Gin Rickey
The Gin Rickey is gin, fresh lime juice and soda water over ice, and there is no sugar in it of any kind. That absence is the whole drink. It is what separates a Rickey from a Fizz, and it is why the gin matters more here than in almost anything else you can build. It is named after Colonel Joe Rickey, a Missouri lobbyist who drank his bourbon with lime and soda at Shoomaker's on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1880s Washington, consistently enough that the bartenders named the order after him. The gin version came shortly afterwards and overtook the original so completely that a Rickey now means gin unless you say otherwise. Rickey himself, by most accounts, thought the gin version was worse. He was outvoted. With no sweetener and only three ingredients, the freshness of the lime is the most consequential thing in the build. Squeezed to order it is bright and genuinely refreshing. Squeezed an hour earlier it is flat and slightly bitter, and nothing else in the glass can cover for it.
Glassware: Highball Glass
Garnish: Lime Wheel
Ingredients
60ml
A London Dry with enough juniper to hold its own without sugar to round the edges. In a three-ingredient build with no sweetener, the gin defines the drink entirely.
25ml
Squeezed immediately before building, and the single most consequential variable here. Pre-squeezed juice goes flat and slightly bitter, and the gin and soda cannot compensate for it.
100–125ml
Well chilled, added last, poured gently down the inside of the glass. The effervescence is structural in a drink this simple rather than decorative.
Instructions
Squeeze the lime juice immediately before building the drink.
Fill a highball glass to the top with large cubed ice.
Add the gin and the lime juice over the ice.
Stir once briefly to combine.
Pour the chilled soda water gently down the inside of the glass.
Stir once with a single upward lift of the bar spoon.
Squeeze a lime wedge over the surface, drop it in and serve immediately.
Expert Tip
If it tastes too austere, take out lime rather than adding sugar. Five millilitres less juice fixes most versions that have come out too sharp. Adding sugar does not fix a Rickey; it makes a Gin Fizz, which is a perfectly good drink and a different one. The gin choice matters more here than in almost any other build. There is no sweetener to round the edges and nothing else to hide behind, so a thin or heavily contemporary gin gives you lime and soda with a faint spirit note. A London Dry with real juniper is what the drink assumes. Pour the soda gently down the inside of the glass and stir once with a single upward lift. Carbonation is structural in a drink this bare, and stirring it out leaves the whole thing flat.
Behind the Gin Rickey
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
Colonel Joe Rickey was a Missouri-born lobbyist and political fixer who operated in Washington during the Gilded Age, when the capital's bar culture centred on establishments like Shoomaker's on Pennsylvania Avenue. His preferred drink was bourbon with lime and soda, requested consistently enough that the bartenders named it after him, and it was documented in the press of the 1880s as a specific drink rather than a generic combination.
The gin version emerged shortly afterwards, as bartenders found that gin's juniper and botanical complexity suited the dry, citrus-forward structure even better than bourbon had. It spread beyond Washington, appeared in the bar guides of the following decades, and displaced the bourbon original so thoroughly that it was largely forgotten. Rickey, by most accounts, was not pleased about it.
The Unsweetened Structure
A Gin Fizz shares this drink's base of gin, citrus and soda, and adds sugar syrup. That syrup softens the lime's acid, rounds the juniper, and produces something more approachable that asks less of the spirit.
Leaving it out produces a drink that is sharper, drier and far more dependent on the quality of the gin. That dependence is the Rickey's most demanding characteristic and its greatest virtue. A gin with genuine juniper and botanical complexity produces one of the most refreshing long drinks there is; a thin or neutral one produces lime and soda water with a faint spirit note behind it. The choice of bottle matters more here than in almost any other build.
Lime as the Foundation
Fresh lime squeezed immediately before use is not a preference in this drink. It is the only citrus, there is no sweetener to mask its degradation, and there is no foam or modifier to distract from it.
Lime juice loses its brightness within about half an hour of being squeezed and develops a slightly bitter, cooked quality. In a build this bare that is immediately obvious, and it decides whether the drink is worth finishing.
The lime wedge squeezed over the surface and dropped in is not decoration either. The oils in the peel release slowly as the drink sits, adding a faint aromatic complexity to the later sips. It costs nothing and it improves the glass.
Built for the Long Afternoon
The Rickey came out of a political culture where business was done informally over several hours, and the drink reflects that. It is not designed to impress. It is designed to be drunk steadily and to still taste good on the third one, which is a different brief from most cocktails and a harder one.
That is probably why something this plain outlasted both the era and the city culture that produced it.
How to Serve It
Built over ice in a highball, soda poured gently down the inside wall, a lime wedge squeezed and dropped in. Serve it immediately and serve it cold.
It asks for a good gin, a fresh lime and cold soda, and it returns considerably more than that costs. Warm weather and long afternoons are its natural habitat.
Make it at home
The Spirit
GinA flavour requirement rather than a method. The law asks only that juniper be the predominant taste and that the spirit reach 37.5%, which leaves everything else on the botanical bill to the distiller and permits a gin that was never redistilled at all.
Master the Techniques
More to explore
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Gin Rickey?
Who was the Rickey named after?
How is it different from a Gin Fizz?
What gin should I use?
You Might Also Like
Whiskey Highball
The Highball is one of the oldest and most debated drink formats in the canon, with origin stories placing it variously in American railroad culture, British officers’ messes, and the bars of late nineteenth century New York. The name most likely derives from the railway signal ball that indicated a clear track ahead, fitting for a drink fast to build and faster to consume. The format arrived in Japan in the early twentieth century and was adopted with a seriousness that turned a simple two-ingredient serve into a craft discipline. The Japanese Highball, whisky and soda water over ice in a tall glass, became one of the defining drinks of Japanese bar culture, and the attention given to ice temperature, glass preparation, carbonation preservation, and the ratio of whisky to soda made it the benchmark for the format. The version documented here applies those standards to a Scotch or Irish whiskey base. Two ingredients. The quality of each determines everything. A whiskey with genuine character and a well-chilled, high-carbonation soda, poured correctly over properly prepared ice, produce a drink greater than the sum of its parts; the format has nowhere to hide a characterless whiskey or a flat soda.
Campari & Soda
Campari & Soda has been served in Italian bars since the late nineteenth century and has never needed improving. Two ingredients, built in a glass, drunk before a meal. The simplicity is not a limitation, it is the entire point: Campari is complex enough that adding anything beyond soda and ice risks obscuring the thing that makes it worth drinking. The drink became a fixture of aperitivo culture partly through a piece of industrial design. In 1932 the company commissioned Fortunato Depero, a Futurist artist, to design a single-serve bottle that could be sold pre-mixed and carried to a table without a bartender. The inverted cone that resulted became one of the most recognisable pieces of drinks packaging in Europe, and it introduced the combination to a generation who might never have ordered it at a bar. The ratio matters more than it appears to. Too much soda and the bitterness goes dilute and loses its structure; too little and the drink is heavy and slow. The correct proportion lets the Campari lead while the soda lifts and extends it into something sessionable.
Daiquiri
The Daiquiri is a sour in its most elemental form: white rum, fresh lime juice and sugar syrup, shaken and served up. Three ingredients, no bitters, no liqueur, nothing to hide behind. It takes its name from a mining district on the south-eastern coast of Cuba, near Santiago, where Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer, is credited with combining local white rum with lime and sugar around 1898. Whether Cox invented it or documented what Cuban workers had been drinking for years is not something the record can resolve. What is not disputed is that it was refined and popularised in Havana at El Floridita by Constantino Ribalaigua Vert. The simplicity is the point and the problem at once. There is nothing in the construction to compensate for a poor rum, juice that was not squeezed fresh, or a syrup made carelessly. Every variable is fully exposed, which is why a properly balanced Daiquiri demonstrates more skill than a ten-ingredient tiki drink.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits