One of The Most popular cocktails in History!
The Long Island Ice Tea is the Rodney Dangerfield of cocktails, it don’t get no respect! But if you see it for what it really is, you’ll see that it’s simply a sour template where the main spirit is split into four with a little dry Cointreau to temper the sweet.
Now given that we’re in a time when cocktails are thought of in a more culinary way and there’s a lot of innovation going on it’s easy to see why this drink get’s lost in the shuffle, it really isn’t very balanced and it is a lot of sweet on sweet on sweet. That said, it is somewhat of a guilty pleasure, it is a household name that is called often, will continue to be called in bars today, Highball drinks are back in fashion and therefore worth our consideration. If you are working in a bar today (and really even if you’re not) you may as well know how to make a Long Island Ice Tea, and if you’re going to learn that, you may as well learn all the major variations too. There are easily another five variations on this drink, using the same template and changing the modifier and the lengthener.
The Long Island came into being the way a lot of cocktails do: A company wanted to sell a product so created a competition for bartenders to push the product. In this case it was Triple Sec and the guy who entered the competition was a bartender named Robert “Rosebud” Butt who worked at the Oak Beach Inn on Long Island, NY around 1972. There is a somewhat similar drink which claims to be the genesis of the Long Island created during Prohibition by a guy known as Old Man Bishop in a community called Long Island in Kingsport Tennessee. The drink is said to have been perfected by Ransom Bishop (Old Man Bishop’s Son) and it consisted of various amounts of the major four liquors with the addition of Whiskey and Maple Syrup. I don’t have the specs on this one, just the story which seems unlikely as it wouldn’t have been created in the 1920’s, lay dormant for 50 years then all of a sudden spike in popularity. But I guess it could have provided inspiration to Mr. Butt if he;’d known about it. All of this is just conjecture, there’s really no way to know!
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Here’s links to the gear I use in this video:
Barfly Copper Measuring Cup
Barfly Shaking Set (Gold)
Barfly Hawthorn Strainer
Barfly Fine Strainer
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Long Island Ice Tea
Ingredients
- 1/2 oz Light Rum
- 1/2 oz Vodka
- 1/2 oz Tequila
- 1/2 oz Gin
- 1/2 oz Cointreau
- 3/4 oz Lemon Juice
- 3/4 oz Simple Syrup
Top
- Coke We used Mexican Coke
Garnish
Glassware
Instructions
- Add ingredients to Tin
- Add shaking Ice
- Shake 8-10 Seconds
- Add Ice cubes to Glass
- Fine Strain into Highball Glass
- Garnish with Lemon Wheel and Maraschino Cherry Flag
The Old Man Bishop and Ransom Bishop story has her own vaidity. since a relative of them both has the recipe from 1920.