The Blackthorn Cocktail was once popular enough to spawn a slew of drinks all confusingly going by the same name. The 1947 Trader Vic Bartender’s Guide has no fewer than five wildly different recipes for the Blackthorn. There’s a Blackthorn made of gin, Dubonnet, and kirschwasser; there’s a Blackthorn of gin, sloe gin, dry vermouth, and orange bitters; there’s one with sweet vermouth instead of dry; there’s one with both sweet and dry vermouth; and then there’s an entirely different Blackthorn—Irish whisky and dry vermouth with a dash each of Angostura and Pernod. The great Blackthorn debate goes back the better part of a century. In his 1922 Cocktails: How to Mix Them, Robert Vermeire, the barman at the Embassy Club in London, allows that “the Blackthorn is a very old cocktail, which is made in two different ways.” See Vermeire, Robert. One is attributed to the legendary barman Harry Johnson and calls for equal parts Irish whisky and dry vermouth with 3 dashes each absinthe and Angostura bitters. See Johnson, Harry. The other version, credited to “Cocktail Bill” Boothby of San Francisco, is made with equal parts sloe gin, dry and sweet vermouth, and a dash each orange and Angostura bitters. See Boothby, Bill. Boothby himself—in the 1908 edition of his manual, The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them—gave the honors for the sloe-gin version to William Smith, bartender at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.
Recipe (Smith’s Blackthorn Cocktail): Stir 30 ml ea. sloe gin, red Cinzano vermouth and try vermouth and 2 dashes orange bitters and one dash Angostura bitters with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and twist lemon peel over the top.
“New Things in Tipples.” New York Herald, November 21, 1897, section 5, 8.
“Shun Blackthorn Cocktail.” Los Angeles Herald, December 13, 1905, 4.
By: Eric Felten