The Cocktail Said To Be The Strongest In The World

The cocktail that's often called the strongest in the world for its potent mix of alcohol with nary a mixer to be seen is called the Aunt Roberta, and it's not for the faint of heart. It combines at least four different kinds of strong liquor, depending on the recipe, and rounds it out with a liqueur. At the heart of the drink is absinthe, the high-proof green-hued alcohol alleged to have hallucinatory properties (it doesn't). The other ingredients include gin, vodka, brandy, and blackberry or black raspberry liqueur, such as Chambord. As if this wasn't potent enough, there's a version that also includes Bacardi 151 rum.

Unlike Poland's Spirytus Rektyfikowany Vodka, billed as the strongest liquor in the world at a whopping 192 proof, you can actually sip the Aunt Roberta up.

While some recipes call for it to be served up in a coupe glass, others say to serve it over ice in an old-fashioned glass. Either way, we don't recommend drinking more than one. But it is really the strongest cocktail in the world?

Whether the Aunt Roberta is the strongest cocktail in the world is debatable, but it definitely packs a high amount of alcohol in one drink. Most recipes call for two shots of absinthe, three shots of vodka, 1.5 shots of gin, and one shot each of brandy and blackberry or black raspberry liqueur. The average absinthe is 136 proof (68% alcohol by volume), a potent drink all by itself. Brandy is somewhere between 80 to 100 proof, with vodka and gin in the range of 80 to 100+ proof. Chambord is the lowest at 33 proof. Add the 151, which as the name suggests, is 151 proof, and you've got a real contender for the strongest cocktail in the world. It outdoes another potent cocktail that bartenders hate to make, the Long Island iced tea, which includes vodka, gin, tequila, rum, and triple sec. But the Long Island iced tea also contains sweet-and-sour mix and cola, making it weaker than the Aunt Roberta, which is straight alcohol.

So what does this potent mixture taste like? Not surprisingly, the anise or black licorice of the absinthe predominates, but the other flavors — the blackberry (or raspberry), the warm fruit from the brandy, and the botanicals from the gin — also come into play. In 2013, the YouTube channel Common Man Cocktails described it as "fiery dark hot fire... the most potent brown sugar flavor, followed by raspberry, [with] black licorice throughout the whole thing."

The Aunt Roberta's provenance is as shaky as you're likely to feel the next morning after imbibing in one, or, God forbid, more than one. Many sites claim the Aunt Roberta is a "classic" cocktail, while some go further and claim the drink was invented by a woman named Roberta who was the mixed daughter of an enslaver from Alabama. She supposedly became a sex worker before inventing the drink and then dying in poverty. The silliest part of the myth is that a raccoon hunter named Billy Joe Spratt became a millionaire when he introduced Aunt Roberta's recipe to Manhattan after her death.

The only problem with this story is that the earliest reference available about the potent drink is from a newspaper article in 2007. A search through Newspapers.com for the supposed raccoon hunter who made his fortune with the drink revealed no one by that name or history. And a perusal of the American section of the Exposition Universelle des Vins et Spiritueux's database of classic cocktail books turned up no recipes for this supposedly classic cocktail. Various cocktail books from the 1880s through the 1940s also turned up nothing. The database, by the way, is well worth spending time with. So while the Aunt Roberta may be one of the strongest cocktails in the world, its backstory is weak tea.