DOTD For Tuesday, September 9, 2025

A Combo Better'n Chicken & Waffles

Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is the Kentucky Colonel cocktail inspired by the birthday of fried chicken titan Colonel Harland Sanders, founder of KFC.

Harland Sanders was born on September 9, 1890, in a small house just east of Henryville, Indiana. He was the oldest of three children, his father died when he was five and his mother was a strict woman. She warned her children of “the evils of alcohol, tobacco, gambling and whistling on Sundays.” Lot of fun she was.

Sanders left home at 16, became a streetcar conductor, did a stint in the US Army and passed through a variety of jobs that ended in failure. He studied law by correspondence through La Salle Extension University and began to practice. But that ended after a reputation-destroying courtroom brawl with his own client. As his biographer Ed Pearce wrote, he “had encountered repeated failure largely through bullheadedness, a lack of self-control, impatience, and a self-righteous lack of diplomacy.”

By the late 1930s Sanders owned a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky, that also included a diner. The diner became so well known for Sanders’ fried chicken that he converted the whole operation into a motel and restaurant. By July 1940 he finalized his “Secret Recipe” for frying chicken in a pressure fryer.

When the U.S. entered World War II in late 1941 gas was rationed and tourist business dried up. So he closed the place and ran a cafeteria for the government. He then divorced his wife, married his mistress, and in 1950 was “re-commissioned” as a Kentucky Colonel by his friend, Governor Lawrence Wetherby.

Sanders franchised his secret recipe “Kentucky Fried Chicken” for the first time in 1952, receiving $0.04 per chicken. At that point, getting well into his 60s, he had only some savings, and $105 per month from Social Security. So he began franchising in earnest - and the rest is history

Ingredients

Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink: