The Last Word

Taste

On the nose it's the Chartreuse doing all the talking, herbal and a bit medicinal, with the lime sharpening it underneath. On tasting, the Chartreuse leads again, then the maraschino turns up with that odd nutty cherry-stone thing it does, which tastes nothing like a cherry and is much better than one. The gin holds the structure together from below, more felt than tasted, and the lime stops any of it going syrupy. It's an assertive drink and the balance is the whole trick, four loud ingredients and not one of them wins. Green Chartreuse is 55%, so it drinks harder than the glass suggests. If you've got a bottle, guard it.

Origin

The Last Word turns up first in a Detroit Athletic Club souvenir menu, sent out to members with the club's July-August 1916 magazine. That's four years before Prohibition, which makes it a pre-Prohibition drink that then had to survive one, most likely made with whatever gin somebody's bathtub was producing at the time. The name usually attached to it is Frank Fogarty, a vaudeville monologist known for getting the last laugh, and that credit comes from Ted Saucier's 1951 book Bottoms Up! Except the club's own researchers have since pointed out that the drink was already on the menu months before the only visit Fogarty is known to have made. Read Saucier's line again and it doesn't quite say what everyone thinks it says: he credits Fogarty with introducing the Last Word "around here", meaning New York. Fogarty was the courier, not the inventor. A century of people crediting him is what happens when one slightly loose sentence gets repeated often enough. Then it vanished for decades, until Murray Stenson found it in an old bar manual while working at the Zig Zag Café in Seattle in the early 2000s and put it on his menu. That is genuinely the whole reason you can order one today.