Mint Julep
Bourbon and mint, packed into crushed ice until the cup frosts over.
CC BY 2.0 · Cropped, white-balanced, graded and re-encoded to WebP by eXir.
Two Mint Juleps in frosted silver julep cups, packed with crushed ice, mint and metal straws
Serving
Drink spec, per drink
Every figure above is per drink and does not move with the count, which is what makes the two service modes comparable. Sugar per litre, strength and standard drinks stay in the units their own authorities publish, because they are figures for comparing rather than for pouring. Dilution is modelled rather than measured, as a fraction of the poured volume before any ice; dotted figures descend from that estimate.
Diet and allergen labels are computed from the ingredients listed on this page and nothing else. They cannot account for cross-contamination or for the particular product you buy, and they are not medical or safety guidance.
Ingredients
3 g mint
7.5 ml simple syrup
60 ml bourbon
- 3 g mint
- 7.5 ml simple syrup
- 60 ml bourbon
- ~61 ml water
Glass
Vessel
68 ml of liquid plus 166 ml of crushed ice occupies about 234 ml, inside the 355 ml the glass holds. The build fails if a recipe ever exceeds its stated vessel.
A batch needs a vessel that closes and fits a fridge shelf.
Method
4 steps · 1m 25sPress the mint for the 2 g mint gently in the bottom of a julep cup or rocks glass with the 7.5 ml simple syrup, just enough to bruise the leaves.
The mint is pressed just enough to release its oils, not pounded. Torn cell walls release chlorophyll along with the oil, and a bruised, shredded leaf reads bitter and grassy rather than simply minty.
Add the 60 ml bourbon and pack the cup with crushed ice, stirring as it goes in so the mint and syrup work their way through the ice rather than sitting at the bottom.
Mound more crushed ice on top until it stands proud of the rim, and stir again for 20s from the surface down, until the outside of the cup is frosted white.
Stand the 1 g mint in the ice near a straw, so it sits right under the drinker's nose with every sip.
Common pitfallCubed ice in place of crushed will not pack tightly enough around the metal cup to frost its outside, which is the point of serving this drink in one at all. The drink ends up merely cold rather than the frosted cup the format is built around.
Keeping and make-ahead
Batched ahead, this keeps sealed and cold. The water line the engine adds is the dilution figure from the spec panel, not a rule of thumb.
About
A mint-and-spirit drink documented in Virginia since the 1770s, long before bourbon or the Kentucky Derby entered the story, that only became the race's official drink in the twentieth century.
The word appears in American print by around 1770, in Robert Munford's satire The Candidate, which names a character Mr. Julip, and the drink itself is described a few decades later: an English visitor's 1803 account of Virginia records a morning dram of spirits with mint steeped in it, and a Virginia clergyman had already described "a tumbler of rum and water, well sweetened, with a slip of mint in it" in 1793 1.
Bourbon is not original to the drink. Rum and brandy were the early bases, and gin-based versions made with genever were common through the nineteenth century; a bourbon julep only became the dominant form in the twentieth 1. Crushed ice is nearly as old as the drink in America: Virginia taverns had ice houses by the 1780s, and an "iced julep" is advertised in a Norfolk newspaper as early as 1807, which makes the julep one of the first American drinks built around ice rather than served merely cooled 1. The convention of serving it in a silver or pewter cup, held only by its rim and foot so that frost forms untouched on the sides, is part of the same early tradition 1.
Its association with horse racing predates the Kentucky Derby itself: silver julep cups were already being awarded as race trophies by the 1820s 1. The Derby began in 1875, but the julep's status as its official drink is a later, and heavily promoted, development: Churchill Downs has marketed it that way only since 1938 1, and the track's own account now describes it as tied to the race for "nearly a century" rather than since the race's founding 2. The scale is now considerable: Churchill Downs reports well over a hundred thousand juleps served across Kentucky Oaks and Derby weekend, drawing on thousands of bottles of bourbon 2.
- 1Mint julepen.wikipedia.org
- 2Mint Julep — The Official Kentucky Derby Cocktailkentuckyderby.com