Moscow Mule

Taste

On the nose it's ginger, sharp and peppery if you've bought decent ginger beer, with the lime lifting it. On tasting the ginger leads and keeps leading, the lime stops it getting sticky, and the vodka mostly just makes the whole thing stronger without announcing itself. That's not a criticism, it's the job. The copper mug isn't only for the photograph either, it goes properly cold in your hand and stays that way. Use a spicy ginger beer rather than a ginger ale, the difference between the two is basically the whole drink.

Origin

The Moscow Mule was invented to shift stock. In 1941 John G. Martin of Heublein had bought Smirnoff and discovered that Americans did not want vodka, and Jack Morgan of the Cock 'n' Bull on Sunset Boulevard had a cellar of ginger beer nobody was drinking. They put the two together with lime and sold the problem as a cocktail. The copper mugs are where it gets murky. One version has Morgan's girlfriend Osalene Schmitt inheriting a copper business and needing to move some inventory of her own. The other has a Russian woman, Sophie Berezinski, arriving in America with two thousand copper mugs from her father's Moscow factory and going door to door until Morgan said yes. The second is the better story and it's the one the mug companies tell. It's also hard to square with what Soviet industry was and wasn't producing for export in the 1930s. Martin, who was actually in the room, credited Osalene.