Trump’s Whisky Sour to the Teddy Hat: Cocktails Get Political
Image Credit: If Trump's Transatlantic Whisky Sour represents statecraft, the Roosevelt-inspired Teddy Hat Cocktail could start a bar brawl.

IF DIPLOMACY HAD A FLAVOUR, it would probably taste like Johnnie Walker and marmalade. That was the logic at Windsor Castle this week, where Buckingham Palace unveiled the Transatlantic whisky sour to honour Donald Trump’s second state visit to the UK.

A smoky-bright spin on the classic, it folded in Johnnie Walker Black, a swipe of citrusy marmalade, pecan foam, and a toasted marshmallow perched on a star biscuit. It was rich in symbolism and ceremony — and tinged with irony, considering Trump’s famously a teetotaller.

Still, the point wasn’t to get him tipsy. It was to stir the air of special-relationship showmanship. A state-crafted cocktail as soft power...and a far cry from the last time a presidential drink made headlines for the opposite reason.

The Cocktail That Drew Battle Lines

Step back to Chicago, 1912. Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Rider turned president turned political insurgent, had just declared he was coming for his old job — and for his former protégé-turned-rival, William Howard Taft. His rallying cry? “My hat is in the ring.”

Enter Charles W Svendsen, a bartender at the Congress Hotel with a flair for theatre. As Republican delegates poured into town, he mixed up the Teddy Hat: orange bitters, raspberry syrup, gin, vermouth, and Dubonnet. Bold. Brash. But the genius was the garnish — a strip of lemon peel snipped into Roosevelt’s signature Rough Rider hat and dropped into the glass like a tiny yellow mic drop.

Sip to Pick a Side

Here’s where it got lethal. If you fished the lemon hat out, you were Team Taft. Leave it in, you were Team Teddy.

One drink, one choice — and suddenly Chicago’s bars became campaign trenches. The Record-Journal called it “the frazzliest new cocktail”. Roosevelt didn’t win (he splintered off into his own Progressive ‘Bull Moose’ Party and still lost), but for one glorious summer, he had the hottest drink in America.

The Hangover of History

The Teddy Hat faded fast. Roosevelt was more of a coffee guzzler than a cocktail man anyway. But for a flash of history, he proved that a drink could do more than toast power; it could seize it.

And that’s the real twist: while Trump’s Transatlantic whisky sour was theatre, Roosevelt’s Teddy Hat was war.

Because once upon a bar, ordering a drink wasn’t about taste.

It was about allegiance.