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Published: January 4th 2024
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Love Exploring says: One of the most famous boulevards in all of America, Bourbon Street is the raucous hub of nightlife in New Orleans, a city which knows how to party. Named after the royal French House of Bourbon, the street is jam-packed with neon-drenched bars, night-time revelers and the perpetual sound of jazz music. Time your trip for Mardi Gras in February and you'll find the famed balconies here strung with decorations and the street alive with parades.
On my first trip to Nawlins in the 80s, I am strolling down Bourbon Street, when I see a guy who once worked for our company. He was rather short but had very curly hair. How did I notice him among the throngs of revelers? It amazes me to this day.
The excitement of the Super Bowl dominated another visit in 2014. My Niners played the Ravens, and presented the experience of meeting Dirty Pat, Ravens fan #1, and famous University professor. Walking around the French Quarter, celebrities could be spotted every 2 minutes!
But I wondered what the signature drink of Bourbon Street might be. Is it bourbon, or their famous Hurricane? I would venture to say, at least in this
Millenium, it is Sazerac.
What is Sazerac? In the mid-1800s a Creole man named Antoine Peychaud started selling his own medicinal elixir with the promise of health benefits. Made with Cognac, bitters, sugar, and herbsaint, Sazerac (
Saz-er-ack) quickly became a hit and has turned into the Official Drink of New Orleans. Today most of the places in New Orleans use rye whiskey instead of Cognac but you can order it either way. Whiskey is made from grains while Cognac is made from grapes, but they are both strong. If you like Old Fashions we recommend the Cognac version as it is more or less smoother extra distilled Brandy with hints of oak.
In my many visits, I have never tried it. Perhaps this is the time??
More history:
The Sazerac is a close cousin to the
Old Fashioned that traditionally consists of rye whiskey or brandy, bitters, sugar, and absinthe. The drink has reportedly been consumed in some form as far back as 1838, with the cocktail itself becoming trademarked in 1900 by the Sazerac Company. The Sazerac cocktail was crowned the official cocktail of New Orleans in 2008, though this designation was hardly needed—official status or not, the Sazerac has
always belonged to the Crescent City.
It’s believed that the first Sazeracs were made with French brandy—Sazerac de Forge et Fils Cognac, to be specific—rather than the now-standard rye whiskey. The earliest iteration of the cocktail is said to have originated from Antoine Amédée Peychaud, a pharmacist from Saint-Domingue, a French colony in what’s now modern-day Haiti. Peychaud relocated to New Orleans around the time of the Haitian Revolution, where he opened an apothecary that sold, among other things, his namesake Peychaud’s Bitters.
Like other bitters of the time, Peychaud’s was originally marketed as a curative before making its way into the pantheon of great cocktail ingredients. The story goes that the businessman began to combine his bitters with brandy, sugar, and water, then marketed the resulting elixir as a health-aid. Eventually this cocktail grew in popularity to the point where locals sought it out whether they were sick or not, and the Sazerac cocktail was born.
Around 1885, after Europe’s phylloxera epidemic decimated French vineyards, grape-based brandy was replaced with American rye whiskey as the Sazerac’s spirit of choice.
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