The Applebee's $1 Long Island Iced Tea: Is This A Good Thing?

BELLEVUE, WA - Here are the facts: Applebee's will sell Long Island Iced Tea cocktails for $1 in December, a promotion that follows the chain's popular October $1 margaritas promotion. The $1 Long Islands - Applebee's calls them "the Dollar L.I.T." - are available beginning today at all Washington Applebee's.

This promotion raises some questions, however. Is this good or really bad?

According to lore, the Long Island Iced Tea was invented as the "Old Man Bishop" in the 1920s by a bartender in Tennessee. A recipe for the drink later appeared in a 1960s Better Crocker cookbook with mid-century updates. But it was apparently a man named Bob Butt who in the early 1970s popularized the drink and named it after the place where he was tending bar: at the hard-partying east end of Long Island at the "rowdy"Oak Beach Inn.

Butt mixed vodka, rum, gin, tequila, triple sec and sour mix with a splash of coke for color.

"I invented it for fun," Butt told PBS about the drink. "I think I did my job well."

By some estimates, one Long Island can be up to 22 percent alcohol by volume. That's equivalent to drinking five Budweisers or 12-ounce Rainiers compressed into one pint (with ice). On top of that, Long Islands taste like candy, so you can finish two and, depending on your weight, be very drunk.

The Brewers Association, a trade group, makes a starker comparison: "Another way to look at this is that a gallon [there are 8 pints in a gallon] of beer is less than a 12-pack, whereas a gallon of hard liquor is the equivalent of more than 85 beers."

The Long Island Iced Tea is in many ways the personification of all the worst parts of drinking culture. It's not something you sip while watching the Seahawks. It's a drink that leads to guys and girls vomiting in the gutter outside a nightclub, or getting into messy 3 a.m. fistfights. It's also likely behind countless drunk driving incidents and sexual assaults. Too much of any drink can cause chaos, but the Long Island Ice Tea was designed to make people dangerously irresponsible.

Even Applebee's name for theses drinks, the Dollar L.I.T., is reference to intentional over-intoxication.

There are about a dozen Applebee's locations between Lakewood and Marysville. All of them are in strip malls or regular malls, tricky or impossible to get to without a car. It's not clear how much alcohol Applebee's can fit in these Dollar L.I.T. cocktails for under a buck, but hopefully less than 22 percent ABV. The $1 margaritas were allegedly more water than anything.

In a press release about the promotion, Applebee's advises consumers to "please drink responsibly," which is a strange message when you're selling a drink designed to get people drunk as hell.

Photo: A bartender pours a Captain Morgan Long Island Iced Tea at the Captain Morgan Long Island Iced Tea house party in Philadelphia hosted by former 76er Darryl Dawkins Thursday, May 26, 2011.

Image via Mark Stehle/Associated Press