Grape Juice Highball, the Prohibition Soft Drink

Highballs for a dry country

Stockbridge wrote for the hostess of the day, who she expected would now be serving drinks at home far more often than before. Her chapter on cocktails, highballs, fizzes, cobblers, sours and juleps borrows every barroom word and none of the barroom’s bottles. Highballs of fruit juice, ginger ale or cider, she promises, are both satisfying and cooling, and the hostess who makes a habit of them will find guests asking for the recipes. Her ginger ale punch works on a larger scale: weak tea, sugar and citrus over a block of ice, topped with ginger ale and sparkling water.

Grape juice was the easy choice. Purple and white juice came in bottles at reasonable prices, she notes, so there was little need to make it, although she reprints the Department of Agriculture’s method for anyone with a crop of grapes.

The soda fountain trade sold the same idea. In March 1921 The Soda Fountain described a Portland, Oregon, store window dressed as a veranda, with golfing mannequins and glasses of grape juice and straws on the table. A Western firm’s joking notice in the same article offered lemonade, root beer, fruit phosphates, grape juice and ginger ale, with a promise: “They quench the thirst and don’t give you a hang-over.”