Hey Rickey!

One of the great joys of cocktail mixing and drinking is deciding to give a moldy oldie that you’ve never tried a runabout, and discovering (yet again) that Granddad and the Boys knew what the heck they were doing. To paraphrase the favorite smack talk of oldsters everywhere, for all the creative achievements of today’s bartenders, I think the old guys may have forgotten as much or more about cocktails than we know now.
Witness the subject of this little excursion, the Rickey. If you are a Baby Boomer or older, you’ve probably heard of a Rickey. And if you are a Baby Boomer or younger, you’ve probably never had one. First off, the Rickey is actually an entire class of drinks, rather than a specific one, just like the Sour, or the Julep… or the Cocktail for that matter. And like most of the base classes, it is dead bone simple on the face of it.
The one disappointing aspect of the Rickey, to my own taste, is that its origin is shrouded in neither mystery nor controversy. It’s pretty well documented, which is no fun at all. Esquire’s cocktail historian does manage to make the story itself entertaining. He details who Colonel Rickey was, and how cocktails made him an influential lobbyist. This is how the Rickey itself came to be:

Anyway, one day in the 1890s, a bartender at Shoemaker’s handed the colonel a little something he was working on — perhaps the one drink known to mixology that can cut through the Precambrian swamp that is the capital in summer. We don’t know the bartender’s name. The colonel went into the lime-importing business. Washington.

My only problem with this story is the last word. It should read, America. For this to be a Washington story, the colonel would have established a domestic lime plantation, then gotten his congressbuddies to pass massive import tariffs on foreign limes. Washington.
Sadly, we still wouldn’t know the bartender’s name.
To make a base Rickey, you take some liquor, some lime juice, and some sparkling water, and serve it in a tall glass over the rocks. Tradition would indicate you leave the squeezed lime half in the glass as garnish. The ratios between ingredients are fungible, of course, but a good rule of thumb to work with is

• 1 part lime juice
• 3 parts liquor
• 8 parts soda water

That’s really all you need for the blueprint, and you can run off to experiment right now. But there are lots of choices to make within this framework, lots of ways to stray outside of it, and lots of my under-edited, purple prose to enjoy, so stick around.
Your first choice to make is what spirit to employ. The two great classics are gin and whiskey. Either bourbon or rye is likely the booze used in the first Rickey served, but gin is perhaps the most famous star. I’ve tried both in recent days, and while I adore the gin version, a Bourbon Rickey made with Bulleit is a heckuva way to take the edge off of a hot, angry, frustrating day. Other common liquors to Rickey-fy are rum and applejack.
Lots of people think you should sweeten a Rickey with a half part of simple syrup or even some grenadine or orgeat (depending on the spirit used). I think sweetening is unnecessary in this drink, even for more timid drinkers, and it removes a little of the bracing refreshment that makes the Rickey such a great summer drink.
If you do want a little sweeter drink, take the advice of David Embury, in his The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, and modify the liquor to a liqueur.

…and liqueurs, perhaps, make the most palatable Rickeys of all. I have introduced dozens of people … to the Apricot Rickey, and each and every one has pronounced it one of the most delicious beverages he has ever tasted.

If you don’t know Embury’s work, 1) Go buy the book. Now. And 2) Listen to him. He knew his stuff, even if he did prefer his Rickeys sweetened a bit.
Embury’s apricot fascination aside (I don’t have any around now, or I’d report on how it works here), the most traditional liqueur for Rickey’s is sloe gin, if you can find a quality one (which I can’t).
The one immutable element of a Rickey is the lime. You can make a drink with lemon instead, but it ain’t a Rickey. Thoroughly squeezing half a modern lime will give you just about the right amount of juice, and plopping the crushed fruit in the drink makes for a garnish that’s just a bit different.
The sparkling water could be just about anything. I usually eschew club soda, in favor of my handy dandy soda siphon. But since Ol’ Spitsky is broken here at Pegu Blog Headquarters, I picked up a six-pack of Perrier to use. The only problem with this is now I’m going to have to keep Perrier on hand in the summer months. It really works well.
You could also sweeten your Rickey by using a soft drink instead of sparkling water. Whip up a Vodka Rickey using ginger beer, and you’ve stumbled onto the Moscow Mule!
As a final note, Embury also steered me to another valuable application of the Rickey. It makes a super Preggatini, sports drink, or kid’s drink. Treat your kids (either indirectly while still under construction, or in their tweens) to a Welch’s Rickey, or a grenadine one. We had a good time last night using fresh watermelon juice for the kid’s drinks. As an aside, pouring Perrier into watermelon juice produces an interesting result. You get a very stable, large bubbled head on the drink. Unfortunately, they were consumed before I could get the camera.
As I said at the outset, the Rickey is a really wonderful drink. It’s hot right now. And if it ain’t humid, it’s really hot. The Rickey can take care of that. Moreover, it’s another source of endless experimentation for the cocktail hound. You can bend it to the whims of lots of different guests with a pretty limited collection of supplies, so it’s a great application for which to set up your traveling cocktail kit.
Cheers!

Tagged as: embury, gin, lime, moscow mule, preggatini, Rickey, washington, whiskey