Rickey (cocktail)
highball drink made from gin or bourbon
The rickey is a highball made from gin or bourbon, lime juice, and carbonated water. Little or no sugar is added to the rickey. It was created with bourbon in Washington, D.C., at Shoomaker's bar by bartender George A. Williamson in the 1880s, purportedly in collaboration with Democratic lobbyist Colonel Joe Rickey. Its popularity increased when made with gin a decade later. A non-alcoholic version is a lime rickey.
A recipe for the rickey appeared as early as 1903 in Daly's Bartenders' Encyclopedia by Tim Daly (p. 57):
GIN RICKEY. Use a sour glass. Squeeze the juice of one lime into it. One small lump of ice. One wine glass of Plymouth gin.
The public source identifies “Rickey (cocktail)” as highball drink made from gin or bourbon. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rickey, cocktail and highball.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rickey (cocktail)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.