The Manhattan — A Recipe That Reversed Itself, and a Birthplace No One Can Pin Down

Today's "standard ratio" reversed itself over the span of a century. And what happens when the mediating ingredient — the vermouth — is rebuilt from rice

1. The “Standard Ratio” Has Already Reversed Once

Whiskey, sweet vermouth, a few dashes of bitters — that is how the Manhattan is described today. The ratio of whiskey to vermouth runs at roughly 2:1, the contemporary standard.

But this ratio was not always so.

Recipes recorded through the 1880s and 1890s show whiskey and vermouth in equal parts (1:1), or even favoring vermouth at 1:2. In other words, the Manhattan of that era leaned far more toward vermouth than the one we drink today.

The garnish has shifted too. Early versions were finished with a lemon peel; records show a move toward the maraschino cherry around 1891.

The fact that the ratio has moved over time means that the very sense of “what a Manhattan is” is simply the product of one particular moment in its history. If that’s true, adjusting the ratio once more is not a betrayal of tradition.

2. Where It Was Born Is, in Fact, Unverifiable

The story widely told about the Manhattan’s origin goes like this.

On December 29, 1874, at the Manhattan Club in New York, a testimonial dinner was held for Samuel J. Tilden, who had just been elected Governor of New York that November. The hostess was the socialite Jennie Jerome — later the mother of Winston Churchill. The Manhattan was supposedly unveiled at this dinner, and became a house favorite at the club from then on.

As stories go, it’s a good one. But the moment you check the dates, it falls apart.

Three Things That Don’t Hold Up

First, the venue itself doesn’t fit the timeline.

The story places the dinner in the Jerome family mansion. But according to the record, the Manhattan Club didn’t acquire the Jerome mansion until 1899. In 1874, the club was housed in a different building — the Benkard mansion. The two are a quarter-century apart.

Second, Jennie Jerome could not have been there.

On November 30, 1874, Jennie Jerome had just given birth to her son, Winston Churchill, in England. Her presence in New York as hostess of a dinner held less than a month later is difficult to reconcile.

Third, no contemporary record mentions the story at all.

Nothing in the newspapers or records of 1874 documents the Manhattan being unveiled at this dinner. The story is said to have taken its familiar shape only in 1950, when columnist Walter Winchell added the detail of the Jerome mansion. In other words, the tale settled into its current form more than 75 years after the event it claims to describe.

There Is Another Lead — But It Isn’t a Clincher Either

In 1922, a man named William F. Mulhall testified that the drink was invented by a bartender known as “Black,” who ran a bar on Broadway in the 1860s. Separately, records from 1881 document “the Manhattan Inn” at 493 Broadway, formerly owned by a George Black.

The same surname turning up in two separate decades, at two separate establishments, is a lead — but there is no contemporary evidence linking them to the same person.

The Most Solid Record in Print

The earliest reliably traceable reference is far more modest.

In 1882, a society column called “Gotham Gossip,” syndicated to several regional newspapers, noted that a mixed drink known by several names had “come into vogue” — and named the Manhattan cocktail as one of them. It has none of the grandeur of the banquet story; it’s a single line in a gossip column.

1883 saw the Boston Herald praise it as “about as good as anything that can be manufactured.” By 1884, it had appeared in three cocktail guides at once.

In other words, by the mid-1880s — roughly a decade after the supposedly landmark 1874 dinner — the drink was already established enough to appear in professional guides. Neither Tilden nor the Jerome family shows up anywhere in that process.

How We Read This Uncertainty

Neither the place nor the person who first made it can be pinned down. What we do know is that by the 1880s, it was already circulating among several New York bars.

A colorful anecdote can be added later and still take root as fact. Even a drink as famous as the Manhattan has an origin that remains open across several fragments.

If that’s true, adjusting its formula is not, in any sense, an act of disrespect.

3. The Three Roles Are Not Equal

Where the Negroni’s three ingredients hold each other in an equal, contesting balance, the Manhattan’s structure works differently. Here, it’s a lead role supported by two co-stars.

The Base — The Lead Role, and the Character Itself

Whiskey (traditionally rye) is not merely a skeleton. It carries the drink’s very character. Rye’s spice, or bourbon’s grain-forward sweetness — the choice between the two shapes the whole silhouette of the drink. Where the Negroni’s gin was a “rigid foundation,” the Manhattan’s whiskey is both the foundation and the one making a statement.

The Sweetness — Rounding Off the Edges

Sweet vermouth’s job is to soften the whiskey’s edges and smooth its silhouette into something drinkable. Where the Negroni’s vermouth was “a mediator between two opposing forces,” the Manhattan’s vermouth is closer to a partner accompanying a whiskey that already stands on its own. It isn’t arbitrating a conflict — it’s adding depth to the lead.

The Drop of Aroma — Tightening the Outline

Bitters don’t occupy an “equal corner” the way Campari does in the Negroni. They’re added in dashes. But those few dashes tighten the aromatic outline and keep the sweetness of whiskey and vermouth from turning vague. Their job isn’t about volume — it’s about the drop.

What this breakdown reveals is that the Manhattan doesn’t run on a “three-way standoff” the way the Negroni does — it runs on a different mechanic: lead, partner, accent. Which raises the question — what happens when the partner’s role is replaced?

4. What If the Vermouth Were Made From Rice

Vermouth is made from wine. That’s the accepted rule, worldwide.

Outside that rule, there’s a maker in Japan.

AKA-ONI ROSSO, made by Kanegasaki Yakusoshuzo in Kanegasaki, Iwate Prefecture, is a sweet vermouth built on a mirin base.

What’s Different

The base ingredient is mirin made from Iwate’s branded rice variety, “Konjiki no Kaze.” It’s then fortified with kasutori shochu. Rather than wine, rice is doing double duty in the structure.

Where sweetness derived from grapes runs mostly to simple sugars, sweetness derived from rice koji carries amino acids — that is, umami — along with more complex sugars. In the Manhattan, vermouth had been “a partner accompanying the whiskey.” Change the very quality of that sweetness, and the way it relates to whiskey’s grain-derived character should change too.

The Bitterness Is Real

This isn’t a purely sweet liqueur. Alongside wormwood — the botanical that qualifies any liqueur to be called a vermouth — it layers in kihada (Amur cork tree bark), a botanical long used in Japanese herbal medicine. To that, it adds kuromoji, tamushiba, shiso, and sansho pepper as Japanese botanicals, along with rose, ginger, and vanilla.

These botanicals are said to have been selected for how they harmonize with the aroma of koji. Where Italian vermouth is built around compatibility with wine, this starts from an entirely different point of departure.

Its ABV sits at 18% — on par with a typical sweet vermouth.

5. The Distillery That Couldn’t Install a Still

This spirit’s origin story was covered in depth in Ep.01, “Negroni.” Here’s the essential version.

Kanegasaki Yakusoshuzo’s building is a converted rice-polishing facility once used by the founder’s grandfather — a wooden structure. Fire code restrictions on wooden buildings meant a still couldn’t be installed there. In its place, the distillery turned to maceration, steeping its botanicals separately, in three to four rounds. Sequencing and repeating the process according to each ingredient’s extraction characteristics was the method the founder — a former bartender who launched the distillery in 2021 — arrived at once distillation itself was off the table.

A constraint became a method found nowhere else.

📎 The distillery’s origin and the details of its maceration method are covered in Ep.01, “Negroni.”

6. Toward the Manhattan 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.

We’ve already noted that the traditional benchmark is 2:1, whiskey-forward. Here is the information needed to decide how to work with that.

Four Points to Consider

① ABV is 18%. The structural weight holds.

Since this sits at the same level as a typical sweet vermouth, substituting it in doesn’t require any major rethinking of the drink’s overall strength or “weight.”

② The sweetness may echo the whiskey’s own character.

This is the most important point. Mirin-derived sweetness is smooth and layered, but it also tends to come forward in a recipe. Combined with a bourbon’s grain-forward sweetness, the two sweetnesses may run in the same register and flatten the drink. Set beside a drier, spicier rye, a contrast is more likely to emerge. That said, this is a theoretical read, not a claim about which pairing actually works better — that isn’t ours to declare.

③ The bitterness may change what the dashes are doing.

The dual bitterness of wormwood and kihada differs from bitters’ few dashes both in origin and in scale. Where bitters were “a drop that tightens the outline,” AKA-ONI ROSSO’s bitterness exists as wormwood and kihada contending with the sweetness. How these two bitternesses interact — whether the bitters become redundant, or more necessary than ever — is something that happens in the glass. It can only be confirmed at the counter.

④ The aromatic character is kuromoji, sansho, and shiso.

These aromatics won’t necessarily sit comfortably with the maraschino cherry, the traditional garnish. What to garnish with is something to be worked out in dialogue with this aroma. It isn’t ours to specify.

Where to Start the First Round

Start from the traditional 2:1 and pull back once the Japanese sweetness asserts itself?

Move closer to equal parts from the start, echoing the sensibility of the earliest Manhattans?

Or adjust the whiskey itself and search for the balance point from that side?

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 Manhattan’s three components, we moved only the vermouth.

So — what happens if the whiskey is moved instead? Replace the base itself with a Japanese distillate, and how does the “lead, partner, accent” mechanic reshuffle? That question remains unanswered.

And can bitters — that job done in a single drop, not a measure — be built from Japanese materials at all? Where might that drop-sized power to tighten an outline be found?

We’ll take these up in turn, in episodes to come.