I got the idea for this odd-but-delightful deconstructed drink from “Cocktail Bill” Boothby’s 1890s book, American Bar-Tender. Though this source comes over forty years after the gold rush began, it’s a testament to how San Francisco remained a locus of cocktail culture and has remained so, though not necessarily continually, to this day. I based this on Boothby’s Dude Cocktail, which is a simple sweet soda or lemon soda laced with lime juice and crème de vanille.

The California gold rush created an incredible demand for all kinds of goods that the Bay area didn’t yet have the infrastructure and stock to provide. Coffee was one such commodity and its price skyrocketed as coffee merchants sought to make big profits off the miners’ newfound wealth. I imagine that the miners would have spiked their expensive coffee with a bit of whiskey and sweetened it with pricey sugar and vanilla, too.

Pisco Punch was a popular drink during the gold rush, especially at the Bank Exchange Bar which, if it wasn’t the drink’s birthplace, became the site of its popularization. This drink, which applied the already centuries-old punch template to a brandy all the way from Peru. I took a few liberties with our recipe, but the spirit of the original shines through.

The California gold rush created an incredible demand for all kinds of goods that the Bay area didn’t yet have the infrastructure and stock to provide. Coffee was one such commodity and its price skyrocketed as coffee merchants sought to make big profits off the miners’ newfound wealth. I imagine that the miners would have spiked their expensive coffee with a bit of whiskey and sweetened it with pricey sugar and vanilla, too.