The Alabama Slammer Is The Signature State Drink Everyone Should Try Once

Picture this: It's 1982 and you're 20 years old visiting Tuscaloosa, Alabama, during football season. You wanna have some fun (the legal drinking age at this time is 19), so you go out on the town before the big game. You find beer galore, but after a while, it gets old; you're a little buzzed, and you want something different. You ask around and keep getting the same response: Alabama Slammer. Unsure what the drink is, you order it at the bar and guzzle it down. The flavor hits you like a ton of bricks, but at least now you can say you've had an Alabama Slammer.

While not the official state drink, the Alabama Slammer was and is a popular drink in its namesake state. The drink can be a shot or whole cocktail and is traditionally made with Southern Comfort, Sloe gin, Amaretto, and orange juice and garnished with an orange wedge and a cherry. For those who don't speak cocktail, let's break that down: Southern Comfort, or SoCo, is a liqueur made with whiskey, fruits, and spices; those flavors dominate, along with a finishing taste akin to cherry medicine. Sloe gin, also a liqueur, is made by steeping sloe berries, or blackthorn plums, with gin and sugar; this mixture generally creates a sweeter gin, with hints of cherry, citrus, and cinnamon. Finally, Amaretto is a sweet, almond-flavored liqueur made with almonds and other fruit pits, and it's often mixed with other drinks to dampen strong flavors.

The exact origins of the Alabama Slammer are unknown. While folks generally agree that the drink was created and made popular around the University of Alabama (U.A.) in the early to mid-'70s, there are many discrepancies in the details. For instance, there's a 1971 recipe for the drink (notably made with lemon juice rather than orange) in an issue of the "Playboy Bartender's Guide." Some bars, such as Harry's Bar in Tuscaloosa, are touted as the first to serve the drink, though this bar's doors didn't open until 1972. Other folks claim that famed NFL player Brett Favre popularized the drink, but in the early '70s, Favre would have only been a few years old, squashing this theory.

The drink did reach national fame in the late '80s, though, as Tom Cruise uttered the cocktail's name in the 1988 film (with a painfully obvious name) "Cocktail." The Alabama Slammer was, in fact, born in the "dark ages" of cocktails, a post-Prohibition time of mixed drinks marred by an emphasis on mass production — and therefore a decline in fresh ingredients. It was never at the top of cocktail lists and slowly declined in popularity, said to have lived on as a pitcher option at TGI Friday's for some time before eventually slipping into obscurity. If you go to U.A. today, though, you're still likely to find tailgating college students downing the brightly colored drink.