Loving and tweaking the Long Island Iced Tea

Want to get drunk, fast? To most, that’s the point of the Long Island Iced Tea. It’s not so much a drink as a chemical formula designed to make an enormous percentage of alcohol consumable in a single glass. When I worked at a cocktail bar, a man once ordered two, and I asked if he would like me to hold on the second until his guest arrived. He replied, “No thanks, they’re just for me.” He proceeded to down both within a few minutes, for what surely began either a wild or very bad night. For the unfamiliar, Long Island Iced Tea contains almost every liquor you can imagine and no actual iced tea (though it shares its color). Nobody quite knows who first made it, or where it came from; the leading candidates are a bartender Robert “Rosebud” Butt of the said island, in the 1970s, or someone who put a spin on Old Man Bishop’s boozy blend from Prohibition-era Tennessee.

Though there are some variants of the classic formula, I typically do the following:

Add 15ml each of tequila, vodka, white rum, triple sec, gin, lime juice, lemon juice and 2:1 sugar syrup to a Boston shaker. Double these measurements if you want to serve it in a pint glass and don’t have work tomorrow.

Aggressively shake for 10-15 seconds to comprehensively chill and mix the ingre- dients, before double-straining into a tall glass, filled with ice, stopping a third from the top.

Top up with cola, add a lemon wheel and straw and have fun.

Some bartenders bitch about making it, given its large number of ingredients, but anyone with a well-set-up rail can make it in about thirty to forty-five seconds, particularly once you get the muscle memory down for the movement of your hand from bottle to jigger to bottle again.

Mostly bartenders hate it because they know it’s not going to be appreciated. It’s the cocktail of the college student, the raver and the drunken rambler; not a delicate beverage, sipped by the cocktail upper crust, as they snack on hors d’oeuvres and chat about horticulture or polo. But it deserves more respect. It’s more flexible to modification than a Sidecar, less pretentious than a Martini and, made well, tastes fantastic.

If you want to slightly change the flavor, you can hark back to the Tennessee story and use 30ml maple syrup instead of sugar syrup, and 15ml of bourbon. An easy upgrade is to swap out Coca-Cola for a nice organic cola, like Karma Cola. Never use your cheapest, knockoff supermarket cola, or sour mix; if you put trash in, you get trash out. And don’t use a teapot to serve it. It’s not cool, it’s just tacky, and Southerners will laugh at you.

Once you’ve got the classic down, you can make some of the more well-known variations, often named for other parts of the globe. There’s the Adios Motherfucker, which uses blue curaçao instead of triple sec and is topped up with Sprite instead of Coke — or better, a bitter lemon soda.

Then there’s the Tokyo Iced Tea, which is a “goodbye mother lover” (as a polite customer once tried to order from me) but uses the melon liqueur Midori as the triple sec replacement; and the Black Widow, which takes the same formula but with a raspberry liqueur, preferably Chambord. There’s also the Italian clear-spirit cousin of the Long Island iced tea, the Quattro Bianchi, usually just rum, gin, vodka, triple sec and lemonade. I prefer to start that one with the original recipe, swapping out lime juice for saline solution, and topping with soda water instead of cola.

There are an endless number of variants that swap out the cola — for cranberry juice or ginger ale or pineapple juice — but most are just subpar versions of the original. To really make a fun, new version, you need to replace the triple sec with another liqueur, choose a sensible soda to finish it with, and play around with the citrus and the balance of gin or tequila to get the flavor right. For example, you could use Giffards crème de cassis or crème de mûre instead of the triple sec, drop the tequila and up the vodka, and then use cava or prosecco instead of cola to make the tallest, booziest Kir Royale you’ve ever tried. Or use amaretto Disaronno, Monin’s Orgeat syrup, and a light lemonade instead of rum, sugar syrup and cola for a nutty version.

But nobody drinks a Long Island Iced Tea the way they drink a martini, nor should they. My own version, the Mexico City Spiced Tea, tries to capture the boisterous nature of the drink. Basically, it takes the classic formula of a great, refreshing Long Island Iced Tea, and makes it burn everywhere.

To make it, use 70 percent overproof rum, tequila, mezcal, Cointreau, chili vodka (best home-infused but try Absolut Chili to start), agave syrup, lime juice, one dash of angostura bitters, plus the bottom half of a red chili, chopped up fine. If you particularly hate yourself, add a dash of your favorite hot sauce (so long as it has a simple, relatively sweet chili flavor; don’t add mango ones or awful stuff like the Bomb). Once shaken, top up with Karma Cola and garnish with the top of the chili, cut diagonally, planted on the rim. Add a lime wheel. All that’s left is to enjoy, then cry, then have an incredible night.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2024 World edition.