The Highball — Six Stories Told About Its Name, and Not One of Them Proven

There are only two ingredients. Yet six different stories are told about where its name came from. And not a single one of them has been proven

1. Six Stories Are Told About Where the Name Came From

Where does the name “highball” come from? Line up the explanations most widely told, and they run as follows.

① The railway signal theory. A railway ball signal meant “clear to proceed” by raising a ball high. From there, the story goes, the term came to describe a drink poured in a hurry. More elaborate versions tie it to the float ball that indicated water level in a steam locomotive’s boiler, or to a signal exchanged between bartenders.

② The golf theory. A piece of golf-course slang, tied to a struck ball.

③ The Irish slang theory. “Ball” was slang for a whiskey drink, or for the glass itself, and it was served in a tall — “high” — glass.

④–⑥ Three personal anecdotes. A New York bartender is said to have served one to a British actor, who then coined the name. A Boston establishment claimed to be its birthplace. A Scotch distiller is said to have named it as a play on words.

Line all six up, and one thing stands out. Each story starts from a completely different place, and a completely different profession. A railwayman, a golfer, an Irish tavern, an actor, a proprietor, a spirit maker. The only thing they share is that each one sounds plausible.

2. No One Can Prove Where the Name Came From — But the Record of When It Started Being Used Still Survives

So what does the written record show?

None of the six stories is proven. But when it comes to when the name began to be used, there are sources we could trace back to the original text and confirm. This time, we opened three period sources ourselves.

1894 — as a line in a comedy. In H. A. Du Souchet’s play My Friend From India, a character says the following to a servant:

Jennings, bring me a high ball of whiskey.

What’s worth noting is that this line carries no explanation at all. It was already common enough language for an audience to follow on the spot. By the time the name appears in the record, it was already fully formed.

1895 — as the first recorded recipe. Cincinnati bartender C. F. Lawlor’s The Mixicologist includes an entry for “High Ball” on page 39. What it describes is put together differently from today’s drink. Ice goes into the glass, the glass is filled with soda water, and the spirit is floated on top — in that order. It wasn’t mixed together; the spirit sat above the rest.

1900 — as a category. In Harry Johnson’s Bartenders’ Manual, page 251, the spelling has become the single word “Highball.” And what’s interesting is that it instructs the bartender to vary the spirit according to whether the customer asks for whiskey, gin, or brandy.

In other words, by 1900, the highball was no longer the name of one particular spirit — it had already become the name of a format whose base could be swapped out.

Details Blur With Retelling

There’s one more thing worth reporting here.

These three sources are cited in many articles today. But checking them against the original text turned up discrepancies in how they’ve been repeated.

For instance, the 1895 entry is often paired, in secondary accounts, with an alternate name. But that alternate name does not appear anywhere on the original page, or in its index. And the soda water specified in the 1900 recipe is, in the original text, not seltzer but Vichy water.

There’s also a widely circulated claim that, according to a certain authoritative English dictionary, the term’s earliest known use traces to an 1878 newspaper. But as far as we could trace it, every instance of that claim turned out to be copied from somewhere else — we were never able to confirm the dictionary entry itself. So this article doesn’t use that date.

How We Read This Uncertainty

In the Martini episode, we wrote that repetition builds authority but not evidence. With the Highball, that played out visibly. Simply checking the original sources was enough to unravel several details that had been repeated.

To sum up: no one has proven where the name came from. Six stories stand side by side, and none of them is backed by evidence. What can be confirmed, on the other hand, is roughly when the name began to be used, and what the drink looked like at the time. And that drink was different from today’s highball — the spirit was floated on top, and from an early stage, the base was already something that could be swapped out.

One of the most frequently ordered formats in bars around the world cannot account for where its own name came from. And still, the drink holds together, and keeps being poured.

If that’s true, then adjusting its base is hardly an act of disrespect. The 1900 manual, after all, had already said as much.

3. In a Structure This Stripped Down, Soda Isn’t Just There to Dilute

The highball’s structure has only two elements: the base spirit, and soda.

Having fewer ingredients also means there’s nowhere to hide. Looking back at the three drinks we’ve covered so far, each one relied on a third ingredient carrying some kind of role. In the Negroni, three components held each other in equal contest. In the Manhattan, vermouth became a partner accompanying the lead. In the Martini, that same vermouth was cut down to a mere whisper — but it was still there, in the glass.

In the Highball, that third element doesn’t exist at all. It’s fair to say that what kept eroding finally disappears here.

The Second Job Soda Is Doing

Here’s a point that’s easy to overlook.

Soda isn’t only there to dilute the alcohol. Rising bubbles are generally said to make it easier for the aromatic compounds in a liquid to volatilize. Whether the same spirit is cut with soda or not changes how its aroma reaches the nose — that’s a premise this format has widely shared.

Seen that way, the highball’s structure takes on another dimension: a device for presenting the aroma of whichever spirit sits in the base.

From this angle, what the base slot needs to offer starts to shift. A spirit that carries a drink through barrel-derived weight and body behaves differently, within this structure, from a spirit whose very identity is its aroma.

That raises a question: if the spirit placed in the base were chosen specifically for its aroma, what would this simple structure give back?

4. What If That Base Were a Sweet Potato Shochu

In Kagoshima, there’s a sweet potato shochu designed around aroma.

DAIYAME — a 25% ABV honkaku shochu made by Hamada Syuzou (founded 1868, Ichikikushikino, Kagoshima Prefecture).

The Aroma Is Built at the Raw-Material Stage

This shochu’s defining trait is an aroma reminiscent of lychee. Its official tasting notes list lychee, muscat grape, elderflower, chamomile, and rose water. The distillery itself describes it with the comparison “lychee reminiscent of an Alsace wine.”

Why would a sweet potato shochu produce this kind of aroma? The key lies in how the raw material is handled.

The distillery uses a proprietary aging technique it calls koujuku-imo (香熟芋, literally “aroma-matured sweet potato”) — aging Kagoshima-grown sweet potatoes before fermentation begins, in order to amplify monoterpene alcohols, the family of aromatic compounds that shape floral and fruity scent. Judging when the aging is right is described as work done by hand, by craftspeople checking the aroma themselves.

The koji is black koji; the raw materials are domestic rice koji and sweet potato. Distillation is done under reduced pressure — distilling at a lower temperature so that delicate aromatic compounds aren’t broken down by heat.

In other words, this shochu is designed, from the aging of its raw material through to its method of distillation, consistently around preserving aroma.

The Distillery Itself Suggests Cutting It With Soda

Here is where this episode differs from the ones before it.

From Ep.01 through Ep.03, we were the ones proposing a hypothetical — “what if this material were used here.” With DAIYAME, though, the distillery itself has publicly introduced a way of serving it cut with soda, under the name “DAIYAME Highball.”

In other words, the structure discussed in the previous section — soda changing how aroma comes through — is something the maker had already anticipated.

What’s noted here is information the distillery itself publishes on its own website; this article is not recommending any particular way of drinking it. Specifics of the distillery’s stated preparation are addressed later, in the section aimed at professionals.

5. The Word “Daiyame”

This shochu’s name has an origin of its own.

“Daiyame” is a Kagoshima dialect word. “Dare” means fatigue; “yame” means to stop. Together, they mean “to ease fatigue,” and by extension, the word came to refer to the evening drink itself.

This everyday dialect word became the brand name as it stands.

Here, let’s return to where this article began.

The name “highball” stood on six stories, none of them proven. No one can say whether it came from the railway, from golf, or from an Irish tavern.

This name, by contrast, is clear from the start about where it comes from. There’s no need to argue over who coined it. A piece of everyday dialect simply remains, intact, as the name.

A format whose name’s origin is unknown, and a spirit whose name’s origin is perfectly clear — the two meeting in the same glass is, we think, what makes this pairing interesting.

6. Toward the Highball of That Counter

Now, to the point.

This is as far as we can take it. What comes next belongs to whoever is standing behind the counter.

The following is a framework of considerations for professional bartenders. It is not intended to encourage mixing at home.

Points to Consider

① The ratio the distillery has published lands close to convention.

The distillery has published its own ratio for the “DAIYAME Highball” on its website. For the specific figures, check the distillery’s own published information.

What’s worth noting here isn’t the number itself, but where that ratio sits.

Run the math on the ratio the distillery gives for a 25%-ABV shochu, and it sits roughly within the strength band the highball has conventionally settled into — about the same range reached by cutting a spirit around 40% ABV at the conventional ratios bartenders use (which run somewhere in the range of 1:2 to 1:4). One way to read this is that using a lower-proof shochu means using correspondingly less soda, so the result lands at a familiar strength. Put differently: the base can be swapped out without shifting the strength the drinker actually receives.

Two caveats, though. The distillery hasn’t published its reasoning for choosing that ratio — the observation above is simply an arithmetic coincidence drawn from published figures, not our reading of the maker’s intent. And any such calculation is a theoretical figure, taken before the ice has had time to melt; in the glass, it drops over time.

② The character of the aroma runs in a different direction from barrel-derived notes.

Lychee, muscat, elderflower — this runs on a different axis from the weight typically supplied by barrel aging. Given that soda carries aroma upward, that difference is likely to register directly in the drink’s overall impression. That said, exactly how it comes across isn’t something we’re positioned to declare.

③ Citrus remains an open question.

The distillery lists a cut lemon as optional. It isn’t required. Whether to add citrus to a shochu whose whole character is its aroma, or leave it untouched so the aroma stands alone, isn’t ours to specify.

④ We don’t specify soda strength, ice, or glassware.

The distillery’s own wording about ice varies by page — “plenty of ice” in one place, “crushed ice” in another. Even within the official material, there’s some inconsistency. Soda strength and glass shape, too, are best left to each establishment’s own design.

Another Option — The Same Distillery’s 40% Expression

Everything above assumes the 25% expression. The same distillery also makes a 40%-ABV SKU: DAIYAME 40.

To be precise about this first: the distillery does not list the highball as an official way to serve DAIYAME 40. What it does list officially are serving it neat, cut 1:1 with room-temperature water, and building it into cocktails such as Martini-style drinks, the Moscow Mule, and Fizz-style drinks. This is a SKU designed as a cocktail base.

With that established, here is the structural point.

40% ABV sits within the strength band the conventional highball has always assumed. In other words, a bar that has already built its highball ratios around a spirit near 40% ABV can swap in this base without changing that ratio design at all. The strength that lands in the glass stays the same as before.

Confirm how the aroma comes through at 25%, then compare what changes — with the ratio untouched — at 40%. Or work in the reverse order. Either way, these are two expressions the same distillery has built from the same underlying idea about aroma.

Just as the Red Oni and Blue Oni filled the vermouth slot for three of our classics, here again, two expressions from a single distillery arrive at different answers within the same format.

How to Begin the First Round

Start from the ratio the distillery has published, and confirm that design as it stands?

Keep the conventional ratio and swap only the base, to compare the difference directly?

Or change the soda itself, and design how the aroma comes through from that angle?

Any of these is a valid answer. The moment you choose that first move, it already belongs to that counter.

7. What Remains Unanswered

In this article, of the Highball’s two ingredients, we moved only the base.

The other one — soda itself — we’ve barely addressed. Hardness, carbonation strength, temperature: how much these matter within a structure this simple remains an open question.

And as for where the name came from, we’ve done nothing more than line up six stories. We haven’t settled a single one of them. That’s the honest state of things.

Next time, we take up a drink that moves in the opposite direction — adding, rather than stripping away. Spirit, sweetness, bitterness, and the aroma of citrus peel. Where the Highball pared everything down, this old-style format builds its elements up one at a time: the Old Fashioned. There, the question becomes what to place in the sugar slot.

We’ll take that up next.