Cream Cocktails: Where the Cocktail Bar Meets the Dairy Aisle

“Jas. O’Keefe is the only barkeeper on earth that makes a cream cocktail,” read a squib in the Savannah Morning News in 1895. It was touting drinks made by the manager of a café beneath a Savannah theater (“drop down between acts”).

This ad was as full of fiction as the plays performed upstairs. Cocktails made with dairy products had been around for centuries. Milk punch in particular had moved from punch bowl to individual serving in the mid-19th century, and was popular both in clarified and fresh forms. As David Wondrich wrote in Imbibe!, in 1873 the Brooklyn Eagle hailed the expediency of milk punch, claiming that it was “the surest thing in the world to get drunk on, and so fearfully drunk, that you won’t know whether you are a cow, yourself, or some other foolish thing.”

[The Alexander cocktail] was the first cream cocktail that, in modern terms, went viral.

While cream drinks had existed for some time, they didn’t really rise to any prominence—Jas. O’Keefe’s efforts notwithstanding—until the early decades of the 20th century. Their popularity was due almost wholly to the rise of the Alexander cocktail. This was the first cream cocktail that, in modern terms, went viral. It was originally made with gin, but soon migrated to brandy. The Brandy Alexander—made with brandy, white crème de cacao, and cream, shaken to a silken frothiness—was soon knocking on the door of the classic cocktail canon.

Cream cocktails persisted through Prohibition—if anything, the ban helped promote them. They traveled to Europe along with other exiled elixirs where they appeared in the new “American bars.” Back home, they remained popular when the perpetually thirsty discovered that lush, thick cream did wonders to mask the appalling taste of bootleg liquor and bathtub gin.

But the golden age of the cream cocktail was arguably yet to come. The late 1960s and ’70s was a time of large, laminated menus and small concerns about health. The Brandy Alexander reveled in a revival (“a sophisticated after-dinner drink”—Scranton Tribune, 1971), and Alexander’s triumphant return was accompanied by a cadre of other cream drinks, like the Grasshopper (New Orleans, 1910s), the Pink Squirrel (Wisconsin, 1940s), the White Russian (Brussels, 1940s), and the Mudslide (Caribbean, 1970s). Udders opened, and a new wave of cream drinks flooded the tippler’s landscape. “These were everything these drinks should be,” gushed a 1977 review of a bar’s cream cocktail offerings in Des Moines, “perfectly smooth, rich, and very potent.”

Among the more popular members of the cream cocktail family was the Banana Banshee (which swaps the Alexander’s gin or brandy for banana liqueur). It was first concocted in the 1950s at Bryant’s Lounge in Milwaukee, which is something of a cathedral of cream drinks set amid America’s Dairyland. (The Banshee has in its family tree the Banana Cow, which consisted of rum, brandy, Bénédictine, banana, and cream. It was served at Trad’r Sam’s in San Francisco in the late 1930s.) The Banana Banshee underwent a revival in the 1970s, a time when its cousin, the Screaming Banana Banshee, also surfaced (just add vodka).

Cream drinks are popular in large part because they’re undeniably tasty—especially if you don’t enjoy the taste of alcohol.

Cream drinks are popular in large part because they’re undeniably tasty—especially if you don’t enjoy the taste of alcohol. And most are based on a simple algorithm. I learned this from Walt Purcell, a well-known New Orleans bartender who worked at Nick’s Big Train Bar in the late 1970s and ’80s. “The cream drinks were the basis” of the bar’s success, he told me. “Banana Banshee, Pink Squirrel, Grasshopper, and those type of drinks. They’re two parts liquor, one part white crème de cacao, and one and a half to two parts whipping cream.”

I met up with Purcell over drinks (no cream involved) in the French Quarter a decade ago, when he was plotting out his return to the industry. His animating idea: to launch the New Orleans Cocktail Company and license a menu of 200 drinks to hotel bars around the country. Bartender training included.

Among the new drinks he’d developed for his scheme were the Masturbating Mosquito, Ruptured Duck, Monogrammed Rubber, and Pregnant Canary. “They’re visual,” he said. “We’re going to have a visual menu, targeted toward tourists aged 40 and older.” Many of the drinks had the DNA of the Brandy Alexander—that is, cream, crème de cacao, and insert liqueur here.

As far as I know, Purcell’s company never launched and no bar ever adopted his menu. Part of the reason may be that he never really left the 1970s behind, but the rest of the world had. Drinkers became more health conscious, and many realized that going out at night to pound drinks of 500 calories each was not entirely sustainable. (In Maine, the White Russian was often called “Fat Ass in a Glass.”)

Sadly, Purcell died in the summer of 2015. Perhaps it’s best that he’s not around to see the continued movement away from the cream drinks of yore. It’s the era of the Aperol Spritz and NA cocktails, which are about as closely related to cream drinks as an elephant is to an ant.

But … and yet … cream drinks have been around for centuries. And past is always prologue. Jas. O’Keefe may have company yet.