Long Island iced tea

A Tasty Adult Beverage made with the following ingredients:

1/2 oz. Vodka

1/2 oz. Gin

1/2 oz. Light Rum

1/2 oz. Tequila

Juice from 1/2 Lemon

1 Dash of Cola

Combine ingredients and pour over ice in highball glass. Add cola for color. Garnish with slice of lemon.

Enjoy!

I am from Long Island, and one of the funniest things in the world is watch a tourist order a Long Island Iced Tea while not realizing that the drink is alcoholic. Most of the time they just figure it's a local flavor or something. The amazing thing about a Long Island Iced Tea is that it really does taste remarkably like normal iced tea, and if you're not specifically tasting it for alcohol you can miss it. Thinking it's really good, they'll order another one...and another...and another...I've seen people get really drunk from it, in the middle of a crowded fancy restaurant, practically being dragged out muttering, "But I didn't know it had ALCOHOL in it!"

Ahh, the glory that is the Long Island Iced Tea. If you are a big hipster martini fan, well; you are... no, I'll just keep that to myself. The official mix for this ambrosia is:

Long Island Iced Tea

3/4 oz. each: Rum, Gin, Vodka, Tequila, & Triple Sec, Sour Mix, Splash of Cola

Shake liquors with Sour mix, Pour in Hurricane or Large glass, Add splash of Cola, Garnish with a Lemon wedge

As all the initiated know, a true "LIIT" is made with a long pour, meaning that you get about 5 shots of booze in it, a splash of sour and a thimble full of coke. The result is a drink that could strip paint off of an oil tanker and gets you so drunk the cabby has to pull your wallet out of your back pocket to find your home address. Due to the gin involved this is also the drink of lovers; this is because of the unusual properties this particular alcohol has:

1. It makes your face numb like you fell asleep face in the snow
2. You remember nothing the next day, not even the trans-sexual stripper or how you got in jail.

This combine with regular drunkenness makes people very daring and a bit randy. Get two of these into a nun and you are pretty sure to spear a penguin by 4AM. Not that I'd know.

The other devious thing about them is depending on how expertly they are mixed, you can't taste the alcohol at all; this usually fools people into thinking that they can drink more than they should, which can be really really funny (contingent on how much you enjoy the suffering of others).

Anyway, this brings us to the "Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Long Island Iced Tea". This is when the bartender decides to try to trick you into thinking that you got a strong drink by pouring half shots and then dumping in an ass-ton of sour to fill in the difference. The sour is "strong" so some people believe that the drink is "strong" when really, the only thing strong about it is the heart burn that you are going to get in the morning.

When you get a drink like this TAKE IT BACK . There is no excuse for a trained bartender to make you crap drinks like that unless you get a side order of TUMS or a courtesy stomach pump for free.

---

Re mrichich: Unless you go to the correct bar! If you go to "Bricks" and you don't know the bartender, you are going to get a HUGE tumbler half full of sour; it was the worse LIIT I have ever had. On the other hand, the guy that worked at "DV8" while I was there kicked ass. He free poured his drinks like a mad scientist with narcolepsy.

In the end it is really dependant on the bar and the tender.

If you purchase a Long Island Iced Tea in the state of Utah, due to the bizzare Utah liquor laws, you will have one of two things happen:

• You will get a hurricane glass with the sour and the cola and the ice, and five little shot glasses all around it with the gin, vodka, rum, tequila, and triple sec around them like children listening to their camp counselor, or:
• A full glass, with one legal shot of alcohol (likely the vodka), with "flavorings" of rum, gin, tequila, and triple sec.

This is because in a bar in the state of Utah it is illegal to sell a mixed drink with more or less than one legal serving (defined, I believe, as a half ounce of pure alcohol) in any glass. Drinks that contain more than one legal serving must be in separate glasses when delivered to the table.

So if you get the first one, you pour all the small glasses into the big one (consider it a Long Island Iced Tea Do It Yourself Kit) and get a good drink; however, if you order a LIIT and just get one glass, you're gonna be disappointed.

Alternative, Best Version:
1/2 oz. Vodka
1/2 oz. Gin
1/2 oz. Rum
1/2 oz. Tequila
1 oz. Triple Sec
3 oz. Sweet & Sour Mix
Splash of Coke -- only for color

The most important thing to remember is: if you mixed it correctly, the alcohol should be invisible to the tastebuds. The most amazing thing about the LIIT is that such an odd and potentially rancid combination of toxins could combine in such a harmonious way to taste so good.

The famous Long Island Iced Tea is a drink enjoyed by many, and recipes for it abound (in this node and on the web). Ever since I first encountered this cocktail its name seemed strange to me, and when I first heard an explanation for it I was delighted. Apparently, a friend told me, during the prohibition, when serving alcoholic beverages was illegal in the USA, this drink that looks like a nice glass of ice tea was created. Customers could order this drink without explicitly naming an alcoholic beverage, and if the law raided the establishment where the drink was served, it would appear to be legal.

A day or two ago I decided to share this story with the E2 community - it's an amusing anecdote, and given that so many words have already been written here about this cocktail (and so little about it has been told), I thought the story would be enjoyed. Being a good noder, I decided to first google the drink's history. What do you know - the Long Island Iced Tea was invented around 1972 by a Long Island bartender named Robert C. "Rosebud" Butt. Butt was tending bar at the time at the Oak Beach Inn in Hampton Bays... So while this tasty beverage surely has many of the wonderful qualities described elsewhere in this node (such as confounding tourists, numbing faces, and being served in surprising ways in Utah), its history is more mundane than I believed.

Apparently, the popularity of cocktails in the USA may well be based on the prohibition. According to drinkalizer.com cocktails became popular in the twenties because of the low quality of the alcoholic beverages. Bartenders trying to hide the horrible taste mixed them with juices of all sorts. In a sense the Long Island continues this tradition - for many drinkers the mixed tastes of Rum, Gin, Vodka and Tequila may have been a bit much, but this strong drink tastes as if it has very little alcohol in it.