How To Make A Jack Rose, The Polarising Cordial Cocktail

The Jack Rose is one of the most polarising classics from the early 20th century — people either love or hate it. But those who love it, really love it.

There is some debate over who it’s named for — it has been attributed to notorious gambler “Bald Jack” Rose, as well as Jersey City bartender and wrestling enthusiast Frank “Jack Rose,” among many other theories. What we do know is that in 1899, it was reported that bartender Frank Haas was making a dusty rose-hued drink he called the Jack Rose for the business folk who flocked to Fred Eberlin’s bar in downtown New York City. In 1913, he finally shared the recipe, which was essentially an apple brandy-based riff on the Whisky Daisy: applejack, raspberry syrup, lemon, and orange juice.

From the 1910s onward, the cocktail made the rounds and was eventually reinvented. The surviving streamlined version uses only one kind of citrus, typically lemon but sometimes lime, and grenadine instead of raspberry syrup. In 1917, Tom Bullock, the first Black bartender to write a cocktail book in the US, included the simplified recipe in what is likely its first published form in The Ideal Bartender.

This sleeper hit of a drink even got its own literary cameo. In a passage in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, the narrator orders a Jack Rose at a bar.

As with many pre-Prohibition cocktails, the Jack Rose seemed lost to history. However, in the early 2000s, the cocktail become a sort of obsession with a new generation of bar folk and aficionados, particularly Jackson Cannon, head bartender at Eastern Standard in Boston and a founding member of the Jack Rose Society, whose mission has been to preserve and defend the legacy of once-forgotten, oft-disparaged cocktails such as the Jack Rose. Cannon makes notable tweaks by increasing the amount of applejack, swapping the ratio of grenadine to citrus, and adding a couple of dashes of Peychaud’s bitters for structure.

Recipe extracted from Signature Cocktails by Amanda Schuster, published by Phaidon. $80, out now.