Mint Julep

The Julep is older than the cocktail itself. The word travels from Persian gulab, meaning rose water, through Arabic and into European pharmacy as julep, a sweet liquid used to make medicine palatable. By the eighteenth century the term had crossed to America and attached itself to a morning drink of spirit, sugar, water and mint, taken as much for its supposed restorative properties as for pleasure.

Early American Juleps were made with whatever was to hand: peach brandy, cognac, rum. Bourbon became the standard as Kentucky distilling grew through the nineteenth century, and the drink turned into a symbol of Southern hospitality. Its most famous advocate was Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, credited with popularising the Julep in Washington, and the drink appears throughout nineteenth-century American writing as shorthand for genteel Southern leisure.

The Julep also owes a debt to the ice trade. Packing a cup with finely crushed ice was a luxury before commercial ice harvesting and shipping made it ordinary, and the frosted silver or pewter cup, held by the rim so the frost survives, became part of the ritual rather than an affectation.

Its modern identity is inseparable from Churchill Downs. The Mint Julep has been the official drink of the Kentucky Derby since 1938, and something on the order of a hundred thousand of them are served over Derby weekend, which is both a triumph of branding and the reason many people have only ever had a bad one from a plastic cup. Made properly it is a genuinely serious drink: strong, cold, aromatic and slow, closer in spirit to a spirits-forward sipper than to a summer cooler.

Variations follow the same logic as its ancestors. Cognac Juleps recall the pre-bourbon original, rye gives a spicier version, and the Georgia Julep with peach brandy nods to eighteenth-century practice.