In Defense of the Long Island Iced Tea

He is out there somewhere, on a vinyl stool under a television playing a game nobody is watching, and he orders it without flinching. A Long Island Iced Tea. The bartender’s shoulders drop about an inch. Two people down the bar exchange a look. And our man, blissfully, does not notice or does not care, because he has been ordering this drink for thirty years and he knows exactly what he is getting for his twelve dollars.

Somewhere along the way, ordering a Long Island Iced Tea became a confession. It tells the room you are not a serious drinker, that you came here to get somewhere rather than to taste something, that you would not know a Manhattan from a Manhattan sunset. It is the cocktail equivalent of admitting you like a chain restaurant. And that reputation, if we are being honest, is mostly deserved and completely beside the point.

How a party trick became a punchline

The drink is most commonly credited to Robert “Rosebud” Butt, who says he mixed the first one at the Oak Beach Inn on Long Island in the early 1970s, reportedly for a contest that required triple sec. As the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails notes, even that story is contested. Butt places it in 1972, a later account says 1973, and there is a stubborn, undocumented legend about a Prohibition-era Tennessee drink made by a man called Old Man Bishop. Nobody can prove much of anything, which feels appropriate for a cocktail nobody remembers the second half of.

What is not disputed is the recipe, and the recipe is the whole scandal. Roughly equal parts vodka, gin, rum, tequila, and triple sec, a hit of sour mix, and just enough cola to bluff the color of iced tea. Four base spirits in one glass, none of them talking to each other, all of them talking over each other. It lands somewhere around 22 percent alcohol by volume, which is stronger than most wine and considerably less polite about it.

For about two decades that was a feature. The Long Island was the drink of the 1980s and 1990s, of chain bars and spring break and the specific optimism of being twenty-two. Then the cocktail revival arrived, with its house bitters and its single large ice cube and its bartender who wants to ask you three questions before making a Negroni. Against that backdrop, a five-liquor sour-mix bomb was never going to survive as respectable. It became the thing you order ironically, or drunkenly, or not at all.

In defense of ordering what you actually like

Bartenders, for their part, have real complaints, and it is worth separating the fair ones from the snobbery. In a survey of bartenders by Alcohol.org, reported by The Daily Meal, close to a third named it among the drinks they least like to make. The honest gripe is labor: five pours and a mixer during a Friday rush is a genuine pain, and a slow ticket is a slow ticket. The less honest gripe is the assumption that comes attached, the quiet verdict that anyone ordering one is not really here for the craft.

Here is where we would gently push back. A cocktail should be judged on its own terms, not against a drink it was never trying to be. The Long Island Iced Tea is not competing with a well-made Manhattan any more than a diner cheeseburger is competing with a dry-aged steak. It promises a sweet, cola-tea, faintly citrus rush and a very efficient trip to merry. On those terms it delivers with a straight face. Held to that promise instead of somebody else’s, it is not a failure. It is one of the most reliable dollar-for-dollar deals on the back bar.

Because value, the way we think about it, has never meant cheap. It means getting the thing you would have chosen anyway, without a surcharge for someone else’s approval. If what you want on a Tuesday is a tall, cold, potent glass of uncomplicated fun, then a twelve or fifteen dollar Long Island is exactly that, and a fourteen dollar Old Fashioned you ordered to look correct is the actual waste of money. The overpriced drink is not the one you enjoy. It is the one you bought to impress a stranger who is not thinking about you.

Written by Vim, Editor of 12×75.