Chatham Artillery Punch , a nineteenth-century specialty of Savannah, Georgia, bears one of the most famous and, to those who have consumed it, formidable names in the annals of mixology. While there is a great deal of variation among the older recipes for it, they all agree in deploying copious amounts of mixed spirits, minimally cut with lemon juice and sugar, and lengthened with champagne.
The two early accounts of the drink’s origins (from 1883 and 1900) differ slightly in detail, but triangulating between them yields the following account. The punch was created when the Chatham Artillery, a volunteer militia manned by socially prominent young men, was welcomed back to Savannah after an 1859 trip to Nashville. Alonzo B. Luce (1816–1879), an honorary member of the company who owned and tended bar at the Marshall House, the city’s finest hotel, brewed the punch from spirits provided by wholesaler William Murray Davidson, the son of one of Admiral Nelson’s officers at Trafalgar and a lieutenant in the company. At its inception the punch’s formula was simple: according to the 1883 account in the Augusta Chronicle, “One of the horse buckets of ordinary size [12–16 liters] was filled with finely crushed ice; a quart of good brandy, whisky and rum each was poured into the ice, and sugar and lemon added. The bucket was filled to the brim with champagne, and the whole stirred into delirious deliciousness.” The 1900 account, from the Savannah Morning News, gives the same ingredients, plus “a gallon of some light wine.” In any case, as the Chronicle noted, in Savannah, “from that day artillery punch has been a regular convivial institution … and as a vanquisher of men its equal has never been found.”
Savannah was exporting bottled versions of Artillery Punch to the rest of Georgia by the late 1860s. Five years later, it was known throughout the South. By the 1880s, its fame was nationwide. It helped that it had become a custom in Savannah to test visiting dignitaries against “Old Artillery Punch.” Many, including ex-president Chester A. Arthur; Admiral Dewey, fresh from his victory at Manila Bay; and a selection of senators, governors, and justices, went up against it and were found wanting.
By the 1890s, Luce’s simple formula seems to have been modified, judging from published recipes in which catawba wine has replaced the brandy and things such as green tea, pineapples, oranges, strawberries, and maraschino cherries have been added. The results were somewhat less immediately intoxicating, and deliberately so, “experience,” as one recipe writer explained in 1907, “having taught the rising generation to modify the receipt of their forefathers to conform to the weaker constitutions of their progeny.”
With temperance on the rise in Georgia in the 1900s and 1910s, Chatham Artillery Punch began to fade as a civic institution in Savannah. By 1912, it was served no more at official banquets. It made something of a comeback after Repeal, but by then it bore little relation to its former self. Recipes from the time offer a catchall mixture of gin, rye whisky, light rum, Bénédictine, and the now-canonical tea, lemons, and oranges. There is little left of Luce’s simple, elegant formula but the champagne—and, once again, the potency. This version has survived as an occasional social drink in parts of the South. Modern attempts to revive Luce’s formula have proven that its reputation was in no way exaggerated.
punch.Recipe: Seal the peels of 4 lemons and 180 ml sugar in a jar overnight. Add 180 ml lemon juice and shake to dissolve. Pour into a 4-liter bowl half full of roughly cracked ice. Add 250 ml each aged, pot-distilled rum, bourbon whisky, and VSOP cognac. Stir and top with 750 ml chilled champagne.
“Artillery Punch and Other Things.” Atlanta Constitution, March 22, 1900, 6.
Hammond, Percy, and George C. Wharton. Poker, Smoke and Other Things. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907.
“Punch Has Lost Potency.” Savannah Morning News, April 1, 1900, 9.
“Savannah Salad.” Augusta Chronicle, February 18, 1883, 2.
By: David Wondrich
Advertisement for Mike “The Mixologist of Tipular” Quinan’s “O.A.P.” (Old Artillery Punch), Savannah, Georgia, 1870.
Wondrich Collection.
Advertisement for Mike “The Mixologist of Tipular” Quinan’s “O.A.P.” (Old Artillery Punch), Savannah, Georgia, 1870. Source: Wondrich Collection.