The Blue Blazer , one of the more spectacular drinks in the bartender’s repertoire, is ultimately nothing more than a hot, scotch-whisky Toddy, set ablaze and poured back and forth between mugs in as broad an arc as the maker can manage. See whisky, scotch; and Toddy. The drink, strongly associated with Jerry Thomas, enjoyed broad popularity from the 1860s until the beginning of the twentieth century. It was not revived again until the cocktail revolution, when it once again became a popular and highly visual way for bartenders to demonstrate their skill.
The Blue Blazer first appeared in print in 1862, in Thomas’s How to Mix Drinks, accompanied by an engraving of the author mixing one, evidently based on a photograph Thomas displayed behind his bar. While he apparently claimed, in his lost 1863 second book, that “this drink is solely my own,” that might not be strictly true. The American naval officer William Augustus Weaver recalled his fellow sailors during the War of 1812 drinking a “blue blazes.” Admittedly, he gives no description of the drink, but it does raise the possibility that Thomas adapted his drink from something he picked up during his years before the mast. (Another possibility is that he learned it in the late 1850s from the bartenders at New York’s famous St. Nicholas Hotel, just down the street from his job at the Occidental Hotel, who were famous for lighting their Toddies on fire—unless it was he who taught it to them.)
In 1862, Thomas wrote that “a beholder gazing for the first time upon an experienced artist compounding this beverage would naturally come to the conclusion that it was a nectar for Pluto rather than Bacchus.” That devilish display was always the drink’s strong suit, but it was not the only rationale advanced during its heyday for setting the whisky ablaze. As one Chicago barman claimed in 1885, the fire “burns out the sting—the fusel oil, you know.” See fusel oil. Considering that almost all the scotch whisky sent to the United States at the time was undiluted and unaged, there may be something to that idea. Nonetheless, it is clear that the drink’s greatest appeal was the fact that preparing it made the bartender appear, in the words of the New York Sun from 1882, like “a necromancer working up something fine to please the heated tastes of his Satanic boss.”
By the 1880s, however, the flamboyant style of American bartending was becoming increasingly unfashionable, and the Blue Blazer with it. “This drink is seldom called for over a first-class bar,” one Chicago bartender sniffed in 1883. “It is a great country drink, as the ‘jays’ think more of watching the blaze than they do of the drink.” Upon receiving an order for one, Matt Higgins, a cocky young New York mixologist of the new school, would even go so far as to mix it out of the customer’s sight. As a standard bar drink, the Blue Blazer did not make it out of the nineteenth century.
DeGroff, Dale. By 2007, detailed investigation of Thomas and his drinks had uncovered the original (and much easier) high-proof method, and the drink once again entered bartenders’ repertoires, where it resides primarily as a late-night spectacle. While cask-strength scotch whisky is often used as the base spirit, one also encounters everything from rye whisky to Jamaican rum to green Chartreuse to baijiu. See Chartreuse and baijiu.Recipe: Take a pair of metal pint mugs with handles and flaring rims. Pour 120 ml of boiling water into one of a matched pair of metal pint mugs with handles and flaring rims. Quickly add 150 ml cask-strength scotch whisky to the same mug and ignite with a long match or grill lighter. Pick up both mugs and carefully pour three-quarters of the contents of the flaming one into the other. Now pour three-quarters of that back into the first mug, from a greater distance. Repeat four or five times, increasing the distance each time. Snuff each mug with the bottom of the other and pour into four small glasses, each prepared with 5 ml sugar and a twist of lemon peel. Stir and serve.
See also Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”.
“The Barkeeper.” Chicago Tribune, November 25, 1883.
“Barmaids.” Salt Lake Tribune, April 30, 1885 (reprinted from Chicago Tribune).
Campbell, Charles B. The American Barkeeper. San Francisco: Mullin, Mahon, 1867.
“The Kinnickabine Bake.” New York Sun, November 19, 1882.
Thomas, Jerry. How to Mix Drinks. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1862.
Weaver, William Augustus. Journals of the Ocean and Other Miscellaneous Poems. New York: George C. Morgan, 1826.
By: David Wondrich