Irish Cocktail
A sweet and bitter whiskey cocktail ∙ Stir ∙ 3 min ∙ 28.8% ABV ∙
The Irish Cocktail is a stirred, spirit-forward drink of Irish whiskey, orange curaçao and maraschino liqueur with a dash each of absinthe and Boker's bitters.
Ingredients
1
Servings
Garnish
Instructions for 1 serving
- Pre-chill a glass
- Stir all ingredients with ice: Irish whiskey 45 mlOrange curaçao liqueur 25 mlMaraschino liqueur 25 mlAbsinthe 1 dashBoker’s bitters 1 dash
- Fine strain into the chilled glass
- Express an orange twist over the cocktail and discard
- Garnish with an olive on a skewer
Tips
- One dash of absinthe is plenty; it should stay in the background, and more of it smothers the whiskey.
History
The Irish Cocktail is a whiskey-based member of the family of "improved" cocktails that 19th-century American bartenders built by adding absinthe, curaçao, and maraschino liqueur to a base spirit and bitters. It is documented in Harry Johnson's Bartenders' Manual, with sources dating its appearance either to the 1888 edition or to Johnson's revised 1900 New and Improved Bartender's Manual; the printed recipe calls for Irish whiskey, absinthe, maraschino, curaçao, and Boker's bitters, stirred with shaved ice and finished with an olive and a twist of citrus peel.
The recipe was carried forward into several later bar guides largely unchanged, appearing in Harry MacElhone's Barflies and Cocktails (1927), Harry Craddock's The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), and Patrick Gavin Duffy's Official Mixer's Manual (1934), with only minor differences in garnish between editions.
