The Jack Rose , a mix of applejack, lime juice, and grenadine, is (along with the Bronx and the Clover Club) one of the triad of popular drinks that, in the first decade of the twentieth century, made it permissible for a cocktail to include citrus juice. See applejack; grenadine; Bronx Cocktail; Clover Club; and cocktail. It also served, for much of the twentieth century, as applejack’s toehold in the bar: it was the last applejack cocktail standing.
The creation of the Jack Rose was variously attributed in its day, including to “Bald Jack” Rose, a New York gambler at the heart of the sensational 1912 Becker-Rosenthal murder case; Frank “Jack Rose” May, a Jersey City, New Jersey, bartender and wrestling aficionado; John Coleman, steward of Philadelphia’s august Union League Club; and Martin Curry, steward of the tony Tuxedo Club in Tuxedo, New York. There is one more attribution, however, which is both older and better supported than any of those. In 1899, a reporter for the New York Press noted, in an item on what bartender Frank Haas was mixing for the city’s stockbrokers at Fred Eberlin’s downtown bar, that the Whisky Daisy was popular there, but that “the jack-rose is the pet of many connoisseurs.” Indeed, Eberlin’s was famous for the drink, and in 1913 the long-serving Haas (he had been at the bar since the 1870s) gave his recipe for it: applejack, raspberry syrup, and lemon and orange juices; in other words, a Whisky Daisy with applejack. (This is practically identical to the version printed by Jack Grohusko in his 1908 Jack’s Manual; his bar was near Eberlin’s and drew on the same clientele.) See Grohusko, Jacob Abraham “Jack”. The name was apparently derived from the Général Jacqueminot, or “Jack” rose, a then-popular hybrid that the drink resembles in color.
By 1913, however, the drink had escaped the narrow confines of downtown New York, getting an update in the process. Gone was the delicate combination of citrus juices; now, it was straight lemon juice or the trendier lime juice. The old-fashioned raspberry syrup was, as was common at the time, replaced with grenadine, also trendy. There were even those who splashed some gin and/or vermouth in the drink (those, too, being trendy ingredients), or threw in an egg white. But it was the simple, three-ingredient version that survived the twentieth century, barely, and made it to revival in the twenty-first. While not one of the standard-bearers of the cocktail renaissance, the Jack Rose is nonetheless a foot soldier in good standing: a solid classic that has its adherents (indeed, in the renaissance’s early days Boston even had a Jack Rose Society, comprised of most of the city’s top bartenders). See
Recipe: Shake with ice 60 ml applejack, 15 ml lime juice, and 15 ml grenadine. Strain into chilled cocktail glass.
“A New-Old Drink.” New York Press, April 28, 1899, 10.
“Cocktail War Divides Brokers into Four Hostile Camps over Bartenders.” New York Evening Telegram, January 26, 1913, 9.
Grohusko, Jack. Jack’s Manual. New York: J. A. Grohusko, 1908.
By: David Wondrich