The History of the Sazerac

Some of America’s food and drink staples have stories of disputed origin. Who was the first person to put a hot dog on a bun? How about officially calling it a hot dog in the first place? Who invented the hamburger? Or who coined the name cheeseburger?

But the first cocktail is one significant American culinary creation whose story we know definitively—mostly.

With its roots deep in the vineyards of France dating back to the 17th century, the Sazerac is a drink that reflects much of America’s cultural and economic history. You could make the argument that it’s a drink that embodies the American character in its first century of existence.

The Sazerac has a strong flavor built on simple foundations, with a good deal of help from the French.

Older than the apple pie that has long been shorthand for Americana, the Sazerac has typified New Orleans. And if New Orleans is the height of drinking culture, that must mean the Sazerac is not just the Crescent City’s first cocktail, but truly America’s cocktail.

The Louisiana House of Representatives certainly thought so when, by majority vote in 2008, it declared the beverage the official cocktail of New Orleans.

The Sazerac’s history reveals much more than just the birth of cocktail culture; it also tells us about the political, cultural, and economic journey America has been on for the past 170 years.

The grand narrative of a country is found at the bottom of a rocks glass.

The secret is that there is no secret. The history is straightforward, and the ingredients and the taste even more so.

The Sazerac has adapted to changes in American politics and global markets. But no matter how much it’s changed, it’s always been the same.

How to Make a Sazerac

There’s a lot to cover, so you might want to pour yourself a drink and relax. Better yet, make yourself a Sazerac. Here’s what you’ll need and what you’ll need to do.

Ingredients

• Rye whiskey
• Peychaud’s Bitters
• Herbsaint
• Sugar cube
• Ice
• Lemon peel (garnish)

Preparation

1. Grab two rocks glasses. Put some ice in one and set it aside.
2. In the other glass, add a sugar cube and 4 dashes of bitters. Muddle until the sugar is mostly ground but still a little granular.
3. Add 2 oz. of rye whiskey or cognac. Stir for 20–30 seconds.
4. Remove the ice from the chilled glass. Swirl ½ oz. of Herbsaint or absinthe in it, coating most of the inside of the glass. Pour out the excess liquid.
5. Add the contents of the mixing glass to the chilled, absinthe-rinsed glass.
6. Rub the lemon peel around the rim of the glass and place it on top before drinking. Serve and enjoy!

The scent of lemon and the ascending notes of absinthe reach you before the drink does. It’s less a preparation and more of a first wave, with each sip further commingling the flavors into something more than the sum of its parts.

Granules of sugar brush against the tongue and the roof of the mouth briefly before dissolving. Each remnant of sugar works to keep the bitters from living up to their name.

If you’re using Sazerac Rye Whiskey, the drink’s blazing cherry color will have you expecting an overload of sweetness. However, the infusion of all the ingredients results in a balanced concoction that’s sweet, strong, and bold—one that makes it all too easy to drink and to forget how many you’ve had.

While it may not make the drink any sweeter by the time you’ve reached the bottom of the glass, knowing the rich history of the Sazerac can only embolden the experience: knowing what the drink has been through, from its inception to the bar in your neighborhood or the bar in your dining room.

Like the drink, it’s a history best consumed in sips, not shots.

Sip One: The Family Sazerac

Before it was a drink, it was a family.

Sometime in the 1630s, north of Bordeaux in the heart of the Cognac region of western France, the Sazerac family began operating a vineyard and distillery to make eaux de vie—basically clear brandy.

Nearly 150 years would pass before a descendant, Bernard Sazerac, began to make cognac under the family name. Before housing a great number of aging barrels in Angoulême, just east of the Cognac region, Bernard purchased the Jardins du Logis de Forge: a massive estate with vast hills and far-reaching vineyards. The gardens there produced some of the richest grapes in all of France.

Bernard even took the name of his new estate, becoming Bernard Sazerac de Forge. Complete control over all his affairs passed to his son, Laurent, in 1791—just a decade after Bernard assumed responsibility for Logis de Forge.

The 18th century was ending, and the birth of the world’s first cocktail was on the horizon.

Did you know? During the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin, America’s first ambassador to France, requested that cannons be manufactured by the Sazerac family. Louis Sazerac answered the call.

Sip Two: Bitterness and Sweetness

From France to the French Quarter.

An apothecary opened at 123 Royal Street in New Orleans in 1834. A sign out front read: “The Best Bitters, Peppermint, and Alcohol.” The shop belonged to Antoine Peychaud, a 31-year-old Creole who had made a name for himself selling his wares to coffee houses throughout the city.

Peychaud’s Bitters are still available to this day. The young pharmacist combined gentian and alcohol for medicinal purposes, mostly to help with anything from hiccups to upset stomachs.

Peychaud would often entertain friends (allegedly fellow members of a Masonic lodge) in the Royal Street apothecary after business hours. Always curious, he would experiment by mixing his bitters with spirits such as brandy and absinthe.

Eventually, he put all three in a glass together, then began to toy with the proportions until they were just right. The concoction may have been nameless at the time, but Peychaud had invented what is widely accepted as the world’s first cocktail.

It depends on your definition of a cocktail, but everything we know about mixology today can be traced back to Antoine Peychaud’s experimentation in the mid-1800s.

From the very beginning, the brandy used in Peychaud’s amalgam was Sazerac de Forge et Fils.

By the early 1840s, Peychaud’s mixture had attracted the attention of Sewell Taylor, owner of the Merchants Exchange Coffee House. Taylor began serving it in his shop, and since he used only Sazerac brandy, customers would come in and request a Sazerac cocktail.

Over time, though, Sewell Taylor began to think that simply owning a shop was for the birds. The real money was in importing brandy, not slinging it over a counter. And so, in 1850, Taylor sold his coffee house to Aaron Bird.

Bird made moves of his own early in his proprietorship. He relocated the shop to Royal Street and renamed it the Sazerac Coffee House.

Sip Three: Changing Ingredients

Aaron Bird proved to be an intelligent businessman. During the formative years of the Sazerac’s life, Bird purchased the rights to the bitters from Peychaud. It was clear how essential these bitters were to the identity of the drink. Bird didn’t just want pieces; he wanted the whole thing.

Some changes came out of necessity. For instance, what happens when you’re in the middle of the Great French Wine Blight and the vineyards needed for Sazerac brandy are decimated en masse?

Simple: go domestic.

Production and distribution of French brandy ground to a halt in the late 1850s, when an invasive pest found its way to French vineyards. Numerous European countries were affected by the plague of grape phylloxera (an aphid), but none faced as much devastation as France.

Back stateside, Aaron Bird sold the Sazerac Coffee House at the first sign of trouble. That left its new owner, Thomas Handy, scrambling to save its star cocktail.

Meanwhile, the production of rye whiskey in America was steadily increasing, especially in the Northeast. Handy did what any bartender would do: he kept costs down. He began substituting rye for brandy.

After the change was officially made, the Sazerac Co. began to bottle and sell its pre-mixed cocktail.

Brandy wasn’t the only Sazerac ingredient to disappear from the original recipe. Remember that little absinthe rinse we used earlier? Well, an aphid may be able to destroy brandy, but it takes a law to get rid of absinthe.

Absinthe, sometimes known as the Green Fairy, was rumored to cause a great number of side effects, chief among them hallucinations. There were reports that a man even died from drinking it.

And so, in 1912, amid so much bad press, absinthe was banned in the United States.

Another ingredient bites the dust.

Luckily for bartenders around the country, especially during Prohibition, the answer was anise-flavored liquor—Herbsaint in particular. Herbsaint was created to replace absinthe, banking on the fact that the ban was practically unenforceable.

It worked. To this day, ordering a Sazerac in New Orleans means Herbsaint is part of the mix—even though the ban was lifted in 2007.

The Sazerac House

Before a pest plagued French vineyards and before absinthe paranoia flourished, the Sazerac House was established in New Orleans, legitimizing the cocktail’s integral role in early drinking culture.

The 1850s saw the Sazerac and its ingredients quickly rise in popularity, largely thanks to visibility in the press. A series of advertisements in a local paper in 1852 featured the first mention of the Sazerac House.

These ads, posted by Antoine Peychaud, let readers know that his family recipe for bitters was available at the Sazerac.

Sip Four: Same Sazerac, Different Owners

During the 1860s, the Sazerac House changed hands like a baton in a relay race. Aaron Bird died in 1860, leaving J.B. Schiller, an importer of Sazerac brandy, to take over. By the end of the decade, Schiller himself was in poor health, and he died only months after selling the Sazerac House to Thomas Handy, one of the House’s longer-tenured clerks.

Just a few years after taking over the Sazerac House, Handy placed an ad in the papers to let customers know that his establishment was the only place one could find brandies produced by Sazerac de Forge et Fils.

Unfortunately for Handy and the entire Western world, the 1870s were a time of economic crisis. Handy’s exclusive announcement came in the same year as one of the worst economic periods in American history: the Panic of 1873.

Sip Five: Everyone’s Going to Need a Drink

After agriculture, the railroad industry was the second largest in the United States—and for good reason. Some 33,000 miles of track were laid across the nation in the five years leading up to 1873. Over-speculation and over-expansion eventually breed collapse, and that’s exactly what happened to the railroad industry.

As with gold mining before it and oil drilling to come, the railroad boom devolved into the get-rich-quick schemes and high-yield-for-little-investment pitches that still catch Americans off guard to this day.

The problem with dreams is that they rarely come true. For many Americans in the early 1870s, railroads turned out to be an investment that led to ruin more often than to wealth.

Railroad over-speculation was only part of what went wrong. In 1871, the German Empire ceased silver production, instantly dropping the value of the precious metal throughout the world.

That led to the demonetization of silver in the United States. The United States had once had a bimetallic economy, based on both gold and silver standards. The Coinage Act of 1873, passed by Congress, saw to it that we would use only a gold standard to support our national banking system.

Suddenly, all the silver mines out west, especially in Nevada, weren’t as valuable as before. The money supply took a significant blow, and many of America’s farmers who relied on silver to offset their debts were now at risk of collapse.

It only got worse from there. As if the Apocalypse were nigh, America’s centers of commerce and industry were ravaged by fire, death, destruction, and pestilence.

One of the worst fires in recorded human history decimated Chicago in 1871. More than 3 square miles of the Second City were destroyed, causing $222 million in damage and leaving more than 100,000 people homeless.

The following year, another of America’s worst recorded fires tore through Boston. It took only 12 hours for nearly 1,000 buildings to be reduced to ash and rubble, causing more than $73 million worth of damage. And that’s $73 million in 1872 dollars.

Around the same time Boston was burning, the horses of New England and the Mid-Atlantic were dropping dead. The largest outbreak of equine influenza hit in the fall of 1872, quickly spreading through most of the stables in New York.

Of 100,000 horses throughout the Empire State, approximately 7,000 caught the flu. Close to 10% of those horses died from the virus, and the rest were too sick to travel or work.

Transportation in New York essentially stopped in its proverbial tracks, and with it the movement of goods throughout the state and region. Even with the ubiquity of railroads, horses were still essential to the well-being of the economy.

How does all of this financial crisis affect a cocktail flowering in New Orleans?

Sip Six: A Bitter Bitters Battle

The depression unleashed by the Panic of 1873 would come to an end by 1879, but not before our own Thomas Handy suffered his downfall. Handy invested money—clearly too much—in the railroad industry. A victim of over-speculation, Handy had no choice but to dissolve the Sazerac company.

Handy was forced to sell the business to one of his employees, Vincent Micas. Micas renamed the company and entered into a business relationship with Antoine Peychaud.

Handy might’ve been down, but he damn sure wasn’t out.

Just a couple of years after standing on the razor’s edge of financial ruin, Thomas Handy was able to open up shop again. The only issue was that his new shop was practically next door to Micas’s, and both men advertised that they were the only ones importing Sazerac brandy.

Awkward…

It wasn’t long before this bitter bar rivalry ended. Micas took his business, renamed the Sazerac Barroom, over to Camp Street. Handy, feeling that he was finally back in the game, reopened the Sazerac House in its original location on Royal Street.

In 1883, Antoine Peychaud, the man who first put the Sazerac’s ingredients together, passed away. It was also around that time that Vincent Micas sold his Sazerac Barroom.

Thomas Handy, for all intents and purposes, was the last to carry the torch of the Sazerac’s legacy.

Thomas Handy survived bad investments, financial ruin, and a bitter rivalry to be the Sazerac’s saving grace. And then came the aphid, destroyer of grapes and vines throughout Europe.

The phylloxera blight also contributed to the rise in absinthe’s popularity in France—nowhere more so than in Paris—since the wine economy was virtually destroyed.

We know that absinthe would be forced underground in 1912, but why rye whiskey and not bourbon, a spirit just as popular in the American South?

The answer is simply a matter of taste. Literally.

Rye has a bite that bourbon doesn’t: a punch that isn’t too pugnacious, with a taste that welcomes the citrus rim more than bourbon cares to.

Rye replaced brandy; Herbsaint replaced absinthe. And over a hundred years later, the Sazerac remains the same. Sure, it has variations and imitations, but there’s only one Sazerac: simple, strong, and always a little sweet.

The Sazerac: America’s first drink.