The Story Behind The Revolver

Few cocktails saw as many riffs as the Manhattan during the modern cocktail renaissance. Add a splash of this liqueur, swap sweet vermouth for that — the possibilities were seemingly endless. And while the vast majority of these Manhattan variants hailed from NYC (and named after New York neighborhoods), there were a select few that were born on the other side of the country. One such marvel was the Revolver, a stirred cocktail armed to the teeth with Bulleit bourbon, coffee liqueur, and orange bitters, topped off with a splash of flaming citrus oils.

In 2004, Jon Santer was managing the bar at Bruno’s, a jazz club in San Francisco’s Mission District, when he created the drink. His boss took care of all the liquor orders at the time, and one day, Santer was faced with a fresh case of Bulleit bourbon. Given that Bulleit was relatively new at the time, he knew that customers wouldn’t be requesting it, so he tried incorporating it into a cocktail. He had a friend that would always put crème de cacao in his Manhattans, but rather than copy that move, Santer reached for Tia Maria coffee liqueur to complement the spice of the rye-heavy bourbon. To tie it all together, he added a couple dashes of orange bitters and a flamed orange twist — a trick he borrowed from bartender Dale DeGroff.

The Revolver debuted on Bruno’s cocktail menu, but unfortunately, customers rarely paid any mind to the menu there. “Bruno’s wasn’t that kind of place,” Robert Simonson writes in his 2022 book “Modern Classic Cocktails.” “There, most of the guests ordered lagers or whiskey and Cokes.” Thus, the cocktail simply had no audience.

In 2006, Santer joined the bar staff at Bourbon & Branch in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, and the Revolver became the only original drink on the bar’s opening menu not created by bar director Todd Smith, who also invented the Black Manhattan. The only setback for Santer’s cocktail was that the menu featured 63 drinks, and the Revolver was buried on page 10.

Six months later, though, Bourbon & Branch opened an adjacent sister bar called the Library, a standing-room-only, no-reservations space with a much shorter menu. Among the few cocktails listed was the Revolver, and allegedly, it wasn’t long before Santer and co. were stirring up 50 to 75 of them each night. “I remember my Library colleagues complaining about blackened fingertips from flaming so many orange discs,” Santer tells Simonson in “Modern Classic Cocktails.” Word of the drink eventually reached the East Coast, and the Revolver began popping up on bar menus around the world from Austria to New Zealand, cementing its status as a modern classic. Sometimes, a good cocktail just needs the right stage to truly take flight.

Ingredients

2 ounces bourbon, such as Bulleit
½ ounce coffee liqueur, such as Tia Maria
2 dashes orange bitters
Garnish: flamed orange peel

Directions

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice.
Stir until chilled.
Strain into a chilled coupe glass.
Take a piece of orange peel roughly the size of a silver dollar. Hold it several inches away from the drink’s surface, skin side down, and warm the skin with a match.
Quickly express the orange skin toward the lit match, sending a flaming burst of citrus oils over the cocktail's surface.
Discard the match and orange peel.