The Bushwacker, explained (and the bar fight over who invented it)

If you spend a summer on this coast and don’t end up holding a Bushwacker at least once, you did it wrong. It’s the drink that shows up in a styrofoam cup at the beach bar, looks like somebody handed a child a chocolate milkshake, and then quietly rearranges your afternoon. New arrivals underestimate it every single day. Locals watch it happen with the patience of people who once underestimated it themselves.

So let’s explain the thing.

What’s actually in it

A Bushwacker is a frozen, blended cocktail in the dessert-drink family — think piña colada’s chocolate cousin. The standard build is some combination of:

• Rum (often two kinds — a light and a dark, or a coconut rum)
• Coffee liqueur (Kahlúa)
• Crème de cacao or chocolate liqueur
• Cream of coconut and/or cream or ice cream
• All of it blended with ice into a thick, frozen, brown drink

Every bar has its own recipe and they all guard it like it’s the nuclear codes. The common thread: it tastes like a milkshake and contains roughly the alcohol of three or four regular cocktails. That’s the entire trap. There’s no burn, no bite, nothing that signals “this is strong.” You’re just drinking a frozen chocolate treat in the sun until, somewhere around the bottom of the second one, the sun seems a lot brighter and the walk back to the condo seems a lot longer.

Our standing guidance, established in the mailbag: one is a treat. Two is two too many. Three is a story you tell your friends. Four is a Lyft.

Who invented it (the part you can’t settle)

Here’s where it gets contentious. The Bushwacker’s origin is genuinely disputed, and the disagreement is itself part of Gulf Coast bar culture. The version you’ll hear most around here is that the Sandshaker Lounge on Pensacola Beach is where the drink was popularized — they’ve sold an enormous number of them over the decades and built a real identity around it. You’ll also hear claims tracing the drink’s invention to the Caribbean (the U.S. Virgin Islands gets named a lot) before it migrated to the Gulf.

We’re not going to settle it, because it can’t be settled, and because the argument is more fun than the answer. What’s true: the drink found its spiritual home on this coast, and the Flora-Bama and most every beach bar from Pensacola to Gulf Shores will make you one. If you want to take the question seriously, ask three bartenders and enjoy three different answers delivered with total confidence.

The festival

Orange Beach takes the whole thing seriously enough to throw an annual Bushwacker Festival — a weekend of bands, vendors, and bars competing over whose Bushwacker is best, with people sampling their way through the field like it’s a wine country tasting, if wine country were a parking lot near the water and the wine were 30% rum. It’s exactly as good a time as that sounds. (When the dates firm up each year we put it on the events calendar.)

How to drink one like you’ve been here

• Get the first one early in the day, not as a nightcap. It drinks like dessert; treat it like one.
• Eat first. A frozen drink on an empty stomach in Gulf Coast heat is how the afternoon gets away from you.
• Pace it with water. The cold and the sweetness hide both the alcohol and the dehydration. Two enemies, one cup.
• Don’t drive. Obvious, but the milkshake disguise makes people forget what they actually drank.

Done right, the Bushwacker is one of the genuine pleasures of summer here — a cold, ridiculous, delicious thing you drink with sand on your feet while the day does nothing in particular. Done wrong, it’s the reason you don’t remember the sunset. Respect the milkshake.

— Kathy