It's easy to imagine that the Long Island iced tea was brought to life as some frat boy's Frankenstein creation. How else could five different kinds of liquor (and a dash of Coke) end up in the same highball glass? Considering its popularity with college drinkers, it makes sense that this monster cocktail would be a monument to a student's hubris. But the truth is that this divisive drink also has a hotly contested origin story.
The official narrative promoted by the tourism advocates of Kingsport, Tennessee, is that one Charlie "Old Man" Bishop crafted the concoction during , and that his son developed further iterations of the cocktail decades later. The name, Visit Kingsport argues, refers to the city's own Long Island, located in the Holston River, where all sorts of bootlegging hijinks were going down in the 1920s. Still, when Americans think of a Long Island iced tea, they're probably imagining the other Long Island — Long Island, New York — and one islander claims he came up with the idea in the 1970s.
Robert "Rosebud" Butt told he invented the cocktail as an entry in a contest held by a bar he was working at in the Hamptons. It took off from there, he says: "Five years later, every place you went had Long Island iced tea." How the two versions of the cocktail differ While either story may be true, there are crucial differences between "Old Man" Bishop's purported recipe and what Bob Butt claims he made in the '70s.
Butt makes his Long Island iced tea with vodka, g.