Just the thing for a hot summer day. Gin, lime, soda, and plenty of ice: the Gin Rickey.

It’s summer of 1883 in Washington DC. The air shines and wavers, and you can see it as well as you can smell it—the horses, the pavement, the flats of the Potomac River. A few blocks from the White House, on a section of E Street known as “Rum Row,” the dive bars are filling up with journalists, lobbyists, and any legislators who haven’t left town. At Shoomaker’s Bar, sometimes described as the “third room of Congress”, George Williamson is mixing drinks. On the other side of his bar stands Joe Rickey—”Colonel” Joe Rickey of Missouri—who is about to become that rarest of all things, a man with an entire category of drinks named after him.

The cold glass Williamson offers to Rickey contains ice, a pour of whiskey, the juice and shell of half a lime, and soda. Rickey has a taste, wipes his grey moustache, then finishes the rest with what F. Scott Fitzgerald would later call “long, greedy swallows.” The drink is a true cooler, and the colonel orders another, and another. Williamson is no fool; he names the drink after his customer, and the “Rickey” is born.

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