When the Brooklyn cocktail was created, two out of five boroughs in New York already had their own cocktails, the Manhattan and the Bronx. The head bartender at Baracca’s Restaurant on Wall Street, Jacob “Jack” Grohusko, took on the task to make one for Brooklyn and in 1908 he published his recipe in Jack’s Manual. Mr Grohusko himself lived in Hoboken and his connection to Brooklyn came from the restaurant’s owner who was a Brooklynite.

The original recipe calls for Italian (sweet) vermouth but it soon became common practice to use French (dry) vermouth instead. This new version is how the Brooklyn Cocktail was presented by Jacques Straub in 1914, by Harry Cradock in his Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930 and in Patrick Gavin Duffy in his Official Mixer’s Manual from 1933. The cocktail historian David Wondrich did not agree and in his Updated and Revised Imbibe from 2015 he stated that the version with Italian vermouth is far superior to the more common dry Brooklyn. Thus giving Mr Grohusko right a little more than a hundred years after the cocktail was first stirred up on Wall Street.

The Brooklyn never did become as famous as its neighboring Manhattan and Bronx. Possibly due to the fact that it contains Amer Picon, a French aperitif that has been very hard to come by in the US.

The glass called Manhattan was designed in 1937 by Norman Bel Geddes.