Antoine Amadée Peychaud opened a pharmacy on Royal Street in 1838 and made bitters. That same year, at the Sazerac Coffee House on Exchange Alley, someone combined those bitters with Sazerac-de-Forge cognac and made what is now a strong candidate for the oldest American cocktail. When phylloxera destroyed the French cognac supply in the 1870s, the recipe switched to rye whiskey and kept going. In 1888, Henry C. Ramos invented a drink at the Imperial Cabinet Saloon on Gravier Street that required twelve minutes of continuous shaking — during Carnival, he hired relay teams of shaker boys to keep up with demand. The Louisiana Legislature made the Sazerac the city's official cocktail in 2008, but the designation only confirmed what the bar culture here had always understood: New Orleans doesn't just drink well. It invents.
