Having over the years consumed drinks containing ingredients from beet juice to charcoal to pine needles, when I first heard of Ranch Water, I'll admit I cast up a quiet plea to heaven: Please Lord, do not let this drink contain ranch dressing. Next I thought of actual ranches I've been to, where the water in play was usually brown hollers encircled by slurping cows or mud-slathered pigs.
Now that I've looked into it, I'm happy to report that Ranch Water - which after sloshing around Texas for decades has recently galloped around the country at such speeds that entrepreneurs are betting their ranches on it - contains neither buttermilk nor pig-rinsings.
At its most basic, the drink that sweltering Texans are throwing together is just tequila, lime juice and mineral water. That makes for a pretty tart drink, so many add some form of sweetener, often orange liqueur.
Bars all over Texas have some variation on their menu. The three-ingredient version is a bright low-sugar sip; adding orange liqueur makes for something like a margarita in highball form. And it's easy to ad-lib, throwing in some jalapeño slices, adding summer fruit, switching up the spirit.
"A bunch of people out here refer to it as the Ranch Water because cowboys are out there working hard all day, and they want good water, but they want it a little bit spiked," says Eloise Bryan, lead concierge at the Gage Hotel in Marathon, Texas, whose White Buffalo Bar is often named as one possible originator of the drink. But, she admits, "there's really not hard details. It's been such a popular drink for such a long time that everything gets a little fuzzy."
This is not unique to Texas. Stories about the provenance of cocktails are notoriously loaded with the kind of longhorn-produced substances you'd find in actual ranch water. While it's sometimes possible to verify that cocktail X, composed of eight ingredients in specific proportions, came out of Bar Highfalutin in 2004, people have been combining spirits, soda water and citrus for a good, long while. I suspect what we're now calling Ranch Water has been around for many decades, but don't underestimate the value of a good handle. A name helps a drink travel. (You know, the kind of name that makes idiots wonder if it contains ranch dressing.)
Still, over the past month, I joined a fair number of people trying to track down its origins. Several sources noted that I was the latest in a string of callers and didn't have anything more definite than they had for the last hack hoping to dig up the Deep Throat of Ranch Water, some Stetsoned Sam Elliott-type who could meet under the rodeo stands to pull a bottle of mineral water out of his saddlebag and spin a convincing origin story.
The closest I found to a plausible originator and namer is Kevin Williamson, chef and owner of Ranch 616 in Austin, who says that he has had the drink on the menu since it opened in 1998, and that he and his team trained the folks at the Gage Hotel more than a decade ago. He's firm enough in his claim that he has applied for a trademark on the Ranch Water name.
