That part is still unknown, but it turns out that Regan’s book is very much a part of the Lawrence theory—or rather, the Lawrence chapter of the origin story.
The Lawrence connection
After consulting the crew at Harry's Bar & Tables (the wood-paneled Kansas City pub where I had my first Horsefeather) Maybee was directed to Jeremy Sidener, a veteran Lawrence bartender. Sidener now owns and operates theEighth Street Taproom, a long-standing Lawrence dive, but in 1991 he was working at the nearby Paradise Café & Bakery.
There, Sidener told me, is where the seed was planted for the Horsefeather to become a regional phenomenon.
As Sidener tells it, in 1991 or 1992, Paradise Café bar manager Bob Oswald was looking for a drink to put on special so he opened Regan’s book and picked Horse Feathers since it complimented that night’s dinner special. “And probably because we liked the Marx Brothers or something,” says Sidener.
Instead of the blended whiskey Regan suggested, they used Old Overholt rye becauseit’s what they had—and because it was “cheap and delicious,” according to Sidener. They also didn’t have any ginger ale on tap; it wasn’t yet available in a fountain-friendly box and they weren’t about to mess around with big two-liter bottles. But they figured that out too, by fashioning their own mock version with equal parts Sprite and soda water, a few dashes ofPeychaud's bitters, and a splash of co*ke. It was wildly popular, and as staff went to work at other bars in town, they added it to those menus.
When Sidener moved over toLouise’s Downtown Bar in 1993, he shortened the name from Horse Feathers to Horsefeather. “It just looks better,” he says. The local band he played in,Arthur Dodge & The Horsefeathers, was even named after the drink (Dodge, the frontman, was a bar patron).
Around the year 2000, Sidener started making his own “ginger beer”—the old DIY recipe but with a homemade ginger syrup in place of the co*ke—which he still uses in the Horsefeathers he slings at the Taproom.
A mysterymostly solved
We may never know exactly where Regan’s Horse Feathers recipe came from, but most of the credit for the Horsefeather co*cktail as we know it today goes to Jeremy Sidener. And he isn’t even upset that Maybee hasappropriated the drink to promote his Kansas City whiskey brand. That’s due in part to the fact that Maybee has been veryvocal about the drink’s Lawrence roots. Still, Sidener says he has no plans to stop using affordable rye in his “original” version.
In the end, both men are just happy to see the Horsefeather pop up on bar menus in other parts of the country, as it has in Austin,Baltimore, and New Orleans—which means I might even attempt to order it outside of Kansas City again someday. And if the bartender doesn’t know what I’m talking about, I promise to be much more gracious than I was last time.
