Recipe: Montana Club Cocktail
Will the Real Montana Cocktail Please Stand Up?
The Montana Club, a private club in Helena that was founded in 1885 and has long advertised itself as “the oldest continuously operating private club between Minneapolis and Seattle,” closed its door on March 29 with one final bash that was open to all. Montana Club President Charles Robison told me the next day that the crowd that gathered was “wall to wall.”
Mint Juleps were served. I know this, because I asked Robison when I interviewed him for an article about the club’s closure for The New York Times. I asked because the Mint Julep was the signature cocktail of Julian Anderson, a bartender who worked at The Montana Club for sixty straight years beginning in 1893. In 1919, Anderson self-published Julian’s Recipes, a slim volume of cocktail formulas that stands as only the second cocktail book ever published by a Black American bartender.