The julep or Mint Julep, with spirits, sugar, water, mint, and ice, is the oldest of the canonical American mixed drinks and is the recipe that more than any other spread the gospel of iced drinks in the country. The drink’s name is older than the drink itself: originally, a julep—the name is ultimately derived from gûl-ab, the Persian word for rosewater—was a medicinal mixture of water and an infused syrup. Occasionally, these also tasted good, but eighteenth-century British medical books abound in examples involving such profoundly untasty things as camphor syrup. There are also examples of “mint julep,” some of them containing small amounts of mint-flavored spirit, although it is generally supplemented by things such as salt and syrup of balsam.
In Britain’s American colonies, however, “julep” began to take on a new meaning. In 1770, a Williamsburg, Virginia, newspaper printed a poem on foxhunting by one “S. X.,” with the couplet “The sportsmen ready, and the julep o’er, / Which doctors storm at, and which some adore.” Clearly, this is not a medicinal drink. Descriptions of just what the Virginians meant by a julep begin to appear in the 1780s. It was a rather more spirituous affair than the English medicinal juleps: “water, sugar, rum, and mint,” as a 1787 ode to the drink defined it (under its alternate, more technical, name, Mint Sling); generally, the rum outweighed the water by a considerable amount. See sling. The preponderance of the evidence points to a Virginia origin for the drink, but there is a 1721 item in a Boston newspaper that mentions “a dram of rum and mint-water” without further explanation, as if it were a known drink (it is likely that the “mint-water” here is in fact a distilled cordial). Whatever the drink’s ultimate roots, though, it is with Virginia that it was most closely associated.
It is also in Virginia that the drink’s most important addition is first attested to, in 1807: ice. Iced, the julep became a supremely cooling beverage, perfect for the hot summers encountered in North America. In 1817, according to one who knew him, Orsamus Willard of New York’s City Hotel, the premiere hotel in the country, was taught to make iced julep by a patron from Virginia. See
By the 1820s, rum was out of fashion for juleps except as a float for aroma. See float. French brandy; domestic peach brandy; Spanish, French, and Portuguese wines; Dutch gin; citrus, pineapple, and all kinds of berries in season rapidly found their way into the drink, particularly when it was being concocted by African American bartenders such as John Dabney. See peach brandy. The one spirit rarely encountered was whisky, considered déclassé for what was perceived as an elegant, even aristocratic drink (albeit a stiff one). Even as late as 1862, when Jerry Thomas included the julep in his pioneering Bar-Tender’s Guide he assigned the title “Mint Julep” to the brandy version, with the Whisky Julep appearing among the drink’s variations. The United States Civil War, however, reversed that relationship: from the 1870s on, Mint Julep increasingly was understood as a whisky drink, and a plain one at that: gone was the rum float, the bits of fruit, and the wines and brandies. It was also increasingly understood as a purely southern drink: what had been a universally popular bar drink became a ritual of southern identity, complete with plantation trappings such as white gloves and silver cups. Whatever popular currency it had left was destroyed by Prohibition. In 1938, after Repeal, Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby, made a longstanding tradition explicit by naming the bourbon Mint Julep its official drink. From then on, the drink was condemned to be trotted out once a year on Derby day, a fate from which not even the cocktail renaissance has liberated it. See cocktail renaissance.
Recipe: Stir 10 ml sugar and 15 ml water in a tall glass. Add 6 mint leaves and press lightly with muddler. Pack glass with finely cracked ice. Add 90 ml brandy or bourbon or rye whisky. Stir, add more ice to counter shrinkage, and add 3-4 sprigs of mint. Add straw. Optional: float 15 ml aromatic Jamaican rum on top.
“Brief Notes of the Metropolis.” Buffalo Daily Courier, June 18, 1851, 2.
“Epistle to Mr. M-k-e.” Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, March 17, 1787, 3.
“Fire Works.” Norfolk Gazetteer and Publick Ledger, May 4, 1807, 3.
Modern Practice of the London Hospital. London: 1764.
S. X. “A Short Poem on Hunting.” Virginia Gazette, January 11, 1770, 2.
“To the Readers of the Courant in New Hampshire.” New-England Courant, December 18, 1721, 3.
By: David Wondrich
Jerry Thomas’s (brandy-based) Mint Julep, with slices of citrus and berries lurking in the forest of mint, from his 1862 book.
Wondrich Collection.
Jerry Thomas’s (brandy-based) Mint Julep, with slices of citrus and berries lurking in the forest of mint, from his 1862 book. Source: Wondrich Collection.