How to Make the
Knickerbocker dark rum cocktail

The Knickerbocker cocktail is a delightfully 19th century vintage raspberry cocktail with rum. To make one, you’ll need raspberries, sugar, lime or lemon, Cointreau or Dry Curaçao, Dos Maderas 5+3 and crushed ice. For our version, we’ll use lime and Cointreau. It’s one of the earliest rum cocktails documented as it is listed in Jerry Thomas’s “How to Mix Drinks or the Bon-Vivant’s Companion” published in 1862. For all intents and purposes, Thomas goes down in history as having authored the very first Bartender Guide and his compiled recipes span from his extensive experience in bars ranging from New Haven, Cuba, San Francisco, Charleston, New Orleans, Iowa, St. Louis, Chicago, Nevada, Denver and of course New York, the Knickerbocker city. When referring to Knickerbocker history, one absolutely must conjure the Dutch style pants perhaps better known as knickers,which, being a loose fitted style that gathers at the knee, offers comfort for all sorts of movement befitting an active lifestyle. Early uniforms for baseball, golfers, jockeys? All Knickers. Care to guess where the New York Knicks basketball team gets its name from? To know where it all began, sometimes one just has to name a cocktail or a large sports franchise after one’s roots. Yes, the Dutch were the first to colonize the state of New York and in fact the city used to be called New Amsterdam before it was seized by the British and soon after renamed.