The Highball is a resolutely simple drink: spirits, sparkling water, and ice. Its roots go back to the Austrian Spritzer—white wine and soda-water—and George Gordon, Lord Byron, who popularized it in the first part of his work Don Juan, where, in a stanza widely excerpted by the British press when the poem’s first cantos were published in 1819, he extolled the virtues of “hock [i.e., German white wine] and soda-water” (2.180) as a hangover cure. (He had probably been exposed to the drink while wintering in Venice, then under Austrian control.) If in Venice it was a summer cooler, in Britain it was mostly taken as Byron suggested, often while invoking his name.
By the 1830s, British hangover sufferers had found a way to rectify the Spritzer’s main defect, want of strength, by replacing the wine with brandy. Brandy and Soda became one of the most popular drinks of the mid-nineteenth century, both as a morning drink and as something for gentlemen to sip at their clubs. A decade later it had spread from London to New York, where it was much affected by the fast-living Broadway swells. Yet while its popularity in England stretched to the end of the century, in America it was soon replaced by other, more recondite beverages— fizzes, rickeys, coolers, and the like. See fizz; Rickey; and cooler.
With the rise in popularity—and evolution in quality—of scotch and Irish whiskies, British drinkers began mixing those with soda too (the practice seems to have gained its first firm foothold in Ireland). Once the oidium and then phylloxera epidemics of the second half of the century began biting into the cognac supply, Whisky and Soda became the standard. Eventually, the drink jumped the Atlantic, but it took a while—Americans traditionally looked more to Paris than to London for their fashions, in clothes and otherwise. Besides, the only scotch whisky imported was heavy malt whisky, used exclusively in Hot Toddies, while Irish whisky was usually drunk in punch, and domestic whiskies were generally consumed neat or in cocktails and sours. See toddy; cocktail; and sour. One comes across the occasional pocket of Rye and Soda or Bourbon and Soda drinkers, but there were not many.
American Francophilia began to yield to Anglophilia in the 1870s, in drinks as well as elsewhere. The (British) Collins began to take off, and with it Old Tom gin. See Collins and Old Tom gin. By the late 1880s, the British Whisky and Soda was beginning to appear in fashionable New York bars, complete with the blended scotch whisky that made it so palatable in Britain. At first, it was merely, as a Pittsburgh newspaper dubbed it in 1891, “the latest drink among the ultra-fashionable young men in the Fifth Avenue clubs,” making it a symbol of the “dude,” the effeminate, Londonized New York dandy. By 1895, though, it was rapidly edging into the mainstream, pushed in large part by the craze for another Scottish creation, golf. It also gained an American name, “Scotch Highball.”
The etymology of “Highball” has been much debated. In America, the word was used in baseball, poker, and railroads, in each to mean a different thing. In Ireland, whence a great many of New York’s bartenders hailed, a “ball” was a short glass of whisky. The name could have come from any of these; no Rosetta Stone has been found to tell us which, but the preponderance of the evidence points to the tall glass theory: as a Pennsylvania newspaper put it in 1892, “A ‘high ball,’ in the lingo of the bar-keeper, is above four fingers” (i.e., a drink higher in the glass than the width of four fingers).
Cuba Libre. During American Prohibition, however, it was these sweetened versions, such as the Gin Buck, that proved the most popular. That popularity continued through the 1930s and 1940s and soon spread to encompass Latin America (see Batanga) and beyond. By the 1950s, the Highball was one of the dominant forms in which spirits were consumed worldwide, both in its dry original version and in its sweeter variants such as the Gin and Tonic and the 7 and 7 (Seagram’s 7 Crowns blended whisky and the lemon-lime-flavored 7-Up). See Gin and Tonic and Seagram Company Ltd. That has not changed, although the late 2010s saw a movement in the more artistic bars to upgrade the drink in both its ingredients and its techniques (conspicuous in the latter is the use of the Japanese Suntory highball machine, which pre-chills the liquor and hyper-carbonates the water).Recipe: Pour 45–60 ml spirits into a tall, ice-filled glass. Add 60–90 ml chilled sparkling water or other carbonated beverage. Stir lightly.
“A Little Off Once a Year.” New York Sun, March 9, 1890, 16.
“Girls Who Want Husbands.” Pittsburgh Daily Post, March 7, 1891, 9.
“Hot Weather (a Rhapsody).” Dublin Evening Packet, June 16, 1835, 3.
“Quaker City Notes.” Harrisburg (PA) Telegraph, December 12, 1892, 2.
“The ‘Scotch High Ball.’” Wilkes-Barre (PA) Weekly Dollar News, May 23, 1896, 8.
By: David Wondrich