Recipe: Brandy Alexander

The Troublemaker Cocktail Is At It Again in the New Musical “Days of Wine and Roses."

My program had an amazing view of the action at the Atlantic Theater this week.

Has there ever been a nicer cocktail with worse PR than the Brandy Alexander?

On the surface, the drink is a cuddly teddy bear, likable, comforting and innocent. It’s just brandy, cream and creme de cacao, shaken up and served up frothy and smooth. It drinks like dessert. How could a tipple like that ever do any harm?

Yet, there is a distinct disconnect between the Brandy Alexander’s bartop personality and its cultural reputation. It made headlines—and not the good kind—back in the 1974 when it briefly became the refreshment of choice of rock ‘n’ roll drinking buddies John Lennon and Harry Nilsson. This was during Lennon’s so-called “lost weekend,” when he and Yoko One were separated. Too many of the sweet treats led the duo to heckle the Smothers Brothers at the Troubadour in Los Angeles one night and get tossed out on their ears. I wrote about this history at length in my book 3-Ingredient Cocktails:

Lennon eventually returned to Ono, and his reputation rebounded. Nilsson’s never quite did. “It still haunts me,” Nilsson said in his final interview, before he died in 1994. “People think I’m an asshole and a mean guy. They still think I’m a rowdy bum from the 1970s who happened to get drunk with John Lennon, that’s all. I drank because they did. I just introduced John and Ringo to Brandy Alexanders, that was my problem.