Ward Eight , Boston’s best-known cocktail, is a variation on the Whisky Sour—or rather, a variation on a variation on the Whisky Sour, the Hari-Kari. See sour. Created sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, it would make regular appearances in drink-mixing manuals for decades thereafter until it was given new recognition by Boston bars in the early twenty-first century. Like the Hari-Kari, which took its final form in the early 1880s, the Ward Eight lengthens the standard sour formula with soda water, but then it goes on to add a pair of then-new and trendy ingredients, grenadine and orange juice. While the orange juice is not in any of the earliest recipes, the grenadine is original: along with the Jack Rose, the Ward Eight is one of the first American cocktails to use the syrup. There is, however, an unusual amount of variation in the extant recipes for the Ward Eight, and examples can be found without the orange juice, of course, but also without the grenadine, the soda, or any combination of the three.
There is also a good deal of variation in the accounts of the Ward Eight’s origins. The most widely cited one puts its creation on election eve 1898, at Boston’s historic Locke-Ober restaurant, with bartender Tom Hussion concocting it at the request of members of the Hendricks Club—a social club formed by Martin “the Mahatma” Lomasney, the powerful and wily boss of Boston’s Eighth Ward—to commemorate what they correctly assumed was their leader’s imminent election to the state legislature. That Lomasney, who abstained from alcohol, probably wasn’t at the celebration that night is not even the salient point of dispute (it is more damning that Hussion only started at the restaurant in 1900). Other accounts attribute the drink to another Locke-Ober bartender, Billy Kane, as well Charlie Carter of the Puritan Club in 1903. Also, grenadine was rarely used in the United States until the 1910s. Nevertheless, early recipes for the Ward Eight appear in a 1907 Boston Herald column referring to “the most talked-of drink in Boston” and the 1913 edition of The Cocktail Book: A Sideboard Manual for Gentlemen. The year after Prohibition ended, 1934, Esquire named the Ward Eight one of the year’s top ten cocktails. By the 1950s, it had fallen out of use, although Locke-Ober continued to make a fairly ghastly rendition of it until it closed in 2012.
Recipe (1907): In shaker, stir 20 ml lemon juice and 5 ml sugar; add 7 ml grenadine and 60 ml rye whisky (or 45 ml rye and 15 ml amontillado sherry, as suggested by an old Boston bartender in 1934). Shake well with ice and strain into stemmed goblet. Add 30 ml chilled sparkling water, orange slice, and berries in season. Optional: add 7 ml orange juice or 5 ml orange curaçao.
“The Fairbanks Cocktail Popular.” Boston Herald, August 4, 1907, sec. 2, 12.
Schorow, Stephanie. Drinking Boston: A History of the City and Its Spirits. Wellesley, MA: Union Park, 2012.
Van Nostrand, Albert D. “The Lomasney Legend.” New England Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1948): 435–458.
Wondrich, David. “The Ward Eight Cocktail History.” Imbibe, December 13, 2012. http://imbibemagazine.com/ward-eight-cocktail-history/ (accessed March 15, 2021).
By: Lauren Clark