Was New Orleans’ Famous Hurricane Cocktail Actually Invented in Wisconsin?
The unofficial cocktail of New Orleans is the neon-red and sugary sweet Hurricane. It mixes rum, sweeteners and fruit flavorings. And if you visit the Crescent City you’re practically obligated to stop by the historic bar Pat O’Brien’s to have one of these famous concoctions, which are served in a signature lantern-shaped glass.
The drink is as much a part of the city’s identity as Louis Armstrong’s trumpet playing, Café Du Monde’s delicious beignets and Mardi Gras parades. But as heretical as it sounds, for a while, I have suspected that the Hurricane wasn’t actually invented at Pat O’s—or even in NOLA.
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About 20 years ago, the Museum of the American Cocktail, which is in New Orleans, got a letter claiming that the Hurricane was actually created in the late 1930s at a rustic lakeside resort in northern Wisconsin. As one of the founders of the Museum, I’ve been wanting to investigate this claim for years, and finally did so recently.
This situation actually isn’t that unusual given that there is no national registry for cocktail names or recipes. You often get competing claims for who invented a famous drink or used a drink name first. There are far more drinks out there with disputed origin stories than ones where we know beyond a shadow of a doubt where, when and who created it.
But could the Hurricane really be a Wisconsin drink?
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I started by looking at the evidence. According to Pat O’s website: “In the 1940’s many U.S. distilleries were used to manufacture necessities for war time, and domestic liquor was scarce. However, rum coming up the Mississippi river from the Caribbean islands was plentiful. In order to buy a case of bourbon, for example, there was strong incentive to purchase large quantities of rum. With general manager George Oechsner, Jr at the helm, the folks in the bar experimented with recipes, and eventually everyone agreed that passion fruit was a hit! A glass shaped like a hurricane lamp was the perfect vessel and the Hurricane drink became New Orleans’ favorite libation.”
The phrase “necessities for war time” implies that the drink was created during World War II; indeed, earlier iterations of their website and countless newspaper stories expressly said as much.
Curiously, some years ago I found a slender recipe booklet published by the Ronrico Rum Company, titled The Rum Connoisseur, which also contains a Hurricane Punch and got me thinking that maybe the Hurricane wasn’t created at Pat O’s.
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Ronrico’s recipe calls for, you guessed it, rum, lemon and lime juice, and passion fruit syrup, which sounds like the ones made at Pat O’s. The booklet’s copyright date was 1941, which possibly meant that the drink was around before Pat O’s started serving it. Remember, the U.S. didn’t enter World War II until December of 1941.
Over the years, I made sporadic attempts to find out more about that lakeside inn that supposedly invented the Hurricane and ultimately discovered that it was called the Webb Lake Hotel, in Danbury, Wisconsin. It was owned by Andrew Kucharski. I was recently able to track down some of his descendants, including his grandson Barry Kucharski. (Barry was the one who sent the letter to the Museum in the first place.) From the late 1920s until World War II, Andrew, who lived in Chicago, owned and managed the summer resort on the shores of Big Bear Lake. His daughter Lorraine, nicknamed Babe, ran the bar. According to the Kucharski family, she invented a drink called the Hurricane and soon her bar was called the Hurricane Cocktail Lounge.
The Webb Lake Hotel opened in the 1920s and the Hurricane Lounge was added in the 1930s after the end of Prohibition. It had one of the first liquor licenses in Burnett County. The hotel was especially popular for Chicago-based clientele, who’d take the train from the Windy City up to nearby Spooner, Wisconsin.
While this is a great story, I needed to dig further and needed more hard evidence. I was especially intrigued that, according to Barry, a guest at the hotel had included Babe's recipe for her Hurricane in a book published in Chicago in the late 1930s.
Thanks to the help of award-winning bartender Charles Joly, who lives in Chicago, I found the book, The How and When: An Authoritative Reference Guide to the Origin, Use and Classification of the World’s Choicest Vintages and Spirits. It was written by Hyman Gale and Gerald F. Marco, and did indeed come out in 1938. It was published by Marco’s family, a prominent Chicago liquor retailer.
But the Hurricane recipe in the book was not in any way, shape or form similar to Pat O’Brien’s version. This one calls for gin, lemon juice and, I hope you’re sitting down, crème de menthe. No rum, no lime, no passion fruit syrup. I was crushed.
Not wanting to throw in the towel just yet, I did a little more research on the book. Sure enough, I found a later edition of The How and When that was published in 1940, and while it included the gin and crème de menthe Hurricane there was also a new Tropical Specialties section. It was added to the book to address the burgeoning tiki fad that was sweeping the nation. It contained 25 tropical drink recipes, including one for making Hurricane Punch, which was identical to the recipe from the Ronrico booklet. (A number of the drinks in this section were clearly provided by Ronrico).
So are we to believe this wonderful story from the Wisconsin North Woods? I want to but some questions still remain. Did Babe’s recipe find its way into the Ronrico booklet and later into The How and When? Or was it the other way around? Or did she learn about the drink from reading one of these books and adopt it as her own? Either way, how did the Hurricane find its way to Pat O’s in New Orleans? Like so many cocktail history questions, we’ll likely never know.
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I asked Shelly Oechsner Waguespack, the current president of Pat O’Brien’s, what she thought of my Hurricane findings. Her late father was George Oechsner, who was the bar’s general manager during the 1940s, and later became a co-owner.
“We’re aware of the other stories about the Hurricane’s invention, and the claims it was invented by someone else,” she told me. “To us, it really doesn’t matter; Pat O’Brien's made the Hurricane world famous, that’s indisputable. And it’s 100 percent true that wartime shortages forced Pat O’s to get resourceful about using what it had on hand. That’s a fact. We’re just a place where people can come and have fun, those sorts of details aren’t really that important.”
Hurricane Punch
INGREDIENTS
- 4 oz dark rum (Appleton or Smith & Cross)
- ½ oz fresh lime juice
- ½ oz fresh lemon juice
- 1 oz passion fruit syrup (such as Monin or Small Hand Foods)
- Garnish: Orange wedge
- Glass: Hurricane or pint
DIRECTIONS
Add all of the ingredients to a shaker and fill with ice. Shake, and strain into a Hurricane or pint glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with an orange wedge.