A History of the Black-Eyed Susan Cocktail

Take vodka, rum, whiskey, bourbon, peach schnapps, orange juice, pineapple juice, sour mix, orange-flavored liqueur, elderflower-flavored liqueur, shake, pour into a souvenir glass and garnish with an orange slice, cherry and mint sprig.

Then dump it on the infield grass and get a real drink. – Richard Gorelick, Baltimore Sun May 12, 2014

Name origin:

The 2016 Black-Eyed Susan

Named after the Black-eyed Susan, the state flower of Maryland.

Where is The Black-Eyed Susan Cocktail found?

Maryland, particularly Baltimore City and during the Preakness race. The Preakness, the second leg of the thoroughbred racing series, will takes place on the third Saturday in May at Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course, where it’s been held since the race’s inception in 1873. The Black-eyed Susan cocktail has been the official drink since 1973.

Who created it?

The history of the Black-eyed Susan cocktail is relatively brief. In 1973, to mark the centennial of The Preakness, Pimilco caterers Harry M. Stevens Co. contracted the Heulbein Company — a giant in the ready to drink home cocktail market — to help them create a quick and ready pre-mix to serve the expected crowds, and some expected thousands. What they came up with, the website Retro Baltimore describes as “…a base of rum and vodka, splashed with orange and pineapple juices”.

When introduced, the print advertisements, filled with sophisticates in Edwardian attire, weaved a tall-tale, claiming that the cocktail hearkened back to the early days of the Maryland Jockey club. The reality proved to be “a mixture more Madison Avenue than a bartender”. The wording from the ad was as follows:

Said to be the invention of a daring horse-owning notable in the early days of the Maryland Jockey club, the Black Eyed Susan, the official drink of the famed Preakness Stakes, is a tradition at Pimlico.

It’s a bold and racy kind of drink with a clean start and an unflagging finish.

As exhilarating as a golden day at the track.

What is the recipe?

Pimlico soon parted ways with Heublein, who upon departure refused to divulge the actual recipe for the drink’s base mixture (legend states that it was later repackaged as the infamous Brass Monkey) and though the “Susan” itself was never popular, people did buy it every year in order to score one of the limited edition glasses it came in. So Pimlico came up with their own formula. How close it was to the 1973 original? We will never know, but drinks writer Ted Haigh was able to dig up an early version of Pimlico’s recipe:

Black-Eyed Susan (original)

Recipe adapted from Ted Haigh

1 oz. Vodka
1 oz. Mount Gay Eclipse rum
3/4 oz. Cointreau
1 1/2 oz. fresh-squeezed orange juice
1 1/2 oz. pineapple juice

Build in a Collins glass filled with crushed ice. Add a Maraschino cherry, an orange wheel, a pineapple cube, and a lime wedge for garnishes. Note: it’s imperative to squeeze the juice from the lime wedge into the drink.

Variant recipes:

Like any good marketing venture, the Black-eyed Susan recipe served trackside morphed over time to suit the evolving tastes of the increasingly younger and less sophisticated crowd drawn to the Preakness as well as the changing corporate liquor sponsorships. Bourbon and rum came and went over the years and at times it appeared that the only constant in the cocktail was the inclusion of vodka and pineapple juice. Most bizarrely, the recipes of the early 2000s contained white crème de menthe and Brandy.