweetness and a splash of soda, creating a beautiful rosy-hued cocktail with origins dating to 1911.

The Wild Irish Rose is a pre-Prohibition Irish whiskey cocktail documented in early 20th-century American bartending guides, combining Irish whiskey with grenadine and lemon juice in a sour format whose pink-red color earns its romantic name. George R. Washburne and Bristow Adams's Beverages De Luxe, published in Louisville, Kentucky in 1914, documented an early version attributed to Samuel Foote of the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago — one of the most celebrated hotels in the Midwest, built in 1889 to designs by Adler and Sullivan and long a center of Chicago's cultural and social life. Hugo Ensslin's Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1916) — the same volume that first documented the Aviation cocktail — recorded a closely related preparation under the name Wild Eyed Rose, establishing the drink's place in the documented pre-Prohibition American bar canon. The formula's relationship to the Jack Rose is direct: both use grenadine and lemon juice as the citrus-and-sweetener combination, with the Wild Irish Rose substituting Irish whiskey for the Jack Rose's applejack. The grenadine's pomegranate color produces the rosy pink that both the name and the visual presentation depend upon, and quality pomegranate grenadine — made from actual pomegranate juice rather than the artificial red sweetener that dominated commercial production through the mid-20th century — provides genuine tartness alongside its color.