DOTD For Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Today's Drink Is Special - Literally - And Was Created By A Legend
Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is a Green Isaac’s Special Cocktail - and surprisingly, a mocktail - inspired by the birth of Ernest Hemingway, one of the most famous authors - & drinkers - in Western literature, who was born on this date, July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois.
The Green Isaac’s Special is a tart, hydrating gin cocktail created by the legendary author himself, one of many cocktails Hemingway created. Named after Great Isaac Cay in the Bahamas, it first appeared in his novel Islands in the Stream. It’s essentially a tropical, sugar-free twist on a Tom Collins.
Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now Oak Park), Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was the eldest son, and second child, of Clarence and Grace Hemingway’s six children. The family spent a great deal of time in northern Michigan, where they had a cabin. It was there the future sportsman learned to hunt, fish, and appreciate the outdoors.
In high school, Hemingway worked on his school newspaper, The Trapeze, writing primarily about sports. Immediately after graduation, instead of going to college as his parents wished, nor heading oversees to war as he wanted, Hemingway went to work for the Kansas City Star, gaining experience that would later influence his distinctively stripped-down fiction and nonfiction writing style.
He once said, “On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.”
Hemingway worked at the Kansas City Star, as World War I raged abroad. He was only there for only about six months before he attempted to enlist in the Army. But his initial plan was thwarted when the Army rejected him due to his poor eyesight. His next step was to sign on with the Red Cross to be an ambulance driver in Italy. In June of 1918 he arrived at the Italian Front, and by July 8 he was already seriously injured by mortar fire. That’s a lot to pack in while you’re still 18 years old. It took him six months to recover, and he then returned to the U.S. in January 1919.
Hemingway’s Complicated & Interesting Life
Late in 1919, Hemingway started work as a freelancer for the Toronto Star Weekly. By September 1921, they hired him as a foreign correspondent and he set sail for Paris, the first of many adventures he’d have in his life.
On top of being a legendary writer, Hemingway was an avid sportsman and traveled widely, living in a wide variety of places, including Madrid, Paris, Idaho, Key West, and Cuba. Readers then & now often admired his exciting, complicated life, despite its convoluted and intense mixture of violence and cruelty, along with love affairs and heroism. “There were so many sides to him, that he defied geometry,” his first wife, Hadley Richardson, once said.
Hemingway continued to take part in, and write about, violent conflicts for decades, including the Spanish Civil War and World War II, where he witnessed both D-Day and the liberation of Paris. He was even awarded the Bronze Star for his World War II service.
Despite his willingness to risk his life, as well as his physical and mental health, Hemingway hated war. In fact, it was precisely because of his wartime experiences he wrote, “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
Hemingway’s Wives, Children, & Grandchildren
From the beginning of his adult life, Hemingway had complicated romantic and family dynamics. He always had the next woman in his life before he let go of the first one, and often married his next wife less than a few weeks after divorcing the previous woman.
He was married four times. First to Hadley Richardson in 1921. The couple’s divorce was finalized in April 1927, and he married Pauline Pfeiffer in May 1927. The couple divorced in November of 1940 and he married Martha Gellhorn, considered one of the greatest war correspondents of all time, just 17 days later—but they divorced in 1945. He married Mary Welsh in 1946, and she remained his wife until his death, although that marriage was often unhappy and violent.
He also fathered three children, John “Jack” Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, Patrick “Mouse” Miller Hemingway, and Gloria Hancock Hemingway. Gloria, born Gregory Hancock Hemingway, was the author’s youngest child. She lived publicly as a man for most of her life, struggling with severe gender dysphoria. In her sixties, she finally underwent gender-affirmation surgery.
Hemingway’s granddaughters, children of his eldest son, Jack, may be more familar to some. Joan “Muffet” Hemingway his eldest granddaughter, was a writer and jewelry designer, born in 1950. his second granddaughter, Margaux Hemingway, was a highly celebrated supermodel in the 1970s who later transitioned to acting. She struggled with severe depression and died by suicide in 1996 at age 42. Hemmingway’s youngest granddaughter, Mariel Hemingway, became an acclaimed actress in the 1970s and 80s, and later became a mental health advocate and author of the memoir Out Came the Sun.
Famous Hemingway Quotes
Never confuse movement with action.
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. It will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
Write drunk, edit sober.
It’s good to have an end to journey to; but in the end it’s the journey that matters.
Hemingway’s Legacy
Ernest Hemingway, is lauded as one of the great American 20-Century novelists & authors, renowned for works including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, one of only 13 Americans to win the honor.
Hemingway was famous for his direct and terse writing style, which grew directly out of his journalism work. Even in his fiction writing, he rarely used adjectives and adverbs, and relied on repetition and clarity to create atmosphere and mood. He describing his writing as the “Iceberg Theory,” believing that the omitted part of a story, i.e., the bottom of the iceberg, was the strongest part and that readers would understand the intention without having to be directly told what a story meant or its overarching theme. Because of this stripped down style, many of his greatest works are novellas.
On top of being a legendary writer, Hemingway was an avid sportsman and traveled widely, living in a wide variety of places, including Madrid, Paris, Idaho, Key West, and Cuba. Readers then & now often admired his exciting, complicated life, despite its convoluted and intense mixture of violence and cruelty, along with love affairs and heroism. “There were so many sides to him, that he defied geometry,” his first wife, Hadley Richardson, once said.
Hemingway was also renowned for being a very serious drinker, and by some tellings, not a bad bartender. Hemingway’s drinking prowess hardly needs an introduction to most of those familiar with his legend.
Origin of The Green Isaac’s Special
During the last half of his life, Hemingway also legendarily bought a boat, named it Pilar, and began sailing the Caribbean. He liked going out and fishing around Bimini, a chain of islands about 50 miles due east of Miami. Prone to using autobiographical details as framing devices for his stories, this period of his life provided fodder for Islands in the Stream, a collection of three stories: Bimini, Cuba, and At Sea. It was the first of his works published posthumously from largely finished manuscripts discovered by his fourth wife.
Somewhere out near Bimini is where Hemingway presumably invented today’s Drink of the Day, the Green Isaac’s Special. In Bimini the protagonist Thomas Hudson, a clear stand-in for Hemmingway, asked the first mate Eddy for a drink:
“‘Do you want a drink with coconut water? I got some water coconuts.”
‘Very good.’
‘Want a Green Isaac Special?’
‘Fine. Make it a Special.’
Eddy came aft with the tall cold drink made of gin, green coconut water, and chipped ice with just enough Angostura bitter to give a rusty, rose color, he held the drink in the shade so the ice would not melt while he looked out over the sea.”
Now, while Ernest Hemingway was a legendary drinker, if he’d had the option to have had mocktails back in the day, he might have taken advantage of them, especially when he had editing to do. (See his quotes, above)
So with that in mind, we’ve got recipes for both the Green Isaac’s Special Cocktail AND Mocktail, below. Read up - and drink up!
Ingredients
Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink:
