FOOD NEWS
Meet The Zazarac, The Sazerac's Incredibly Complex Cousin
BY AUTUMN SWIERS
![Sazerac Cocktail mixed by Lalit Limbu, assistant manager, at Armani/Prive, at the 2F, Landmark Chater (Chater House) 8 Connaught Road, Central, Hong Kong. 03OCT16 [GRAPE AND GRAIN FEATURES] SCMP / K. Y. CHENG (Photo by K. Y. Cheng/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)](https://transform-cf1.nws.ai/https%3A//cdn.thenewsroom.io/platform/story_media/1288818744/1096353086.jpg/w_1200,c_limit/)
Invented around 1890, the bourbon-based Zazarac is the Sazerac’s long-lost, incredibly complex cousin cocktail. Unlike the Sazerac, this drink never really took off.
The Zazarac might have started as an incorrect spelling error of "Sazerac," and this mistake became a "ripoff" drink that some call "the pirate" of the cocktail world.
In the 1840s, news publications and other media misspelled "Sazerac" as "Zazarac" multiple times, and in 1904, a Montana spirits purveyor made this fake drink a real thing.
This company sold knockoff bottled Sazerac cocktails called Zazaracs. By 1910, Zazaracs became a mix of Angostura bitters and a dash of absinthe served sans ice in a chilled glass.
By 1913, lemon peel, orange bitters, and anisette were added to the recipe. Today's Zazarac, while not wildly popular by any means, is still quite a complicated drink.
Modern recipes for a Zazarac usually include rye or bourbon whiskey, anisette, light rum, anise-flavored pastis, orange, and Angostura bitters, finished off with a lemon twist.
