History
It can knock your socks off, as one bar patron put it.
The origin of this sweet-tasting drink, which some people say tastes like ordinary iced tea, is unclear. Several bartenders said they believed it started on local campuses or Long Island discos. Bar patrons interviewed recently said they had drunk it in cities from as nearby as Albany to as far away as Florida and the West Coast. Ronald Butt, a bartender, has been credited with creating this cocktail (an alcoholic drink with just about everything thrown in, except tea) in the 1970s at the Oak Beach Inn in Hampton Bays, Long Island. Another source tells us that the drink was invented by bored housewives on the same island who added a little of something from everything in the bar cabinet so that their husbands wouldn't find out that they had been drinking. Everyone would assume that they were drinking iced tea. Take all such bar stories with large lumps of salt.