The Rickey is a highball made from any liquor (though traditionally bourbon, rye, or gin), half of a lime squeezed and dropped in the glass, and carbonated water. No sugar is added to the classic Rickey, though occasionally variations are found with a scant amount of sweetener. By proclamation of the city council in 2011, it is the official cocktail of Washington, DC, where it was popularized in the late 1880s at Shoomaker’s bar by Colonel Joseph Kerr “Joe” Rickey (1842–1903), a lobbyist from Missouri, and bartender George Williamson (1849–1915).
As Rickey told the New York Herald in 1893, he “was not the author” of the drink, but “merely its introducer to the East.” He went on to give a detailed account of its origins, the first of at least three that were published during his lifetime. According to Rickey, the drink stems from the answer his St. Louis friend Enno Sander (1822–1911), a Prussian-born physician and chemist, gave him when the colonel asked him why he never drank beer. Sander replied that “a drink that contained carbonated water was more exhilarating, refreshing, and at the same time less intoxicating” and “explained what constituted a proper drink”: whisky, carbonated water, and ice (it should be noted that Sanders was in the carbonated water business). Rickey “thought his argument forceful and logical” and adopted the drink. See highball. His preferred whisky was reportedly Belle of Nelson bourbon, and his preferred water Apollinaris.
To this, Rickey took to adding lemon juice, in an effort to make the drink even more healthful. One day in the late 1880s he ordered one of these drinks over the bar at Shoomaker’s, the Washington, DC, politicians’ hangout that he frequented, and had even owned for a couple of years after Major Shoomaker’s death in 1883. His drink began catching on with the crowd at “Shoo’s,” as the bar was known—only with lime juice, which Rickey disliked, instead of lemon. Rickey attributed the change to one of the bartenders there. That bartender was more than likely George Williamson, who was the “president” and principal barkeep at the bar and who would have a long association with the Rickey. See Shoomaker’s.
Indeed, Washington political writer George Rothwell Brown named Williamson as the Rickey’s actual inventor, relating the story that an unknown stranger discussed with Williamson how drinks in the Caribbean were prepared using half of a lime, gave Williamson some limes, and asked him to substitute rye whisky for rum. See swizzle. The following morning Williamson was said to have made one of these for Col. Rickey, who approved.
But whether it was the Prussian doctor who didn’t like beer, the man from the Caribbean with the limes, or Joe Rickey himself who invented the drink, and whether Rickey actually drank it or not, his friends certainly drank it and associated it with him. The name itself is attributed to both Rep. William Henry Hatch and Fred Mussey, who were said to be present at Shoomaker’s when the drink was created and later came in asking for a “Joe Rickey drink” or saying, “I’ll have a Joe Rickey.” In any case, both the drink and the name were circulating by the end of 1889 and became widespread in Washington the next summer and the rest of America shortly thereafter.
jinrikusha, or rickshaw, was introduced from Japan. (The joke was already circulating in Washington in 1891: “The first thing a toper asks for in Japan is a gin-ricksha,” as the Washington Star phrased it.)Whatever its precise origin, the peerlessly refreshing Gin Rickey became a true sensation, gaining such wide notoriety in the 1890s and 1900s that a 1907 article from the Los Angeles Herald could state: “Now let the warm weather come and let the siphons hiss, because the limes are here ready for the gin rickeys. Three hundred cases of rickeys, or to be more explicit, 2,000,000 junior lemons—for, to be sure, they lacked the carbonic water and gin—arrived today from the West Indies on the steamship Pretoria.”
The Rickey’s popularity waned, of course, and by the 1900s newspapers were already suggesting that the scotch highball and Mamie Taylor were more popular than the once all-conquering Gin Rickey. It never really recovered in the twentieth century, and even its modern revival has extended only fitfully beyond the borders of its hometown.
Recipe: Squeeze half a lime into an ice-filled highball glass and drop in the lime shell. Add 45 ml bourbon or gin and fill with carbonated water.
Brown, George Rothwell. Washington: A Not Too Serious History. Baltimore: Norman, 1930.
“Col. Rickey on Mixed Drinks.” New York Sunday Telegraph, October 6, 1900, pt. 2, 1.
“DC Councilmember to Declare the Rickey as Washington’s Native Cocktail.” Washington Post, July 14, 2011.
Felten, Eric. “A Lobbyist of Special Interest.” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2008. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120855043970227091 (accessed March 10, 2021).
“He Invented Rickeys.” Syracuse Sunday Herald, October 6, 1895, 19.
“Inventor of the Gin Rickey.” Washington Post, October 1, 1911.
“‘Rickey’ Philosophy.” New York Herald, December 3, 1893, sec. 4, 4.
By: Derek Brown
Joe Rickey’s handwritten recipe for the drink that bore his name, 1895: “Large glass—Ice—/whiskey or Gin—/Lime Juice/Carbonated watter/Dont Drink too Many/JK Rickey.”
Wondrich Collection.
Joe Rickey’s handwritten recipe for the drink that bore his name, 1895: “Large glass—Ice—/whiskey or Gin—/Lime Juice/Carbonated watter/Dont Drink too Many/JK Rickey.” Source: Wondrich Collection.