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Like with many drinks, it’s tough to find the whiskey highball’s genesis. There are signs that a version of the drink was imbibed as early as the 19th century. But it really gained in popularity in the 20th century.
The drink can be traced back to England in the 1880s. This was when purportedly an American-born actor named E.J. Ratcliffe asked a bartender to make him a drink that was simply made with Scotch and soda water. In 1895, a British bartender named C.F. Lawlor created a drink called the “Splificator” that featured whisky, ice, and water. On top of that, Tommy Dewar (of Dewar’s whisky fame) claims to have created the whisky highball in the late 1800s.
Another story takes us to the United States. In the 1890s, a New York City-based bartender named Patrick Gavin Duffy claimed to make the first Scotch whisky-based highball at Ashland House.
And regardless of who actually invented it and while its popularity waned through the years, there’s no debating the drink’s impact in Japan. First introduced in the country in the 1920s, it didn’t gain in popularity until after World War II. In the 1950s, well-known whisky brand Suntory added to the drink’s cultural footprint by opening highball bars that even featured a machine to make perfect highballs. Even today, the whisky highball is one of the most popular drinks in Japan.
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