The Brown Derby and the Honey-Grapefruit Connection

An easy, appetizing, seasonal Whiskey Sour variation with just three ingredients.

Sometimes it’s fun to spend hours making custom ingredients or hunting around for specialized bottles of booze to make a weird cocktail. But there are also times that call for something relatively simple that can be made with just a few easy-to-obtain ingredients. 

Simple, however, doesn’t have to mean boring. A trio of well-chosen and properly proportioned ingredients can produce something surprising and delightful. 

Case in point, this week’s cocktail: the Brown Derby, a three-ingredient cocktail that consists of bourbon, fresh grapefruit juice, and honey syrup. It’s a clever twist on the Whiskey Sour format. And while I normally think of Whiskey Sours as start-of-fall drinks, we didn’t get to any Whiskey Sours this year, so I wanted to sneak this one in before the season was officially over. Besides, the grapefruit-honey pairing gives it a wintry character that will carry you through colder weather. This is an unusual Whiskey Sour that works especially well with sweater weather. 

A Showcase for Grapefruit and Honey

The Brown Derby dates back to the 1930s, where it appeared in the 1933 book Hollywood Cocktails. The same recipe also appeared a few years earlier, but under a different name — the De Rigueur — in The Savoy Cocktail Book by Harry Craddock.

There’s been some speculation that the Brown Derby found in Hollywood Cocktails was borrowed from Craddock, with the name changed. But the combo of ingredients is obvious enough that it seems at least plausible that the two drinks were created independently. 

In any case, Hollywood Cocktails devotes a full page to the recipe, giving it a featured treatment on page 17, along with an illustration of a man in — yep — a derby.

The 1933 book’s recipe is as follows: