Official State Drinks: The Few Real Cocktails, and Each State's Unofficial One

Search for the official state drink of almost any state and the answer will be disappointing to anyone hoping for a cocktail, because legislatures that bother to name a state beverage overwhelmingly pick milk, which has been adopted by more states than any other beverage, usually at the urging of a dairy lobby or a class of schoolchildren writing to their representative. The handful of exceptions are more interesting, and they should be kept apart from the far longer list of drinks a state is merely famous for.

Official designations that actually involve alcohol

Louisiana and the Sazerac. In 2008 the Louisiana legislature passed a measure making the Sazerac an official cocktail, with its identity tied explicitly to New Orleans, where it developed during the nineteenth century from a brandy drink into the rye-based version served today. The Sazerac in our database is the lean modern form: two ounces of rye, half a teaspoon each of Pernod and simple syrup, and a dash of Peychaud’s bitters. Because anise compounds such as anethole are intensely aromatic, half a teaspoon reaches the nose well before the whiskey reaches the tongue, which is why so small a dose dominates the first impression.

Alabama and Conecuh Ridge. In 2004 Alabama named Conecuh Ridge Fine Alabama Whiskey its official state spirit, an unusual case of a commercial brand being written into statute, though no recipe comes attached to it.

Puerto Rico and the Piña Colada. Although Puerto Rico is a territory rather than a state, its 1978 designation of the Piña Colada as its official drink is the clearest case anywhere in the United States of a cocktail being written into law, and it usually appears in these searches for that reason.

The Kentucky Derby belongs in a footnote here, since the mint julep is the official drink of the race at Churchill Downs rather than of the state. Kentucky’s official state drink, by a 2005 statute, is milk.

The non-alcoholic answers people are usually looking for

Several of the most searched states have official drinks that are not cocktails at all, and each has its own logic. Rhode Island adopted coffee milk in 1993, a regional habit of stirring sweet coffee syrup into cold milk. Ohio chose tomato juice in 1965, citing the state’s role in commercializing the tomato, so the closest cocktail tribute is a Bloody Mary, which carries three ounces of tomato juice against an ounce and a half of vodka. Florida’s official beverage is orange juice, Massachusetts chose cranberry juice, and Maine went as far as naming Moxie its official soft drink in 2005. Maryland and Wisconsin, both strong dairy states, picked milk.

Texas, Nevada and California have no official cocktail on the books, so for them, as for most states, the useful answer is whatever locals actually order.

Unofficial signature cocktails, state by state

The table assigns each state the drink most closely tied to it in bars, which is a matter of reputation rather than law, and where an origin story is disputed it credits only what is reasonably well documented.

California has a second claim in the Irish Coffee, which San Francisco’s Buena Vista Cafe popularized in America in 1952. Nevada’s Picon Punch, meanwhile, depends on Amer Picon, a French bitter orange aperitif that is difficult to find in the United States, and many Nevada bars substitute a domestic amer, which shifts the balance toward sweetness because the replacements tend to be less bitter than the original.

Reading the table as a map of what grew nearby

Underneath the list sits geography more than romance. Kentucky drinks bourbon because corn, limestone-filtered water and charred oak converged there; Washington’s drink is named after apples because the state grows most of the country’s crop; and Wisconsin’s taste for brandy has been traced to the German and Central European communities that settled the state, although the exact mechanism of that preference is still argued over. The Gulf and island states lean on rum, the spirit of the Caribbean trade, while the Basque sheepherders who settled in Nevada kept a taste for bitter French aperitifs that their descendants still order.

The classic New Orleans cocktails roundup covers the Sazerac and Hurricane in their home context, while the Washington Apple recipe gives that drink its own month on the calendar. For anyone attempting a fifty-state tasting from a home bar, the limiting factor is usually a single bottle such as Amer Picon or Southern Comfort, and Cocktail Builder will show which of these regional drinks the bottles already on the shelf can make.

Last modified on October 19, 2026