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Rock and Rye: Good Medicine

By Kara Newman

From SAVEUR Issue #151
"Have you tried Rock and Rye?" The question was posed to me not by a bartender, but by my teetotaling mother-in-law. When she was a girl, she recalled, the rock candy-sweetened rye whiskey was a cure for the sniffles. "My mother would spoon it into hot tea," she said.

Intrigued, I called on New York distiller and spirits historian Allen Katz, who, I discovered, has been working on his own version. It's difficult to pinpoint the sweet, citrusy cordial's exact origin, he explained, but by most accounts it was popularized in America's early saloons, where bartenders added rock candy, or rock candy syrup, to smooth out the spicy bite of a young rye. Keep reading »

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