What Is The Arnold Palmer Drink?

The Arnold Palmer drink

The Arnold Palmer drink is a non-alcoholic cocktail, or mocktail. It is made with iced tea and lemonade. Arnold Palmer said that the drink got its name one day when he ordered a cocktail of iced tea and lemonade for lunch – his habitual drink when he wanted something refreshing on a hot day – and a lady overheard him and said: “I'll have that Arnold Palmer drink, too.”

Arnold Palmer was one of the most charismatic and popular golfers ever, with his supporters known as Arnie’s Army. So Palmer’s fondness for this drink became wildly known and copied, and the moniker for it stuck.

Palmer himself preferred the mixture to be one part lemonade to three parts iced tea. However many versions of the recipe for an Arnold Palmer drink have the two main components added in equal measure. Indeed the official Arnold Palmer website gives the half and half version as the recipe for an Arnold Palmer. When the iced tea and lemonade are mixed equally, the cocktail is sometimes called a Half And Half.

In 2001 Arnold Palmer Enterprises began bottling the drink in a deal with the AriZona Beverage Company. It now produces more than 400 million cans a year with eight different flavours of the beverage available.

The alcoholic or spiked version of an Arnold Palmer drink either includes vodka, or replaces the iced tea with sweet tea vodka. This version is sometimes known as a John Daly cocktail after that golfer. Indeed when John Daly found that his name was being applied to the drink, he brought out his own line of “Grip It And Sip It" drinks, a pun on his playing mantra of “Grip It And Rip It”.