Red Apple

Red Apple is an alternate name for the Washington Apple, a whiskey, sour apple liqueur, and cranberry juice cocktail that emerged as a popular bar shot and short drink in the late 1980s and 1990s, often built with Canadian whisky and served as a party shooter before appearing in longer cocktail form.

A colorful creation story circulates widely: that a carpenter named Christof Guycoogan, working amid a pest infestation that ruined Washington state's apple crop, stumbled into a pile of rotten apples and spilled their juice into his whiskey and cranberry drink, inspiring him to distill the spoiled fruit into an apple liqueur. This account traces to a self-published 2021 e-book by Randy Woodward, a Seattle-area bartending writer, and has been reprinted on many recipe sites since. A closer investigation found no independent record of Guycoogan, no evidence of the described crop failure, and inconsistencies pointed out by cocktail historians and bartenders, leading researchers to treat the tale as unverified folklore rather than documented history.

Separately, a longer version built with vodka, apple juice, lime, and grenadine and served as a layered "Red Apple" or Washington Red Apple has been credited to bartender Wayne Collins of London in the late 1990s to early 2000s, though that build differs from the whiskey-based Red Apple in base spirit and construction.