Drink

Every Ivy League School Has a Cocktail Named After It

But not all of them are elite. Here are the best and worst.

Illustrations by Lisa Larson-Walker

US News & World Report—a pillar in the field of freaking out people who remit and collect college tuition payments—published its entertainingly meaningless rankings of the nation’s top undergraduate institutions last week. Waking to this pseudo-event, with its headline news that Princeton University is better than all other schools, we in the Slate Drink department cheered thrice for Old Nassau. Celebrating at noonday, we enjoyed a long liquid lunch, a practice notably familiar to our tribe. And what did we drink? Oh, 19 or 20 cocktails, many of them kinda weird, all named after Ivy League colleges.

Like the other, crappier schools in its athletic conference, Princeton is party to a tradition dating to the Gay ’90s. In that Golden Age of the cocktail, the bar at Holland House on Fifth Avenue—a hotel in “the swellest quarter in New York” (“350 Rooms from $2 upwards”)—began putting out drinks named for Harvard and Yale and Princeton, doubtless currying favor with the alumni among its patrons and announcing itself as a “classy” joint to other suckers for HYP hype.

The cocktails of Ivy League, then, predate the social construct of “the Ivy League” by four decades and the history of the NCAA entity by six. Over the years, charming upstarts, curious arrivistes, and dogged usurpers joined the original collegiate cocktails, which themselves evolved and degenerated to varying degrees. Interestingly, only those recipes attached to the names of Ivies have made their way into recorded history, unless you count the Caltech Cocktail (ingredients: “4 ounces water”). We’d be happy to be proved wrong about this exclusivity. Indeed, we were disappointed to learn that the totally solid Vanderbilt—one part brandy, one part cherry brandy, a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters—is named not for the “Harvard of the South” or even for the robber baron who endowed it but instead for a trust-fund kid who died on the Lusitania. There might be a noteworthy drink named for the eighth-oldest college in the U.S.; as this story went to the proverbial press, we stumbled upon a website inviting Rutgers alumni to a Manhattan bar to watch the Scarlet Knights face Fresno State on the gridiron while enjoying a “special Rutgers cocktail.” Stay tuned for an update, but don’t hold your breath for anything like a Fresno Statini.

There are only eight Ivy League schools, but the forces of culinary history being what they are, we are able to deliver a list of the 12 most notable Ivy League drinks. (And because these cocktails have seen more changes of course than a registrar’s office, we saw fit to make minor tweaks and adjustments to the more promising among them.) Now, we want to be clear: We do not wish to encourage current undergraduates to drink these or any other cocktails. That’s what peer pressure is for, and beer. But we hope that readers claiming all alma maters will appreciate this arcane excursion into American Studies and that recent matriculants will learn something about the characters of their vine-strewn institutions.

US Booze & World Report’s Definitive Ivy League Cocktail Rankings

Harvard Cooler
2 ounces applejack or Calvados
¾ ounce lemon juice or lime juice
½ ounce simple syrup
Club soda
Optional garnish: lime, lemon, or orange twist or wedge

Shake the liquor, the juice, and the simple syrup well with ice. Strain over ice into a chilled highball glass. Top with club soda and garnish.

In American cinema’s classic moment of antagonizing Hahvahd jerks, the hero of Good Will Hunting taunts a romantic rival, bludgeoning the fellow with his Southie accent: “Do you like apples? …” The townie and the snob should be able to agree on very much liking apple brandy, especially as featured here, in a Collins that goes down swell in three out of four seasons. In spring, the Harvard Cooler sings with invigorating crispness. In summer, when a student developing his resume in a developing nation finds himself developing a tropical thirst, it proves a reliable refreshment. And in autumn, its harvest-time tang pairs well with watching—or hanging out in the general vicinity of—the Head of the Charles.

I happened to discover a happy coincidence of the Hub when I gave the recipe (but not its name) to my barman, who suggested rounding it out with a dash of Boston Bittahs. This addition enhanced the brightness of the citrus and brought in a hint of chamomile—the delicacy of which will be lost, I concede, on any drinker who trained her palate on the scorpion bowl at the Kong.

Yale Cocktail (Nouveau)
2 ounces London dry gin
¾ ounce Crème Yvette
¼ ounce Luxardo Maraschino liqueur
¼ ounce dry vermouth
Dash of orange bitters
Garnish: lemon twist

Stir well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish.

A magnificently weird beverage. Your first Yale Cocktail will be floridly floral on the tongue and lavishly lavender to the eye. (That’s the Crème Yvette transforming the drink into a grandly perfumed grandma candy.) Your second Yale Cocktail will not be especially ladylike in its handling of your central nervous system. (That’s the gin.) Your third Yale Cocktail is not quite thinkable.

The drink will hew a bit more closely to true Yale blue if you substitute crème de violette for the Crème Yvette. But only a bit. It’s more like a lush steel blue, and it tastes like it looks, blossoming exoticly on the tongue, flamboyantly aromatic even in this most balanced version, a 1906 recipe recently modified by the Yale Alumni Magazine. Steel yourself, lush.

Harvard Cocktail
2 ounces cognac
1 ounce sweet vermouth
1 scant barspoon grenadine
2 or 3 dashes Angostura bitters

Club soda

Stir the first four ingredients well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Top with club soda to taste.

You can’t get a Harvard Cocktail at the Harvard Club in Manhattan. Writing about Ivy League drinks in the Wall Street Journal a few years back, Eric Felten reported that none of its bartenders “even knew such a drink existed.” Likewise, Brad Thomas Parsons writes about a disappointing encounter on West 44th Street in the book Bitters: “I asked the well-appointed barman … if he had many calls for Harvard’s namesake cocktail. His response of “Say again?” made me think that one hadn’t been ordered there since 1895.”

The Harvard is a brandy Manhattan with a couple of mellow bells and sporty whistles. In this richly flavored recipe—synthesized from sources including Modern American Drinks by the Holland House’s George Kappeler—the drink is firm but kind, dignified but festive, quietly distinctive and assertively delicious. Why does it languish in obscurity? Is the name a problem? Has anti-elitist sentiment limited its popular appeal? If so, then let’s rename it Joe College and move on with things because this is a classic.

Princeton Cocktail #1
2 ounces Old Tom gin
2 dashes orange bitters
¾ ounce ruby or tawny port
Orange or lemon peel to twist

Stir the gin and bitters well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. To create a “nice two-tone effect”—the layered look of the port settling at the bottom of the cocktail glass—pour the port either very slowly over the back of a spoon or very gently down the side of the glass. Twist the peel over the drink and discard it.

The Princeton #1 is not to be confused with the Princeton #2, which is a martini to which some fool added lime juice. The Princeton #1 is not, moreover, a thing to be attempted after having drunk more than three of any cocktail. You need a steady hand in order to achieve the layering effect, the niftiness of which is the drink’s big selling point.

It is a limitation of the drink that the taste experience mirrors the visual one: The cocktail is not more than the sum of its parts. First sip is gin. Second sip is gin. Third sip, hey, that’s more gin. Things get more interesting once you dip into the port, even and especially if you set the drink aside for a while. The Princeton #1 is on the very short list of cocktails that get better as they warm up.

Trader Vic’s Columbia
2 ounces white rum
¾ ounce raspberry syrup
¾ ounce lemon juice

Shake well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. 

There are two distinct Columbia cocktails. The more prominent is basically a Harvard made with dry vermouth rather than sweet. Boring; a school drink needs a distinct identity, and this school reveals a sassy one with the other Columbia Cocktail, which first made the scene in Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide (1947). A reminder of the direct charms of raspberry syrup, this is the prettiest drink on the list and the one most likely to delight a non-adventurous drinker, such as a Barnard undergrad who lives off of Pinkberry and Snapple.

Cornell Special
¾ ounce London dry gin
¾ ounce Bénédictine
¾ ounce lemon juice
¾ ounce Gerolsteiner Heavy Mineral Content Mineral Water

Shake the gin, Bénédictine, and lemon juice well with ice and strain the mix into a cocktail glass. Top with the mineral water.

OK, so imagine you’re a patient at a mountaintop spa. It’s early evening in Middle Europe in the late 19th century. This is what your white-suited caregivers serve, just before dinner on special occasions, when they allow you something livelier than beef tea.

The robust Gerolsteiner mineral water is a cousin to the vintage recipe’s Lithia water, a once-popular health drink shown to improve your mood and temper your tendencies toward criminality, naturally, as it contains lithium. Not to make light of self-harm—seriously, here are the relevant phone numbers for mental-health resources in Ithaca—but it seems possible that this cocktail was designed specifically to keep people from throwing themselves in gorges.

Yale Cocktail (Old School)
2 ounces Old Tom gin
3 dashes orange bitters
1 dash Peychaud’s bitters
Club soda

Stir the gin and bitters well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Top with club soda to taste.

It’s softly fragrant. It’s slightly effervescent. It’s charmingly quartzlike in color and antique in preparation. But, mostly, it’s gin.

Dartmouth (Highbrow)
1¾ ounce St. George Terroir Gin
½ ounce Original Combier
1 barspoon maple syrup

Stir well with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass or serve over ice in an old-fashioned glass.

There is no substantial tradition of the Dartmouth cocktail. Thank God. The tone of things in Hanover, N.H., is so ambitiously degenerate that it’s clearly best for all involved to stick to beer. Just look to Animal House, or investigate the literature of Dartmouth pong. (One of the great moments in the history of long-form undergraduate journalism was committed by the school’s daily on Nov. 16, 2005: “This is the first in a three-part series looking at the evolution of beer pong as a social and cultural phenomenon….”)

There is a bar called Brick & Mortar in Cambridge, Mass., and last fall, filling out a menu of nine college cocktails—the eight Ivy League schools, plus a “Bunker Hill Community College” (a shot of Dr. McGillicuddy’s Schnapps)—its proprietors invented a Dartmouth. We’ve taken the liberty of suggesting serving that Dartmouth in a dainty glass, just for the sake of cognitive dissonance. Its amber decadence is pretty good, and it’s definitely redolent of New Hampshire in its woodsiness. What with the maple syrup and the earthiness of this particular gin, sipping one is a bit like drinking a fancy flannel shirt.

Brown University Cocktail
1½ ounces bourbon
1½ ounces dry vermouth
2 or 3 dashes orange bitters

Stir well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Serve.

Wan. One of the duller Manhattan variations known to man, in fact. I would prefer to drink whatever they’re having over at RISD.

The Pennsylvanian
2¼ ounces Calvados

1½ ounces Madeira
1 egg white
Garnish: lemon twist

Shake well to emulsify the egg white. Add ice and shake well again. Strain into a highball glass. Garnish.

Not so much bad as weird, the Pennsylvanian can only be described as a Colonial-era frat shooter. And it is difficult to believe that anyone would finish one unless they felt a school spirit so intense as to constitute demonic possession. However, its thematic coherence is so strong as to constitute a good story. According to WikiTender, which I almost worry is pranking us, the drink pays tribute to the school’s founder, Benjamin Franklin: The egg alludes to a Poor Richard maxim, the Madeira presents an homage to the Founding Fathers’ thirst for Portuguese wine, and the Calvados at once nods to Pennsylvania’s apple brandy tradition and to the French, for whom Franklin had a “great affection,” if you know what I mean.

Dartmouth (Lowbrow)
1 ounce
vodka
1 ounce Midori
½ ounce
Rose’s lime juice
½ ounce
lemon juice
2 ounces
tonic water
1 ounce
water
Garnish: Lemon wedge and lime wedge.

Put all that crap in a tall glass with ice and stir. Garnish. For a fancier garnish, spear together a green letter “D” (a lime half-wheel) and cut a yellow letter “C” (from the rind of a lemon wheel).

Ew.

Yale (Boola Boola)
2 ounces London dry gin
1 ounce dry vermouth
1 teaspoon blue curaçao
1 dash orange bitters
Stir well with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Crème Yvette—necessary to the fashioning of the second drink on this list—was off the market for 40 years when its manufacturer stopped production, and in its absence, those who wanted to turn their tongues Yale blue when wetting their beaks turned to this fluorescent atrocity. There are lot of incorrect ways to make a martini. The most popular include shaking and using vodka; the most spectacularly incorrect involves turning it the color of windshield washer fluid.