A bright, effervescent pour of gin shaken hard with lemon juice and a touch of sugar, then lengthened with soda water for a clean, refreshing lift. Served tall, cold and without ice, it drinks like a sour set loose with bubbles — the lemon sharp, the gin crisp and botanical, the sweetness just enough to round the edges.
Garnish: Lemon Wheel
shaken · Highball · Up
add
Add gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup to a shaker with ice.
shake
Shake well until chilled.
strain
Strain into a tall glass, served without ice (or over fresh ice, per preference).
top
Top with a splash of soda water.
garnish
Garnish with a lemon wheel.
No single inventor stands behind the Gin Fizz; it took shape as the gin branch of the wider Fizz family, and its earliest appearance in print is usually credited to Jerry Thomas's Bar-Tender's Guide. A mixing guide from 1900 already set it down as gin, lemon, sugar and seltzer shaken and strained into a tall glass, and through the decades up to the 1940s it spread across America as a New Orleans specialty. It went on to anchor a line of offshoots — the Silver, the Golden and the laborious Ramos, which Henry C. Ramos created at his Imperial Cabinet Saloon in New Orleans in 1888 — and the IBA now keeps it among its Unforgettables.