Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week’s Cocktail, The Harvey Wallbanger!

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. Ever since I rewrote the Tequila Sunrise, I’ve had a hankering to revisit the nastier drinks from the fern bar era and transform them into something drinkable. One legend called out to me as the epitome of awful cocktails — the notorious Harvey Wallbanger. My creation is full of citrus, vanilla, and cream flavors, everything the Harvey Wallbanger aspired to be. It also uses twice as many ingredients, none of which were in the original cocktail. I’ve included the recipe for the 1971 drink, along with my updated version, so you can see just how far I’ve strayed from my inspiration. Let’s make some Wallbangers. Here are the recipes:

6 oz orange juice

1 oz vodka

½ oz Galliano

Stir the orange juice and vodka in a highball glass with ice. Splash the Galliano on top of the cocktail. Garnish with a lemon slice and a maraschino cherry.

1 ½ oz Sauza tequila

2 heaping barspoons orange marmalade

½ oz Stirrings triple sec

½ oz Licor 43

1 oz lemon juice

½ oz orange juice

2 oz heavy cream

Stir the tequila and orange marmalade together in a cocktail shaker until the marmalade dissolves. Add the remaining ingredients, except for the cream. Double strain the cocktail into a rocks glass over ice. Shake the heavy cream in a squeeze bottle for 30 seconds (put your thumb over the squeeze bottle tip). Gently squeeze a layer of whipped cream on top of the cocktail. Garnish with orange zest.

Liquor distributors often write cocktails for the oddball liqueurs in their catalog. Such is the case with Galliano, an anise and vanilla liquor that haunted the shelves of fern bars in the ‘70s. George Bednar, an advertising executive for McKesson Imports, commissioned a series of pop art posters from William J. “Bill” Young promoting the drink. As far as I can tell, Bednar also wrote the recipe for the Wallbanger. Harvey looked like a sunburnt, hungover Charlie Brown with big feet and anxiety issues. The tag line of the posters was “Harvey Wallbanger is the Name… and I Can Be Made!”

The Harvey Wallbanger could be made. But it shouldn’t have. This recipe embraces every bad decision you could make behind the bar. It’s classic ‘70s mixology, in the worst possible way. Bottled orange juice is a terrible mixer. Vodka adds nothing to the drink but booze. An unshaken juice cocktail is going to be heavy and thick. And Galliano is just … bad. A vanilla liquor in this drink has some appeal, but anise? Licorice and orange juice in the same glass? Ick.

I started by swapping out the elderly ingredients of this drink for modern equivalents. Licor 43 is a sweet Spanish liquor that has the vanilla notes of Galliano, but more palatable herbal flavors. Tequila loves vanilla and citrus. Use some fresh-squeezed orange juice instead of bottled, and the end result should be fine.

And it was. Just … fine. Honestly, it tasted rather dull. The OJ wasn’t acidic enough to give the drink any lift. The Licor 43 popped out in an interesting but not exciting sort of way. Topping the cocktail with a cream head was a big step in the right direction. The dairy played into the vanilla, evoking classic Creamsicle flavors. Still, the drink seemed bland and uninteresting.

The orange juice was the problem. At its core, the Harvey Wallbanger is a Screwdriver with some weird liquor tossed on top. Screwdrivers are boring. However, I’ve made much better versions of the Screwdriver using some offbeat ingredients. Specifically, I’ve made a Breakfast Martini.

Hollering “Eureka!” loud enough to frighten the cats, I ran to the grocery store to fetch some orange marmalade. With several ingredient swaps, the Harvey Wallbanger became a tequila-forward orange marmalade drink, with lemon and fresh OJ to give it some pep. The Licor 43’s herbal notes faded into the background, while the vanilla stuck around to make everything mellow and groovy.

This probably isn’t a Harvey Wallbanger anymore. One of the Wonketeers suggested an updated name, such as the Henry Floorbasher or Millicent Stairfaller, might be in order. But I think that I’ve made a drink here that evokes the nostalgia of the name “Harvey Wallbanger” while doing everything the Wallbanger was too lazy to achieve. Whatever you choose to call it, it’s a wonderful summer drink.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Sauza Tequila: The scandals around tequila keep growing. Daigeo, the distributor for Casamigos and Don Julio, is facing two class action lawsuits claiming their “100 percent blue agave” tequila is only 30 percent actual tequila. Diageo refutes the claims, but their CEO has quit, and the company is up for sale again. Enjoy this mild, balanced tequila and steer clear of the car crash for now.

Orange Marmalade: Don’t use Smucker’s for this drink. The first ingredient in Smucker’s orange marmalade is high fructose corn syrup. The second ingredient is corn syrup. Pick a local brand like Ohio’s Gia Russa instead.

Stirrings Triple Sec: More orange flavors and related herbal notes like bergamot make the orange in this drink sing. Stirrings is a great value for the money, but use Cointreau if you have it.

Licor 43: This stuff is extremely sweet on its own, but the herbal flavors are great when paired with other strong flavors like coffee or tequila. I’m going to play with this as a margarita ingredient someday.

Lemon Juice: The acidity this drink was desperately missing. Without something tart to balance the Licor 43, the drink falls flat. Always use fresh.

Orange Juice: The primary ingredient in the classic Wallbanger gets relegated to a grace note in this drink. OJ is wasted as the primary mixer in a cocktail, but it’s charming as a secondary ingredient.

Heavy Cream: I’ve used this technique to build a head of cream on other cocktails, like the White Russian. Stir the cocktail after making it; the cream makes the whole drink better.

We aren’t linking to Amazon anymore, because fuck that coward Bezos with a rusty bar spoon. Go read Girly Drinks by Mallory O’Meara instead. This James Beard award-winning book provides context for when the Wallbanger was popular. Fern bars seem cheesy in retrospect, but they blew open the door for women in drinking culture. This book is a fantastic history of women and booze; I own a copy, and so should you.

PREVIOUSLY!

Welcome To Wonkette Day-Drinking, With This Morning’s Cocktail, The Tequila Sunrise!

Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week’s Cocktail, The Breakfast Martini!

You can find me on Bluesky at @samuraigrog!

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