French 75 Cocktail

The French 75 Cocktail. A gin cocktail built with gin, champagne, lemon juice, and sugar syrup.

French 75 Cocktail History

The historians go a little crazy with this one, and I am one of them. Often we cannot give the exact origins of the most popular drinks, which is the case with the 75.

The French 75 cocktail is a combination of cognac or gin with lemon juice, sugar, ice, and champagne. It's the perfect cocktail to prove it. It's refreshing, delicious, and intoxicating. Every bartender should know it, and everyone who drinks it will love it.

But where did it originate? It's all there, so you need to figure out how to put them together. 1927 In a humorous New York magazine called Here's how! the French 75, as we know it today, first appeared. From there, it was picked up by the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book and was soon everywhere. The cocktail has the distinction of being the only classic born in America during the dry period.

The 75 Origin Mystery

This is the problem. Charles Dickens was visiting Boston in 1867; he enjoyed entertaining the literary lions in his Parker House room with "Tom Gin and Champagne cups," according to an 1885 article. Champagne Cups are made from bubbly, sugar, and citrus. As the story suggests, Tom gin can be added to it to make something dangerously close to the French 75 cocktail, and this was years before the drink was supposedly created.

The combination of Champagne and Gin was very popular with sure gents of a specific class. According to their contemporaries, it was loved by Queen Victoria's son, Prince of Wales, and Kalakaua, the sports king of Hawaii. It was as well-known as Champagne and cognac, but it was even more popular. This was the standard in eastern parts of the British Empire.

The odds are good that the person who invented the French 75 didn’t create anything. They just gave the drink a name.

However, drinks are all about the name. People had been drinking spirits with bitters and sugar for over 100 years before anyone added the cheerful term "cocktail," and because of that made the mixture an American cultural institution.