You not be able to place the exact movie, but you know the scene. A man walks into a bar, tie loosened, hat askew, a weary look on his face, and asks the bartender for “a stiff one.” Miraculously, the bartender knows exactly what his customer needs. The bartender slides the drink across the bar. It could be a shot of whiskey. It could be a cocktail. Either way, the customer takes a quick look at the drink, raises his glass to the bartender, and after a few swigs, slams his empty glass onto the bar, satisfied. Unfortunately, in real life there is no code for a stiff drink, and you’ll likely need to be more specific, since according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a stiff drink is merely a strong alcoholic drink.
How did stiff, a word the dictionary defines as “rigid,” come to refer to drinks? The academic response is simple: During the Middle Ages, the word stiff was used to mean strong. The word became associated with alcohol in the late 16th century, when songs started describing heavy drinkers as stiff drinkers. Two hundred years later, stiff became associated with the alcohol itself, with the phrase “stiff grog” starting to appear in newspapers.
An urban legend gives stiff drink a more gruesome definition
There is also an urban legend around the meaning, which also seems to be the stuff of movies rather than a true tale. Allegedly, grave robbers would ship dead bodies by train, and to hide the odor, they stuffed them in whiskey barrels. Once the bodies were removed, the whiskey was supposedly sold off to unsuspecting customers.
Selling Alcohol, which provides licensing and certification courses to bar managers, bartenders, and servers describes a stiff drink as a “firm or potent” mixture, which would include liquor, beer, or wine with high alcohol content (more than 5% for beers and more than 12% for wine) or mixed drinks that are made solely with alcohol or with more alcohol than mixers.
The list includes the three-ingredient Negroni, which contains only sweet vermouth, gin, and Campari; the Long Island Iced Tea, which is one of the most popular cocktails of all time; and liquors with high alcohol levels like Everclear, the world’s strongest alcohol and one too dangerous to drink neat. If you’ve ever ordered anything on that list, you may just have ordered yourself a stiff drink.
