The Hurricane, Pat O’Brien’s, and a surplus of rum

The Hurricane is the drink most visitors to New Orleans meet first, and it comes with a tidy origin story. Like most tidy origin stories, it holds up in the middle and gets shaky at the edges.

The bar

Pat O’Brien’s dates itself to 1933. According to Wikipedia’s entry on the bar, it began operating as a legal liquor establishment on December 3, 1933, at Royal and St. Peter streets. During Prohibition it was a speakeasy called Mr. O’Brien’s Club Tipperary. In December 1942 it moved to its present address, 718 St. Peter Street, in a building that dates to 1791.

Biz New Orleans reported in 2018 that the move was made by Pat O’Brien and his partner, Charlie Cantrell. It also reported that the Oechsner family took ownership in 1978.

The rum story

The usual account runs like this. According to Wikipedia, scotch was hard to import during World War II, so liquor salesmen required bar owners to buy up to 50 cases of rum for each case of whiskey or scotch. The bar’s barmen invented a rum drink to move the surplus.

Other tellings are looser about the war. A 2026 syndicated story says distributors made bars buy large amounts of rum to get smaller amounts of more popular liquor, and that wartime alcohol shortages drove it. The Biz New Orleans piece does not mention the war. It says only that domestic liquor was in short supply in the 1940s while rum was plentiful.

Who gets the credit also shifts. Pat O’Brien is the name usually attached to the drink. In the Biz New Orleans article, Shelly Oechsner Waguespack, who runs the bar, calls it a group effort among O’Brien, Cantrell, and her grandfather, George Oechsner Jr. An Orlando Weekly column, citing the book Edible New Orleans, says O’Brien challenged his bartenders to come up with a new rum drink.

The glass and the name

Pat O’Brien’s own history, as summarized on Wikipedia, says the drink’s hurricane-lamp-shaped glass gave it its name. Biz New Orleans adds that the glass is modeled on the hurricane lamps that sit on the bar’s tables.

There is a competing explanation. The Orlando Weekly column, again drawing on Edible New Orleans, says the drink was never named for the weather. In that version the name traces back to the speakeasy password, which Wikipedia gives as “storm’s brewin’.” Wikipedia gives the password as “storm’s brewin’.” The two versions can both be true, since a lamp and a password could each have helped the name stick, but no source here settles it.

Older and newer claims

Pat O’Brien’s may not have been first to use the word. Wikipedia’s Hurricane entry traces references to a “Hurricane” back to at least 1935, when a whiskey, dry gin, and crème de menthe version with the juice of two lemons was printed. It also says a drink by that name was served at the “Hurricane Bar” at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair in Queens, though the ingredients there are unknown. The same entry credits the modern passion fruit version to Pat O’Brien’s.

What is in it

The bar’s version is simple. Biz New Orleans described it in 2018 as a 26-ounce glass with cracked ice, 4 ounces of 80-proof rum, and 4 ounces of Hurricane mix, topped with an orange slice and a cherry. That article also reported a price of $13, a $4 glass deposit, and more than 500,000 Hurricanes sold a year at the main bar. Prices change, and these are 2018 figures.

The mix itself is the bar’s own. Orlando Weekly notes that Pat O’Brien’s sells a powdered version.

Home recipes vary. The Orlando Weekly column’s “classic” is:

• 2 ounces white rum
• 2 ounces dark rum
• 1 ounce lime juice
• 1 ounce orange juice
• 2 ounces passion fruit juice
• ½ ounce simple syrup
• ½ ounce grenadine

It is shaken with ice, strained into a hurricane glass over ice, and garnished with an orange slice and cherries. The syndicated story lists a similar set: light rum, dark rum, passion fruit syrup or juice, orange juice, lime juice, and simple syrup or grenadine. Treat those as home approximations, since the bar’s own recipe is its mix.

A note on addresses

One syndicated story places the bar at 624 Bourbon Street. According to Biz New Orleans, that address is the separate Courtyard Restaurant, which the family bought in 1990 as an event venue. The main bar is at 718 St. Peter Street.