Louisiana is famous for our food and our cocktails, for our coffees and spices. But where do all these products begin? We (writer-photographer duo Kristy and Paul Christiansen) are on a mission to discover the origins of some of our most famous and unique locally-made products through a new Country Roads series, “Made in Louisiana”.
Olga Kochina
Sazerac, classic alcoholic cocktail with cognac, bourbon, absinthe, bitters, sugar and lemon zest. Dazzling red blue background with hard light and harsh shadows
The Sazerac is one of New Orleans's oldest and most famous cocktails.
Our mission to better understand one of Louisiana’s most famous cocktails led us to the corner of Canal and Magazine streets in New Orleans, to a regal, Italianate, 48,000-square-foot structure dating back to the 1860s. Following an extensive historic restoration, the former dry goods store opened as The Sazerac House, a museum and small-batch distillery, in 2019.
Here we embarked on an engaging tour through three stories of New Orleans’s cocktail history, complete with interactive exhibits, lively bartenders, and drink tastings along the way. Walk through the halls, and you can smell the distinctive notes of Sazerac rye whiskey and Peychaud’s bitters, two of the key ingredients in the modern Sazerac cocktail, along with Herbsaint, a sugar cube, and a twist of lemon.
“The Sazerac’s ingredients are really expressive of some of the city’s cultural influences: French/Haitian Creole bitters, rye sent down the Mississippi River, Cognac and anise liqueur from France, lemons from Italy, and sugar from the Caribbean islands,” explained Experience Team Leader Matt Ray.
In a city known for its cocktails, it’s hard for one to stand out above the rest. Still, the Sazerac House makes a pretty strong case for their nominal cocktail to be elevated above all the others, starting with the fact that the Louisiana Legislature designated the Sazerac the official cocktail of New Orleans in 2008.
“We are the only city in America with an official cocktail by a state-body. The entire state legislature considered the motion,” said Ray. “The Sazerac is one of the oldest classic cocktails in the United States. When you go to New York or London and see the Sazerac on a cocktail menu, it’s a real point of pride for New Orleans.”
The tour journeys back to the 1800s, when Antoine Peychaud arrived in New Orleans after fleeing the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Peychaud opened an apothecary on Royal Street in 1834, where he sold medicines and herbal remedies, including his world-famous Peychaud’s Bitters—which he served in a pharmaceutical brandy cocktail. After hours, he experimented with his bitters, adding them to Cognac, a high-quality brandy made in France, to create the earliest version of the Sazerac cocktail.
“The Sazerac’s ingredients are really expressive of some of the city’s cultural influences: French/Haitian Creole bitters, rye sent down the Mississippi River, Cognac and anise liqueur from France, lemons from Italy, and sugar from the Caribbean islands,” —Matt Ray
At the time, “coffee houses” (where liquor was typically the drink of choice) in New Orleans were flourishing, serving as a gathering place to discuss business and politics, earning the nickname “exchanges.” By 1859, the city had almost a thousand of these establishments. The novel Sazerac cocktail—which originally included the French Sazerac de Forge et Fils Cognac, absinthe, and Peychaud’s Bitters—became popular at the Sazerac Coffee House, which opened in the 1850s at 13 Exchange Place. The Coffee House had a second entrance on Royal Street, steps away from Peychaud’s apothecary. By the 1880s, the establishment boasted a 125-foot-long bar with twelve bartenders serving the Sazerac cocktail. To attract business, they offered free lunch with the price of a drink.
In the later nineteenth century, the phylloxera epidemic swept through Europe, destroying its grapevines. Brandy and Cognac became harder to obtain in New Orleans, but Kentucky whiskey—floated down the Mississippi River—stepped in to fill the void, which is how rye whiskey replaced Cognac as the main ingredient in the Sazerac cocktail.
The next recipe change occurred in 1912, when America followed the lead of European countries in banning absinthe for its alleged dangerously addictive qualities and ability to cause convulsions and hallucinations from the added wormwood. Prohibition quickly followed, and after New Orleans failed in its attempt to reclassify liquor as food, many bars went underground as speakeasies. The Sazerac House, though, permanently closed.
In 1933, Prohibition ended and J. Marion Legendre introduced Herbsaint as a version of absinthe without the wormwood. That same year, the Sazerac Company opened a new bar on Carondelet Street, serving up the famed Sazerac cocktail, this time with Herbsaint rather than absinthe. Sixteen years later, the Sazerac Bar on Carondelet closed, but a new one opened in the Roosevelt Hotel. Although no longer connected to the Sazerac Company, the Roosevelt’s Sazerac Bar remains the official place to buy a bar-made Sazerac in the city. And now, just down the street, the Sazerac House museum pays its own homage to the legacy of New Orleans’s most famous cocktail.
“Sazerac House tries to celebrate the history of New Orleans through the cocktail,” said Ray. “The Sazerac Company, a local family-owned business, bought an empty building on Canal Street in downtown, returned it to its former 1860s glory, and opened it as a free cocktail museum. We’re here to get people excited about being in our city by pouring drinks and telling all our favorite stories.”
Sazerac Rye Whiskey, Herbsaint, and Peychaud’s Bitters are all owned and made by the Sazerac Company, with the majority of the whiskey and Peychaud’s Bitters produced at Buffalo Trace Distillery in Kentucky. However, visitors can watch small batch amounts made at the Sazerac House during their free tour. Tours run seven days a week from 11 am–6 pm, with the last tour beginning at 4:15 pm. Reservations can be made online at sazerachouse.com.
