Bobby Burns

The Bobby Burns is a Scotch-based riff on the Manhattan, traditionally built from Scotch whisky, sweet vermouth, and a dash of Bénédictine. Its earliest known printed recipe appeared on September 9, 1899, in The National Police Gazette, credited to W. J. Burke of Litchfield, Connecticut — a simpler formula of Scotch, gum syrup, orange bitters, and ginger cordial, without vermouth or Bénédictine. The following year it surfaced as the “Baby Burns” in the Bishop & Babcock Company's 1900 guide, Fancy Drinks.

By the 1900s and 1910s the drink was appearing under the name “Robert Burns” — in the 1908 Jack's Manual and the 1914 Drinks — made instead with Irish whiskey, vermouth, and absinthe, a build carried into the more informally named “Bobby Burns” of Hugo Ensslin's 1916 Recipes for Mixed Drinks. The return to Scotch, and the now-standard Scotch, sweet vermouth, and Bénédictine formula, was fixed by Harry Craddock's 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, through which the name reached wide fame.

The drink's connection to the poet Robert Burns is itself disputed. Albert Stevens Crockett, who named it “Robert Burns” in his 1931 Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Days, suggested it might instead honour a cigar salesman, or simply a brand of cigars sold near the old Waldorf-Astoria, rather than the poet. Regardless, the drink became linked to Burns Night, the January 25 celebration of the poet's birthday.

David A. Embury's 1948 The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks described the Bobby Burns as a variation on the Rob Roy finished with a dash of Drambuie in place of the more common Bénédictine — the same Scotch-and-Drambuie pairing at the heart of the Rusty Nail — while his 1953 edition suggested swapping in Peychaud's bitters for Angostura.