The Highball Inheritance: A History of the Highball

How an accident in a monastery cellar became the world’s most elegant long drink

An Accidental Sparkle

The whisky highball’s lineage, like that of every carbonated drink before it, begins with an accident, as so many good things do. In 1531, at the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire in Limoux, in the south of France, the monks’ bottled wine underwent an unexpected second fermentation. Nobody saw this as a gift. The winemakers wrote the gas off as a defect, because the wood-fired French glass of the day was far too fragile to hold the pressure, and the sound and mess of shattering bottles became an all too regular feature of life in the cellars. Limoux gives us the earliest documented sparkling wine. Secondary fermentation had almost certainly happened before, but nobody had written it down.

In England, by the early seventeenth century, the cider makers of Herefordshire and Worcestershire were already coaxing lively second fermentations out of their cider, sometimes by adding sugar or sweet must. Their bottling was domestic and small in scale, using repurposed bottles or locally blown glass, and the cider was drunk close to where it was made. A burst bottle was therefore an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe, and that freedom allowed them to experiment with brisk, sparkling styles long before English glass was strong enough to make the same effervescence commercially viable for wine.

It took more than a century after Limoux for bubbles to become something people chose on purpose, and when it happened, at least on a commercial scale, it happened in England. In December 1662 the physician Christopher Merrett presented a paper to the Royal Society describing how adding sugar to still wine would make it sparkle. Paired with England’s new coal-fired glassmaking, which at last produced bottles strong enough to withstand the pressure, Merrett’s paper became the first written method for making wine sparkle deliberately.

This sits awkwardly with the story most people know. Legend has it that the Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon discovered sparkling wine at Hautvillers Abbey and cried, “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!” The tale is largely apocryphal. Dom Pérignon (1638 to 1715) was a gifted cellar master who greatly improved the still wines of Champagne, but he spent much of his career trying to prevent secondary fermentation and the explosions it caused in weak French glass. The romantic version was invented more than a century after his death, principally by a later monk keen to raise the abbey’s prestige. In any case, the English had beaten him to it. When Dom Pérignon arrived at Hautvillers in 1668, Merrett had described the method six years earlier.

By the late seventeenth century, this new mastery of controlled fizz had met an English taste for “brisk” drinks that already existed. The sugar-charging method was applied to the great volumes of still French, German and Portuguese wine arriving in England, wine shipped in barrels or in weak glass and never meant to bubble. Once it landed, English coopers charged it with sugar and rebottled it in thick, coal-fired English glass built to survive the pressure. England became, in effect, the first market to treat sparkle as a deliberate commercial style on any significant scale. The sparkling-wine trade was built by English drinkers, craftsmen and glassmakers well before continental winemakers caught on.

Bottling the Air

As coopers and glassmakers learned to trap gas reliably, the consequences went beyond commerce. For the first time, an effervescent liquid was stable enough to be observed, measured and manipulated. This was the world in which Joseph Priestley began experimenting with “fixed air”, and it was Priestley who showed that plain water could be artificially charged with the same gas that gave cider and wine their sparkle. A few decades later, William Henry (1774 to 1836) supplied the law that made the process predictable. Henry’s Law, published in 1803, set out the relationship between pressure and the solubility of a gas, turning Priestley’s curiosity into something repeatable and controllable. The English pursuit of a brisk, bubbly drink, begun in cider houses and wine cellars, had quietly laid the scientific foundations of the mixer that would one day meet whisky in a tall glass.

Entrepreneurs were quick to take notice. Jacob Schweppe, born in 1740 in Witzenhausen, in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel, and later a watchmaker and jeweller in Geneva, perfected a method of carbonating water on a scale nobody had attempted before. In 1790 he set up a manufactory in Geneva with partners, and in January 1792 he arrived in London and opened his first English factory at 141 Drury Lane. What had begun as a laboratory curiosity became fashionable almost overnight. Bottles of Schweppe’s Soda Water appeared in apothecaries, coffee houses and Mayfair drawing rooms, prized for their purity and for the near-alchemical novelty of captured gas. By the early nineteenth century soda water was a fixture of polite society, a refined mixer ready to meet any spirit, and the long road from accidental monastic bubbles to engineered carbonation was all but complete.

One problem remained: how to serve it. For all its later association with whisky, the soda siphon began life as something far more modest, a better way to sell soda water, and its origins are tangled. Some accounts trace it to 1813 and a device credited to Charles Plinth, a pressurised bottle fitted with a valve that allowed seltzer to be drawn off a glass at a time. Others date the breakthrough to 1829, when two French inventors patented a hollow corkscrew that could be driven into a sealed soda bottle to dispense part of its contents while keeping the rest under pressure. A third account credits Antoine Perpigna, in 1837, with a refinement closer to the siphon we remember today. On one point every version agrees. None of these devices was built with spirits in mind. They were designed to serve soda water without losing its fizz, at a time when it was still sold as a health tonic.

In the decades between those early patents and the siphon that graced every Victorian sideboard, inventors attacked the same problem from several directions. Chemists built hand-pumped gasogenes, countertop contraptions of glass globes and metal fittings that let households carbonate water on demand, with results ranging from serviceable to explosive. Manufacturers began selling reinforced bottles charged at higher pressure, so that soda water could be produced in larger and more consistent batches. Together these innovations removed the last practical barrier. Bottled soda water was useful, but a bar or hotel needed to serve it by the glass, again and again, without the rest going flat. The siphon, the gasogene and the evolving soda fountain provided exactly that. Once pressurised water could be dispensed on demand behind a bar, the technical foundations of the highball were in place, and whisky had a clean, consistent, sparkling partner waiting for it.

Whisky’s Moment

By the time the siphon and the soda fountain were in wide circulation in Britain, Scotch whisky was riding a cultural tide that had been gathering for decades. In the 1810s and 1820s Walter Scott had remade Scotland in the English imagination, turning the Highlands from a half-forgotten, politically awkward region into a romantic landscape of clans, tartan and misty heroism. George IV’s theatrically stage-managed visit to Edinburgh in 1822 pushed the fashion further, giving Highland dress something close to a royal blessing. When Victoria and Albert took up Balmoral in the 1840s and filled it with tartan carpets and stags’ heads, Scottishness became something the aspiring classes copied with real vigour. So by the time improved stills and the railways were delivering cleaner, more consistent Scotch, Britain already had a long appetite for anything that called itself Scottish. The siphon simply happened to be sitting on the hotel bar at the moment this cultural wave met a modern, reliable spirit. Whisky and soda was no accident. It was the natural meeting point of technology, taste and a very long-running Scottish craze.

There was another push behind whisky’s rise, and it had nothing to do with tartan. From 1863 the phylloxera aphid devastated the vineyards of France, and brandy supplies collapsed. London’s bars and hotels found themselves short of their most reliable imported spirit, and drinkers had to look elsewhere. Nor was it a passing problem. The crisis did not begin to ebb until the late 1890s, and in the worst years French wine production fell by roughly three quarters. Wine and brandy became scarce and, where they could be had, ruinously expensive. Scotch, already improving thanks to better stills and already fashionable thanks to decades of Scottish romanticism, stepped neatly into the gap. The blight did not create the whisky boom, but it certainly accelerated it.

In Britain the habit settled into whisky and soda. Brandy and soda had been a club staple since the 1830s and 1840s, and once Scotch rose, the same formula simply changed spirits. By the 1870s and 1880s “Scotch and Polly”, Scotch with Apollinaris water, was common enough to turn up in everyday speech and in advertising. The British almost never called it a highball.

America Names the Drink

The name “highball” is an American contribution of the 1890s, and it has two plausible parents. In Ireland a “ball” had long meant a glass of whisky, so a “high ball” was simply a tall one, and Irish bartenders in New York and other American cities brought the usage with them. At the same time, the American railroad signal of a ball raised high on a mast, meaning clear track and full speed ahead, offered a second and more energetic association. Both explanations are still current.

The word reaches print in the middle of the decade. It is spoken in a play, My Friend from India, in 1894, and the first known recipes appear the following year in Chris Lawlor’s The Mixicologist, which lists both a “High Ball” (brandy or whiskey floated on seltzer) and the near-identical “Splificator”. Cincinnati’s celebrated barman could hardly have come up with a more Gilded Age name had he tried, though we do not know whether he coined “highball” or simply recorded it. By 1900 the drink was firmly established in Harry Johnson’s Bartender’s Manual. A well-known but unverified story credits the English actor E. J. Ratcliffe with ordering a Scotch and soda in a New York bar around 1894, and so with helping to popularise the “Scotch highball”. Patrick Gavin Duffy later claimed a share of the credit too. Whoever was first, by the turn of the century the Scotch highball was being described as the most fashionable drink in America. Britain went on saying “whisky and soda”, but America had given the combination a name and turned it into a category: any spirit lengthened with carbonated water in a tall glass.

The name then made its way back across the Atlantic, carried largely by American visitors. London’s truly grand hotels were still few in number (Claridge’s, the Savoy, the Cecil and a handful of others) and a disproportionate share of their guests were wealthy Americans. When those guests asked for a “highball”, the word entered the vocabulary of London’s most fashionable bars through demand rather than through any change of staff. By the early twentieth century it was familiar, if never dominant, in British cocktail books and on hotel menus, though “whisky and soda” remained the customary British phrase.

The Japanese Refinement

From those same grand hotels the drink travelled further still, to Yokohama, Kobe and Tokyo, where Japanese bartenders met the highball as part of the wider Western canon of mixed drinks. In the decades that followed, they refined it with characteristic precision. Crystal-clear ice, exacting ratios and a reverence for balance turned a simple mixture of whisky and soda into a quietly perfect expression of the bartender’s art, and a ritual of modern drinking. A drink born of English effervescence, Irish speech, American naming and Victorian whisky found perhaps its most elegant form half a world away. Read the full story in The Highball in Japan.

A Quiet Inheritance

Seen across five centuries, the highball looks less like an invention than an inheritance. It begins with a monk’s unwanted sparkle and an English physician’s deliberate one, gathers strength in English glass, in Schweppe’s bottled air and in the humble siphon, and finds its spirit in the Victorian romance of Scotch. America gave it a name, and Japan gave it its finest manners. Each age added something of its own, until whisky and soda in a tall glass became more than a drink. It became the effortless final chapter of carbonation’s long journey from a cellar accident to a refined craft.

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Sources

Limoux and Saint-Hilaire (1531)

• Contemporary and near-contemporary monastic records (earliest references 1531 and 1544).
• Wine Enthusiast and Limoux AOC histories.

English cider and early secondary fermentation

• John Beale; John Worlidge, Vinetum Britannicum (1678); Royal Society interest in cider and glass.

Christopher Merrett (1662)

• “Some Observations concerning the Ordering of Wines”, Royal Society, 17 December 1662 (CLP/10iii/2, MS/215/11, RBO/2i/14).
• Royal College of Physicians Museum; Tom Stevenson and subsequent scholarship.

The Dom Pérignon myth

• Tom Stevenson and GuildSomm; Dom Groussard’s letter of 1821; modern consensus.

Jacob Schweppe

• Baptised 16 March 1740, Witzenhausen; in Geneva from 1765/66; in London from January 1792 (141 Drury Lane).

Soda siphon, gasogene and soda fountain

• Plinth, 1813; French hollow-corkscrew patents, c. 1829; Perpigna, 1837; mid-nineteenth-century gasogene and soda-fountain development.

Victorian Scotch, phylloxera and British whisky and soda

• Cultural histories of Scott, George IV in Edinburgh (1822), and Victoria and Albert at Balmoral.
• Phylloxera in France from 1863.
• References to “Scotch and Polly” and Apollinaris from the 1870s and 1880s onward.

The American highball (1890s)

• My Friend from India (1894).
• Chris Lawlor, The Mixicologist (1895): “High Ball” and “Splificator”.
• Harry Johnson, Bartender’s Manual (1900 edition).
• Patrick Gavin Duffy’s later claims (letter to the New York Times, 1927; Official Mixer’s Manual, 1934).
• Contemporary newspapers and bar manuals on the rapid adoption of the Scotch highball.

General

• The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails and standard cocktail histories (Wondrich, Regan, Difford’s).

© 2026 Birchwood Stanhope Limited. All rights reserved. Written by Daniel Merson.