Brooklyn Cocktail is a name that has been applied to a great many drinks saluting New York City’s most populous borough. The only thing that most of them have in common is their inventors’ desire to create a drink to rival the Manhattan and the Bronx Cocktail. The earliest on record, a rum Manhattan, dates to 1883 but apparently never left the hushed precincts of the Brooklyn Club, where it was created. In 1908, Manhattan bartender Jack Grohusko got in on the act with a harmonious combination of rye whisky and sweet vermouth accented with maraschino and Amer Picon. See Picon. His was not the last word—over the next few years, various compounds would be invented, christened as Brooklyns, and floated in the pages of American newspapers, only to be ridiculed, dismissed, and forgotten. See Grohusko, Jacob Abraham “Jack”.
After Repeal, the Brooklyn Eagle, the borough’s leading newspaper, wondered why there wasn’t a Brooklyn Cocktail and invited submissions. In the process, Grohusko’s old recipe was excavated from the pages of Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book. Unfortunately, Craddock had pinched the drink not from Grohusko directly but from Jacques Straub’s 1914 Drinks, where it was altered to use dry vermouth instead of sweet, yielding a rather awkward drink. Neither it nor any of the other Brooklyns caught on, not then and not in 1945, when the Bronx borough president reopened the question by taunting Brooklyn in print over its lack of a signature drink. See
The modern cocktail renaissance happening to coincide with a renaissance of Brooklyn the borough, there has also been a renewed interest in Brooklyn the cocktail. See cocktail renaissance. Grohusko’s old warhorse has been dusted off, its resurrection hampered only by the need to work around the Amer Picon (altered from its original state and, in any case, unavailable in America), but modern mixologists have also taken to inventing their own riffs on his formula, naming them after the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, such as Red Hook and Greenpoint. In fact, these variations are probably more popular than the Brooklyn itself, bringing the matter of the Brooklyn Cocktail back to square one.
Recipe (Grohusko’s): Stir with ice 45 ml each straight rye whisky and sweet vermouth and 5 ml each Amer Picon or substitute (such as Amaro CioCiaro) and maraschino. Strain into chilled cocktail glass and twist lemon peel over the top.
See also Bronx Cocktail and Manhattan.
Currie, George. “George Currie’s Brooklyn.” Brooklyn Eagle, December 13, 1945.
Grohusko, Jacob A. Jack’s Manual. New York: J. A. Grohusko, 1908.
By: David Wondrich