The Red Eye Cocktail

How to make a Red Eye Cocktail from the movie Cocktail. Coghlan’s Law.

While it may be the rue of many a great bartender, the film Cocktail introduced the world to many alcoholic concoctions that, thankfully, have never been ordered. How often have you strutted proudly to the bar and ordered a Ding-A-Ling or a Death Spasm? I don’t know about you, but I can’t see myself asking the lads, ‘My round boys, who wants a Velvet Hammer?’  (It’s worth noting that having researched the Death Spasm – a shot of gin, whiskey and absinth, and I’ll be ordering one next night out)

Of all the questionable recipes, undoubtedly the strangest was introduced during the scene where Brian Flannigan asks for a job at Doug Coghlan’s Upper East Side bar. We see Doug half-fill a pint glass with tomato juice before upturning a bottle of Miller beer into the drink, the foam overspilling across the bar. ‘Do you know how to make a red eye?’ he questions the inexperienced Flannigan, before cracking a whole egg into the potion much to the bewilderment of the rookie. Next, he added a couple of Tylenol aspirin before taking a healthy chug and an icon was born (and hangover cured)

Now there are a few ways to make this drink, but I decided we would stick to Coghlan’s Law and follow the great man's lead. Team Root+Bone drinks these regularly; they are a magnificent hangover cure, and we would know as we suffer many hangovers.

Method;

Half-fill a pint glass with tomato juice and tip a bottle of your favourite lager upside down into the pint. Wipe up the spillage or, if you are the less refined type, put your lips to the bench top and suck up excess beer like a human vacuum. Gently crack a whole egg into the elixir and sprinkle with your preferred dose of aspirin, paracetamol or Valium. Chug the lot in one go and remember; the money's gone, the brain is shot. But the liquor, we still got.

Doug Coghlan, logical negativist.

All Images by Steve Ryan https://steveryanphotography.com/