How to Make a Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway's Favorite Aperitif

During much of the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway summered in Florida’s Key West, whiling away the hours drinking, fishing, and getting into all sorts of adventurous scrapes. One such incident ended up producing a superlative summer aperitif, created by the author himself: Death in the Afternoon, a bewitching concoction of absinthe and champagne that is still adored by bartenders and aesthetes today.

As the story goes—recounted in the 1935 book So Red the Nose, or, Breath in the Afternoon, a collection of author-invented drinks—Hemingway and three officers of the HMS Danae came up with the recipe after a seafaring rescue mission. “He loved both components,” says Philip Greene, the author of To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, which dedicates a chapter to the cocktail. “He wrote at length about absinthe and champagne, once saying that he could think of no better way to spend money than to buy champagne.”