It’s Rob Roy MacGregor’s birthday. Some call him an outlaw, some call him a misunderstood rebel with a powerful taste for vengeance, but most of us know him by his eponymous cocktail, the Rob Roy. There is shockingly little controversy over who invented the drink. It was put together in 1894 by a bartender at the Waldorf Hotel to commemorate the opening of an operetta named for and about the Highland rogue. It didn’t take a great leap of imagination. The bartender just made a Manhattan, which was already well established, and replaced the rye with Scotch Whisky.
