How to Make a Gin Rickey

Nothing refreshes like a rickey.

By Sarah RensePublished: Jun 5, 2020

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Yields:: 1 serving(s)
Total Time:: 5 mins

Ingredients

2 oz.
gin
1/2
fresh lime
6 oz.
club soda (top off)

Directions

1. Step 1Squeeze the juice from half a lime into a highball glass filled with ice cubes. Drop the lime half in the glass.
2. Step 2 Pour in the gin, then fill the rest of the glass with club soda. Stir.

To some, a Gin and Tonic tastes little better than a glass of 7Up with a whisper of liquor. Too sweet. Too cloying. Not enough good-gin-taste. To those people we say: The Gin Rickey is your drink.

The Gin Rickey is similar to the G&T in that it has gin and lime and a mixer. But instead of tonic, you use club soda, and instead of some gracefully adorned lime wedges, you throw in whole, hulking lime half. For your willingness to swap soda for tonic, you get a drink that's as refreshing as a dash through an oscillating sprinkler fanning cold water over green grass on a 100-degrees-at-least day—and a drink that lets the gin speak for its bitter, piney self. A Gin Rickey really does taste like gin, made easy-breezy with fizz and citrus.

A Little Background

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Gin Rickey is a drink entrenched in political history. Its inventor (or rather, popularizer) was a political lobbyist for the Democratic party, circa the late 1800s (when said party was far less than liberal). His name was "Colonel Joe" Rickey, and he was known as "a gentleman of grace and charm who wore a black slouch hat above a drooping grey mustache." He was also known to drink. He frequented the Shoomaker's Saloon in swampy Washington, D.C., where a bartender whipped him up a drink called the "rickey"—although at the time, it was made with bourbon, not gin. By the 1894 Democratic Convention, lobbyists, politicians, and all brown-nosers in-between were reported to be drinking Gin Rickeys, Whiskey Rickeys, Brandy Rickeys, and "every other kind of Rickey known to mortal man.” In the end, gin won out as the most popular iteration today. Jury's still out on which iteration of the Democratic party will find similar success.

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If You Like This, Try These

With a Gin Rickey, pretty much any brand of club soda will do. We're not picky. But for a Gin and Tonic, you've got to get the tonic right; here's how. Similar to the Gin Rickey is the Tom Collins, a gin-and-soda drink with lemon juice, not lime. A French 75 takes the gin-and-bubbles equation to a more celebratory place with brut champagne. And for a gin-and-lime refresher with no bubbles, there's always the Gin Gimlet.