Highball

Highballs are your “and” drinks.  Gin and tonic, scotch and soda, vodka and cranberry juice, and so on.  They’re usually served on ice in what is unsurprisingly called a highball glass.  Some places list a Bloody Mary or Long Island Ice Tea as a highball because that’s the glass they use, but those drinks are a bit complex to meet the definition.  You could serve a beer in one too, but that wouldn’t make it a highball.

One story goes that the highball is named for the ball in a steam locomotive that would rise to the top of a glass tube when the boiler pressure reached maximum, alerting the engineer that it was time to “let off steam.”  That’s an endearing theory, but I’ll bet someone drinking highballs made it up.

The phrase “ball of malt” is an old Irish reference to a small glass of whiskey, so using a taller glass and adding water to soften the blow could have led to the name highball.  This explanation maybe isn’t as romantic, but it’s more believable.

We’re in the fall shoulder season now, caught between summer madness and winter sports, but it’s a great time to visit if you enjoy outdoors peace and quiet.  We’ll hope to see you if you’re planning a trip to let off some steam of your own.

Your favorite bartender,

-Dan

This entry was posted on 20. October 2011 at 13:09 and is filed under Bartender's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.