Millstone Times August 2022

Tea Time The History of Long Island Iced Tea! By Pam Teel

You need to know that the drink, Long Island Iced Tea, isn’t an iced tea at all. Though it looks like an innocent enough drink, it’s packed with enough potent alcohol to knock you off your feet by the last sip in your glass. A Long Island Iced Tea is traditionally made with vodka, tequila, rum, triple sec, gin, sour mix, and a splash of Coke – the soda gives it the color of iced tea, and the sweetness of the triple sec makes it sweet tasting like iced tea. Robert “Rosebud” Butt claims to have invented this knock -out drink in 1972 as a contest entry, the challenge being to make a mixed drink with triple sec in it. Robert entered the contest while working at the Oak Beach Inn on Long Island; not at the original Oak Beach Inn near Jones Beach, but at the OBI East, which occupied a historic property that was later home to the famed Canoe Place Inn. There was a similar drink that was created in the 1920s in Long Island, Tennessee, yes you heard it right, an other Long Island, which included in its ingredients, whiskey, rum, tequila, vodka, gin and a little maple syrup for sweetness. This drink was called “Old Man Bishop,” after its inventor. The speculation was that during the Prohibition era, people wanted their smuggled drinks to pack a punch, and its resemblance to iced tea would make it easy to sip in public. Two decades later, Bishop’s son, Ransom, tweaked the recipe by adding lemon, lime, and cola to it. Though not exactly the same, both had a lot of liquor and some sweetness to it. In the 1960s, recipes for the Long Island Iced Tea, before it got its famous name, appeared in Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook (1961) and American Home All-Purpose Cookbook (1966). This was the first time a recipe for the spiked tea appeared in print, though these versions seem to have a few additional ingredients – simply syrup and lemon juice.

Butt’s story of invention seems to be the one that put Long Island, NY, on the map, as Butt grabbed five different bottles of booze and mixed them together to invent what became the region’s most infamous cocktail. The Long Island Iced Tea may be the Hamptons’ biggest contribution to the world since fresh fish. “They put a bottle of triple sec on the bar and they asked us to make something out of it,” Butt told PBS’ Inventors Series in 2013, a year before he died. “Twenty other bartenders and myself, we went to work, and I came up with this drink. It just spread from there. All of sudden, five years later, everywhere you went had the Long Island Iced Tea.” Butt, even had New York State ‘LI Ice Tea’ vanity license plates on his car. “Possibly similar concoctions were created elsewhere, at another time,” Butt wrote. “But the Long Island Iced Tea, as we know and love it, is truly a prod uct of Long Island, created by a true Long Islander, at a genuine Long Island institution with a famous story all its own.” Butt won a trip for two to the grand Miami Fontainebleau Hotel for creating the now-famous Long Island Iced Tea at the OBI East. But the cocktail that OBI popularized grew to have as controversial a reputation as the club itself. For as many lighthearted articles about the Long Island Iced Tea are continually published to this day, it also routinely appears on lists declaring it among the most dangerous cocktails due to its potency and deceptively innocent taste that makes it go down very smoothly. It’s not till you’re almost through with your drink when you start to feel the kick. In Butt’s PBS appearance, he recalled meeting a woman who had learned that he invented the drink and then blamed him for wrecking her car. She was Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, of The Jersey Shore fame, who was arrested in 2010 for disorderly conduct. It’s not uncommon for DWI cases that make news involving the drink to note that the suspect didn’t remember what happened after they drank the Long Island Iced Tea concoction. The credit that the Long Island Iced Tea gets for people making bad decisions is so well known that it’s repeatedly spilled into pop culture, having become a joke on multiple TV shows. Love it or hate it, the Long Island Iced Tea drink doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, so sit back, drink it with caution, and enjoy the ride! For those twenty-one and over- The original Long Island Iced Tea from Long Island, NY • ½ oz. triple sec • ½ oz gin • ½ oz light rum • ½ oz. tequila • ½ oz vodka • 1 oz sour mix • Cola- 4 to 6 ice cubes, lemon wedge

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