Four Horsemen Shot: One Name, Two Drinks That Share Almost Nothing

Ask for a Four Horsemen in two different bars and the glasses that come back may share one bottle, or none. One tradition reads the name as a roll call of first names on the back bar: Jim, Jack, Johnnie and Jose. The other reads it as a threat, and reaches for Jägermeister, peppermint schnapps and overproof rum. Six recipes sit under the name in our database, running from a single ounce of liquor to eight, so any answer about the ingredients has to begin by asking which horsemen are meant.

Neither camp has a documented origin. The riders come from the Book of Revelation and the first-name pun explains itself, but no credible claim to either drink turned up in the research for this page. Confident stories about who poured the first one should be treated as bar talk.

All six, measured

The figures below assume the labels’ usual strengths (35% for Jägermeister, 40% for the whiskeys and tequila, 43.5% for Goldschläger, 50% for Rumple Minze, 75.5% for 151 rum). Ice adds water but removes no alcohol, so everything is calculated before it. A US standard drink contains 0.6 ounces of pure alcohol, which is what a 1.5-ounce pour of 80-proof liquor delivers.

The Hell Breed row is an estimate, because the strength of the Aftershock is assumed at 40%.

The whiskey and tequila shot

Four Horsemen #2 is the plain version of the roll call, at a quarter ounce each of Jim Beam, Jack Daniel’s, Johnnie Walker Red and Jose Cuervo Especial, poured straight with no ice. Its reputation has little to do with chemistry. All four bottles sit at 80 proof, so combining them cannot raise the strength above that of any one of them, and the measured recipe holds less alcohol than a normal 1.5-ounce shot. A bartender working by eye in a rocks glass will usually pour well past an ounce, which is presumably where the stories begin.

Flavor is what the mix changes, and not for the better. The vanilla from a bourbon’s charred oak, the faint smoke of blended Scotch and the green, peppery edge of agave never settle into a single taste, while nothing in the glass is sweet or cold enough to blunt them. It tastes like four shots.

The Piledriver keeps those bottles and multiplies them, with two ounces of each in a beer mug and two ounces of energy drink on top. That is more than five standard drinks, and the recipe’s last instruction is to slam it. It appears here because it exists under the name. Caffeine does nothing to lower blood alcohol, and since it can leave a drinker feeling less impaired than they are, it removes one of the few signals that would otherwise suggest stopping.

The Jägermeister shot

The recipe filed under the bare name is the other family: three-quarters of an ounce each of Jägermeister, Rumple Minze, Bacardi 151 and Cuervo Especial, shaken with ice and served in a small rocks glass, since three ounces will not fit in a shot glass. Tequila appears here as well, which accounts for much of the confusion, as Cuervo is the one bottle that can sit in both camps. Four Horsemen #3 drops it for Goldschläger and takes a slight stir in place of the shake, moving the drink from licorice-and-mint toward cinnamon. Rumple Minze and Goldschläger are both easy to strand on a shelf after one party, which is the moment to ask CocktailBuilder what else they can make.

The trouble is how little of that strength can be tasted. Ethanol at 50% ought to burn, because it lowers the temperature at which the mouth’s heat receptors fire. Menthol from the peppermint, however, switches on the receptors that report cold, while sugar from the Jägermeister and schnapps flattens the sharpness further; shaking then adds about a fifth of the volume in water and takes the drink close to freezing. The burn arrives late, after the swallow, by which time the glass is empty. Of the two families this is the one to respect, although the whiskey version has the worse reputation.

Cinnamon pulls the other way. The cinnamaldehyde in Goldschläger irritates its own class of receptor and reads as heat, so #3 feels hotter than the original while containing nearly the same alcohol. The Hell Breed goes further still, with two ounces each of 151 rum, Aftershock, Goldschläger and Rumple Minze. Eight ounces cannot be a shot under any definition; the sensible reading is a batch for several people, or a recipe to leave alone.

Where the two families meet

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse joins the two families, with half an ounce each of Cuervo, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, Jägermeister and Johnnie Walker Black. They are shaken, then lengthened in a highball over ice with an ounce of pineapple juice and two of sweet and sour. Acid and sugar give the tongue something to attend to besides ethanol, as they do in any sour. At about 18% alcohol before the ice melts, it is the only one of the six that reads as a cocktail.

What one of these does

A Jägermeister-style Four Horsemen is two and a half drinks swallowed at once, and blood alcohol keeps rising for half an hour or more after the glass goes down. That delay is where people get hurt, since a second round bought at the ten-minute mark is bought by someone who has not yet felt the first. One is the limit, with food. Nobody at the table should be talked into it, and rounds of these do not belong in the same evening as a drive home.

Bacardi stopped making 151 in 2016, so a bottle of it today is old stock, and other high-proof rums stand in for it, as our Bacardi 151 guide sets out. Some bars set fire to the top of these drinks. This page offers no instructions for that: rum at 75% gives off flammable vapor at room temperature and burns with a flame that is hard to see, a few inches from someone’s face. Leaving the 151 out altogether is the better edit.

Our notes on the strongest drinks to order at a bar put these numbers beside a Martini and a Long Island, while gentler herbal builds without the rum sit among our Jägermeister shots. At a bar, the name alone is not an order, and naming the four bottles is the only reliable way to learn which drink is coming.

Last modified on November 1, 2026