The Long Island Iced Tea , notorious for its innocent-tasting potency, is served worldwide and has spawned numerous alcoholic beverages with “tea” in their name. Its most-cited origin story is that bartender Robert “Rosebud” Butt (1947–2014) created the drink for a cocktail contest among the bartenders at the popular Oak Beach Inn in Oak Beach, New York, on Long Island in 1972. His winning recipe was equal parts rum, vodka, gin, tequila (all the white spirits in his well), and triple sec, with splashes of sour mix and cola, served over ice. In his 1998 book, Scandal at the Oak Bach Inn, Robert Matheson, the bar’s owner, confirms Butt’s claim but cites 1973 as the year of the drink’s creation. In a PBS Digital Studios profile of Butt in 2013 and on a website Butt created about the drink, he dismisses an anecdote (from a 2006 book) that the Long Island Iced Tea derives from a Prohibition-era drink called the Old Man Bishop, and indeed that claim is completely undocumented. (Another widely repeated claim, by Long Island bartender Craig Weisman, that he and his coworkers created the drink at the popular catering hall Leonard’s of Great Neck founders on the fact that the drink was already well known on Long Island when he began working there in 1976.) TGI Friday’s, which started in New York City in 1965, also claims to have invented the drink, again without documentation. In any case, the drink first surfaced in 1976 when a Long Island newspaper identified it as a “currently popular, brain-destroying discotheque fad drink.” Within five years, it had spread to the rest of America, and soon after to the rest of the world.
Recipe: 30 ml each of rum, vodka, gin, tequila, and triple sec with splashes of sour mix and cola. Serve over ice.
See also TGI Friday’s.
DeGroff, Dale. The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2008.
“Long Island Iced Tea.” Inventors, February 21, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRwCjlfyNGQ (accessed February 18, 2021).
“Long Island Iced Tea.” OED Appeals, April 21, 2013, citations. http://public.oed.com/appeals/long-island-iced-tea/ (accessed February 18, 2021).
Lowe, Ed. “Practicing before the Bar.” Newsday, October 7, 1976, 1A.
By: Lauren Clark
Ladies’ Night drink ticket from the Oak Beach Inn East, Hampton Bays, New York—the home of the Long Island Iced Tea, 1981.
Wondrich Collection.
Ladies’ Night drink ticket from the Oak Beach Inn East, Hampton Bays, New York—the home of the Long Island Iced Tea, 1981. Source: Wondrich Collection.