Ah, the good old Vodka Lime and Soda – one of the only club drinks without litres of sugar in it. Despite its reputation as a boring drink, it’s actually pretty good if you want to feel refreshed and aren’t super keen on the sugar.
But where and when were we blessed with this thirst-quenching cocktail? To be honest, it’s pretty hard to pinpoint the original inventor of the drink, but we can kind of see a very vague lineage from the Gin Rickey, and even more so from the Vodka Rickey.
The Gin Rickey was first created by George A. Williamson in 1880 at Shoemaker’s bar in Washington DC and named after Colonel Joseph Kyle Rickey, a lime exporter. The first written reference to the Gin Rickey was in the legend Harry Johnson’s 1882 book Bartender’s Manual. In it, he highlights the Gin Rickey recipe as lime, gin, ice and soda in a medium-sized fizz glass. Are you seeing the similarities yet? Because we are.
From there, it was too easy to create the Gin Rickey’s vodka brother, the Vodka Rickey, which is almost exactly the same as the Vodka, Lime and Soda we know and love today with the exception of the Rickey’s addition of sugar syrup.
